The next wave of global growth is being shaped along an axis that runs between Asia and the Americas. Emerging Europe, the most growth-hungry part of the continent, should be among the first to ride it.
For most of the post-war era, the global economy had one dominant axis: the Atlantic. Capital, technology, trade rules and security guarantees flowed between North America and Western Europe, and everyone else positioned themselves in relation to that relationship. Emerging Europe’s entire post-1989 project, from EU accession to NATO membership, was built on joining it, and it succeeded.
That axis has not disappeared, but it no longer defines the century alone. A second one is taking shape across the Pacific, linking Asia’s industrial and demographic weight with the financial, technological and resource power of the Americas.
The numbers make the case plainly. In its October outlook, the IMF projects 5.1 per cent growth for emerging and developing Asia in 2026, with India at around seven per cent. Developing Asia attracted 644 billion US dollars in foreign direct investment in 2025, around 40 per cent of the global total. On the other side of the Pacific, the United States remained both the world’s largest recipient and its largest source of FDI. One side of the axis has scale, growth and production. The other has capital, frontier technology and the deepest financial markets in the world. Increasingly, they need each other, even as they compete.
Supply chains tell the same story. Production that once concentrated in China is spreading across South-East Asia, India and Mexico. South-East Asia has now overtaken East Asia as Asia’s largest FDI destination, and India’s inflows rose 44 per cent last year. Mexico has become a manufacturing extension of the North American market. Brazil, Chile and Peru supply the minerals, energy and food that Asian industry consumes. The Pacific is becoming the world’s busiest economic corridor, and the next wave of growth will be built along it.
Washington’s two geographies
The great powers are organising their strategies around this map, and emerging Europe should read it carefully.
The Indo-Pacific has long since moved from diplomatic vocabulary into the centre of American economic and security planning. A second geography has now joined it. The National Security Strategy released in December 2025 commits the United States to enforcing a ‘Trump Corollary’ to the Monroe Doctrine, keeping the hemisphere free of hostile foreign incursion or ownership of key assets. After the strikes on Venezuela in January 2026, the President himself embraced the label ‘Donroe Doctrine’.
This is a security doctrine first, not a development plan, and its coercive edge has unsettled many across Latin America. Conditioning aid and investment on unwinding Chinese-backed infrastructure, and pushing foreign companies out of key sectors, revives old debates about sovereignty that Europeans are right to take seriously.
But the strategic direction is clear. Washington’s two priority theatres are now the Indo-Pacific and its own hemisphere. Put them together and you get the Asia–Americas century in its geopolitical form.
There is a second-order effect that Europeans often miss. A more assertive Washington gives Brasília, Mexico City, Santiago and Ottawa every incentive to diversify. They will not turn away from the United States, but they will want more partners, and so will the Asian economies navigating between American and Chinese pressure. That demand for alternatives is an opening for Europe, and above all for the part of Europe most eager to grow.
What the axis is, and what it is not
The Asia–Americas idea needs some discipline, or it becomes another slogan.
It does not mean every part of the Americas is booming. The IMF projects only 2.3 per cent growth for Latin America and the Caribbean this year, well below sub-Saharan Africa’s 4.5 per cent. It does not mean capital follows growth in a straight line either: Latin America attracted 188 billion US dollars in FDI in 2025, while Africa, growing almost twice as fast, received about 70 billion US dollars. And the ‘Indo-Pacific’ and ‘Africa Rising’ are different kinds of stories, the first essentially strategic, the second essentially demographic and economic.
What the axis does describe is where scale, capital, technology and strategic attention are concentrating. Around it sit two indispensable complements. The Gulf remains a formidable mobiliser of capital for infrastructure, energy, logistics and technology, even if this year’s war has reminded investors that its stability cannot be taken for granted. Africa, approached as fifty-four distinct economies rather than one promise, is the demographic frontier of the century.
The useful insight is that the growth map and the capital map do not overlap neatly. Those who understand both, and can connect them, become valuable to everyone.
Why emerging Europe needs the next wave
Europe’s own growth will not be enough to carry emerging Europe’s ambitions. The IMF expects the euro area to grow by just 1.1 per cent in 2026, and emerging and developing Europe by 1.7 per cent. This year’s energy shock has added to existing pressures on competitiveness, demography and technological dependence.
Within emerging Europe, the picture is uneven. The European Commission’s May forecast puts Poland’s 2026 growth at 3.5 per cent, while Romania, after 0.7 per cent growth last year, is expected to broadly stagnate at 0.1 per cent. My own country is living through a painful fiscal correction. Anyone who presents emerging Europe as a uniform success story is doing it no favours.
But this is precisely why the Asia–Americas century matters. The first wave of emerging Europe’s growth came from integration into Europe. The next wave will have to come, to a significant degree, from connection with the regions where growth, capital and strategic attention are now concentrating. The ambition, the entrepreneurial energy and the industrial base are already there. What is missing is the outward orientation.
CEE, from convergence to connection
For three decades, emerging Europe’s economic project had one name: convergence. Convergence with Western incomes, with European institutions and standards, with the productivity of the core. It worked. EU membership, foreign investment and integration into European value chains transformed national economies within a single generation.
But convergence was a strategy designed for an Atlantic world. It measured emerging Europe against Western Europe and tied its fortunes largely to Western European demand. A company can become excellent inside the single market and never set foot in Bengaluru, Jakarta, Monterrey or São Paulo. In an Asia–Americas century, that is a missed opportunity.
