Twenty-five years after Poland's Solidarity and other dissident movements brought about the collapse of the Berlin Wall and promised a reunified Europe, the continent's political map suggests that this vision has been largely fulfilled.  Nations that once lived behind the Wall’s ideological divide have joined the European Union to help build a secure, prosperous region from the Atlantic Ocean to the Baltic and Black seas. 

But economic and infrastructure maps portray a different picture.  Europe integration remains dangerously incomplete. A glaring problem is in Central Europe, where national networks of railroads, power lines, communications links—and notably oil and gas pipelines—remain largely disconnected from each other and from Western Europe. Nations from Estonia and Poland to the Balkans lack the connections running north-south and east-west essential to making them fully part of a single European market. This is the unhealed legacy of a half-century of Soviet-led development, during which disinterest in such intra-regional connections kept these lands dependent on Moscow. 

The Russia-Ukraine crisis of 2014 has dramatized the cost of Central Europe’s stunted network. Many of these countries, dependent on Russia as the only natural gas supplier their pipelines can access, find themselves vulnerable to Moscow’s political pricing of gas and other manipulations. This vulnerability has spotlighted a strategic imperative for Europe: to build, without delay, a North-South Corridor of energy, transportation and telecommunication links from the Baltic to the Adriatic and Black seas.