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Romania to host next Three Seas Initiative summit in 2018
The 2018 edition of the Three Seas Initiative summit will be hosted by Romania, Romania's President Klaus Iohannis said Thursday while attending this year's edition of the summit in Warsaw.
"I have invited the attendees to hold the summit next year in Romania, an invitation that has been accepted on the spot. (...) We will sketch up some objectives jointly with the others. We do not want to develop initiatives that will separate us from the rest of the European Union. We want to develop initiatives that help our countries and that fit neatly in the European Union's big objectives. So, if we have objectives, we would certainly like to benefit from projects that develop Romania's infrastructure, as we want to contribute to and benefit from energy security. All these objectives are ours as well," said Iohannis.
He added that the main objective of the format is discussing and achieving north-south corridors that will round up east-west corridors.
"It is about road transportation, railway transportation, data transportation as well as energy transmission; we are meaning here, for instance natural gas transmission, and there was a discussion of an interesting alternative regarding liquefied gas," said Iohannis.
He added that the summit in Romania may feature a special guest, as US President Donald Trump was at the Warsaw summit.
"Surely we can think of such thing, but I believe the important thing is finding projects for our region that fit into the European programme, but we are very much open. We are promoting free and fair trade under excellent terms, but, on the other hand, we want to also stand to profit from all the economic offerings to the advantage of our countries," said Iohannis.
He mentioned that the first edition of the Three Seas Initiative summit took place in New York in 2007, on the side-lines of a UN meeting. "Back then, there were few presidents attending, and attendance in general was nothing famous, but in some very few years we have managed to turn it into something very attractive not only to ourselves and to Europeans, but also to Americans," said Iohannis.
The Three Seas Initiative — the Baltic Sea, the Adriatic Sea and the Black Sea — comprises 12 Central and Eastern European countries — Austria, Bulgaria, Croatia, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia and Hungary.
The initiative is designed to provide political support for better cooperation and interconnection among countries in the geographical area that stretches the three seas, in areas such as energy, transportation, telecommunications and environmental protection.