Dr. Oleksii Polegkyi, Academic Director, Center for Public Diplomacy, Ukraine, and researcher at the Institute of Political Studies, Polish Academy of Science. He is also a former Research Fellow at the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies and a member of the Political Communication Research Unit at the University of Antwerp (Belgium). Dr. Polegkyi previously was a research fellow at the National Chengchi University (Taiwan), and a visiting fellow at the Institute of Advanced Studies Kőszeg (iASK, Hungary). Polegkyi earned his Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Wroclaw (Poland) and the University of Antwerp. He published articles concerning the post-communist transformations in Eastern Europe, with a particular interest in the foreign policy, security and political discourse in Ukraine and Russia.
Topic: The idea of “Intermarium” in foreign policy discourse of Ukrainian and Polish elites
The ongoing Russian-Ukrainian conflict, deep crisis of EU, and armed conflicts in the EU neighborhood – influence the debate on the future development of Eastern and Central Europe and the possibilities of regional collaboration overcoming the EU formal borders. The Russian-Ukrainian conflict and growing tensions in the post-Soviet area have brought back geopolitical thinking and put security issues into the center of the world’s attention. All those factors pushed national elites in Poland and Ukraine to look for a redefinition of their regional and security cooperation.
The rationalization of the idea of “Intermarium” as a regional, transnational cooperation project of countries between the Baltic and Black seas is based on a perception of threat coming from Russia. The crucial role attributed to Poland and Ukraine in this project is based on the basis of a unique historical experience in balancing this threat. The aim of this project is to examine and compare how the ideas of regional cooperation and the concept of “Intermarium” are conceptualized in the Polish and Ukrainian political discourses.