Emerging Europe now needs a second transformation, from convergence to connection. I would describe the shift as one from statecraft to businesscraft. The first transformation was led by governments: accession negotiations, institutional reform, the absorption of EU funds. The second has to be led by companies, with governments as enablers. The question is no longer only how much Asian and American investment can be attracted, but how emerging Europe can become the place where Asian and American companies meet Europe, and where its own companies reach out to both.
That is the difference between being a destination for the next wave of growth and being part of it.
Building the Asian bridge
On the Asian side, the fit is already visible.
India is the most obvious opportunity. Its growth and industrial ambitions are matched by large conglomerates and family-owned groups now actively internationalising, many of them looking for a manufacturing and engineering foothold inside the EU. Emerging Europe can offer that foothold, with engineering talent, industrial capacity and logistics at a cost base Western Europe cannot match.
South-East Asia offers a different proposition: a cluster of economies riding supply-chain diversification, each with its own role, from Singapore’s finance and logistics to Vietnam’s manufacturing and Indonesia’s resources. Japan and South Korea, despite demographic decline, remain indispensable sources of technology and patient capital, and both already know emerging Europe well through automotive, electronics and battery investments that can be extended into defence, semiconductors and clean energy. China, whatever the tensions, remains too large and too technologically significant to wish away; the task is managing exposure, not pretending it does not exist.
Building the pan-American bridge
On the American side, the opportunity is broader than Washington.
The United States remains emerging Europe’s indispensable security partner and a source of capital, technology and corporate investment. For American firms reassessing their European footprint, much of emerging Europe combines NATO membership, EU market access and real industrial capability.
Beyond the United States, Mexico’s integration into North American production creates openings for suppliers and engineering services, even if trade-policy uncertainty complicates timing. Brazil remained Latin America’s largest FDI recipient, with inflows up 23 per cent to 77 billion US dollars, and brings agribusiness, energy and an increasingly outward-looking corporate sector that may well see emerging Europe as a practical entry point into European supply chains. Canada offers resources, technology and a shared Atlantic outlook.
And if Latin American economies seek to diversify their partnerships, Europe’s most growth-hungry region should be among the first to answer the call.
The value is in the triangle
The most interesting deals will not be bilateral. They will be triangular.
A Korean investor, Romanian engineering and Ukrainian reconstruction along the Black Sea corridor. Indian capital, Polish manufacturing and Western European customers. A Brazilian agrifood group, Hungarian or Romanian processing capacity and Middle Eastern markets. American technology, Baltic digital expertise and Asian scale. These combinations turn emerging Europe from a destination into a platform.
The same bridge must carry emerging Europe’s own companies outward, not only as exporters but as partners, service providers and participants in infrastructure projects on both sides of the Pacific.
No single country can do this alone. Collectively, as an economic bloc of roughly three trillion dollars, emerging Europe can be far more than the sum of its national strategies, provided its governments practise coopetition: competing for investment where they must, but going to Asia and the Americas together where scale matters.
Security is also a commercial credential
There is a temptation to define emerging Europe internationally through threat alone. The war in Ukraine, Russian revisionism and NATO’s eastern flank dominate its strategic vocabulary.
But in an era of strategic competition between Asia and the Americas, security credibility is also an economic asset. Strategic sectors now account for 44 per cent of global greenfield project values, up from 16% in 2020. Capital increasingly follows trust, alignment and resilience, not just cost. A region that is a reliable NATO and EU member, that has learned to operate under pressure, and that is building defence-industrial and energy capacity in real time, has a story that investors in Tokyo, Seoul, Washington and São Paulo can understand.
A region that defines itself only by danger will struggle to fund its own resilience. One that combines security credibility with commercial ambition turns its geography into a selling point.
What it would take
Concretely, this means governments treating economic diplomacy as a core instrument of development, with mandates, budgets and measurable targets, and with political mobilisation of the whole institutional system behind those objectives. It means emerging Europe’s capitals organising joint trade and investment missions to India, South-East Asia, Japan, Korea, Mexico and Brazil, where a single small country cannot get a meeting but a regional delegation can. It means using Europe’s trade agreements, from Japan and Korea to Vietnam, Singapore and Mexico, as openings to be converted into contracts, because an agreement is a possibility, not a business plan.
It also means recognising that internationalisation is not reserved for the largest corporations. Mid-sized firms and family businesses, the backbone of these economies, are often better placed to move quickly, provided someone helps them understand distant markets first. And it means using emerging Europe’s diasporas, from Silicon Valley to the Gulf, as the bridges they already are.
Riding the next wave
For decades, emerging Europe’s success was measured by how quickly it approached Western standards. That yardstick served it well in an Atlantic century. The century now taking shape runs across the Pacific, between Asia and the Americas, with the Gulf and Africa as essential partners.
Emerging Europe is well placed for it. It has the hunger for growth that much of Europe has lost, the industrial and technological base that investors need, and the security credibility that capital now prizes. What it needs is the ambition to look outward and the organisation to act on it. This is not a turn away from Europe. It is the most practical way to strengthen Europe’s place in the world.
Emerging Europe built its first wave of growth by joining Europe. It can build the next one by connecting Europe to the Asia–Americas century.
Photo: Dreamstime.