"To retain and reinforce our sovereignty, we should first of all cooperate with one another so as to compound our strength and become real partners of anyone outside the region."Continue reading
Three Seas is a flagship initiative for efforts to create a united economic space in central and eastern Europe, and Romania will have to decide whether to be a part of that or participate only “in the league of large European nations,” a lawmaker of ruling Fidesz said on Tuesday, according to Romanian daily Krónika.
Zsolt Németh, who also heads parliament’s foreign affairs committee, told journalists on the sidelines of an exhibition opening in Sepsiszentgyörgy (Sfantu Gheorghe) that the Three Seas initiative, of which “Romania is formally a member”, has many practical advantages.
The Visegrad Group and Serbia have already pledged to link the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Slovakia and Serbia with high-speed railways, Németh noted. Talks are under way to add a Budapest-Kolozsvár(Cluj)-Bucharest line to the network, thus linking Romania to the European high-speed railways, he said. Hungary also has a vested interest in speeding up the construction of three motorways linking the two countries, he said.
Németh welcomed the Hungarian economic development programme for Romanian regions home to many ethnic Hungarians.
At the same time, “Transylvania Hungarians see it as their right to have a state-financed Hungarian university in the region, a debt which the Romanian government neglected to pay since the fall of communism thirty years ago.” Sapientia University was funded with Hungarian government support, he said.
Commenting on remarks by Romanian House Speaker Ludovic Orban who said that “investments should be used to change ethnic ratios in Szekler Land”, Németh said that ethnic homogeneity policies “had ended up opening trenchlines between the two countries in the past centuries”. “It would be time for Ludovic Orban to reconsider that remark and apologise,” he said.
Featured photo by Szilárd Koszticsák/MTI