The 21st century will be shaped not only by the rise of Asia, but by regions that connect continents, such as Central and Eastern Europe.
For more than a generation, ‘ASEAN centrality’ has been one of the organising concepts of the Asian Century. It describes the ability of Southeast Asia to position itself at the heart of the region’s economic integration, diplomatic architecture and great-power balancing. The concept is not merely descriptive; it is a deliberate doctrine, codified across decades of summits and embedded in the institutional machinery of a bloc that has existed since 1967 and now counts eleven members following Timor-Leste’s accession in October 2025. The scale behind the doctrine is real: ASEAN’s combined output reached roughly 12.3 trillion US dollars in purchasing-power terms in 2024—the fourth largest in the world after China, the United States and India—across a market of nearly 686 million people, and the bloc’s own AEC Strategic Plan 2026–30 is explicitly designed to make it the world’s fourth-largest economy by nominal measure before the decade is out.
A parallel phenomenon has emerged in Europe, with far less recognition and under no single banner. Central and Eastern Europe has quietly become as indispensable to Europe’s future as ASEAN has become to Asia’s. Once treated as the continent’s periphery—a region perpetually ‘catching up—CEE has become a critical economic engine, a logistics and energy corridor, a frontline of European deterrence, and the indispensable platform for what may become the largest reconstruction effort on the continent since the Marshall Plan.
But the analogy must be handled with precision, because the most interesting truth lies in where it breaks. ASEAN’s centrality is constructed: it is the achievement of states that sit outside any larger union and that built a doctrine precisely to avoid being dominated by larger powers. CEE’s centrality is structural: it arises from geography, integration and function, but it is exercised through the European Union and NATO rather than as an autonomous pole. CEE has no secretariat, no summit cycle, no single voice. It cannot balance Washington against Beijing the way ASEAN can, because most of it has already chosen its alignment. The right formulation, then, is not that CEE has replicated ASEAN, but that it has become indispensable to Europe without becoming autonomous—a hub within a system rather than a hub between systems. That distinction is what makes the case credible to the policymakers, investors and diplomats who will read it.
From periphery to strategic core
The transformation of the region over three decades is the most successful convergence story in modern Europe. Former command economies integrated into the EU and NATO, rebuilt their institutions, attracted global capital and developed sophisticated industrial and technological ecosystems. What was framed as a catching-up region became one of Europe’s most dynamic growth zones, consistently outpacing the eurozone average in GDP growth through the 2010s and 2020s.
A series of shocks then accelerated the shift. The Covid-19 pandemic exposed the fragility of long, concentrated supply chains. The war in Ukraine rewrote European security from the ground up. Intensifying US–China competition pushed firms toward diversification and resilience. Energy security moved from a technical concern to a strategic one. And nearshoring and friendshoring became the defining economic logic of the decade. CEE captured a disproportionate share of the resulting relocation, for the same reason ASEAN captured supply-chain diversification away from China: proximity, cost competitiveness and political alignment with the markets that matter most.
The geoeconomics—and an honest word on demographics
The region represents a market of more than 150 million people once Ukraine and the Western Balkans are included, though this aggregate folds together EU and NATO members with candidate states of very different legal and security status, and should not be mistaken for a single market acting in concert. Within it sits genuine industrial depth: automotive assembly and components across Slovakia, Romania, Czechia and Hungary; one of Europe’s largest concentrations of EV-battery manufacturing; and a fast-maturing IT and cybersecurity sector anchored in Poland, the Baltics and Romania—the latter home to one of the highest densities of certified IT specialists in the EU and to a cybersecurity ecosystem that has made Bucharest the seat of the European Union’s Cybersecurity Competence Centre, the bloc’s central body for coordinating security research and investment.
Drawn forward by the war on the EU’s eastern edge, an expanding defence-industrial base now runs the length of the region, from Polish artillery and ammunition capacity to the maintenance, logistics and production hubs taking shape in Romania along NATO’s Black Sea flank. The region also sits astride the corridors linking Western Europe to the Black Sea, the Balkans, the Caucasus and Central Asia—corridors for which Romania’s Black Sea frontage and the port of Constanța increasingly serve as the eastern terminus.
Here, though, candour serves the argument better than enthusiasm. The original temptation is to describe CEE as a region of demographic dynamism. It is not. Its defining demographic feature is decline. According to United Nations projections, nine of the ten fastest-shrinking countries in the world are in Eastern Europe, and the IMF has warned that the region risks growing old before it grows rich, with the working-age population in parts of the region projected to contract by as much as a quarter by 2050. Two decades of emigration stripped out precisely the young, educated workers a convergence economy most needs. This is not a footnote; it is the central strategic vulnerability of the entire thesis. The region’s dynamism is economic—productivity, wages, output, capital attraction—not demographic, and its future centrality depends on whether it can convert reconstruction-era labour demand into a reason for talent to return rather than leave. A region that cannot hold its people cannot indefinitely hold its position. In context, ASEAN also provides solutions for some of the foreign worker demand, together with Nepal, Sri Lanka and others.
Ukraine: The project that changes the calculation
No account of CEE centrality is complete without Ukraine, and the numbers have hardened considerably since this argument was first made. The fifth Rapid Damage and Needs Assessment, released jointly by the World Bank, the European Commission, the United Nations and the government of Ukraine in February 2026, put the cost of reconstruction and recovery at 588 billion US dollars (over 500 billion euros) across the next decade, nearly three times Ukraine’s projected 2025 GDP, with direct damage already exceeding 195 billion US dollars and fourteen per cent of the housing stock destroyed or damaged. That is a reconstruction effort larger in scale than anything Europe has undertaken since World War II.
Central and Eastern Europe is the inevitable platform through which much of that effort will be delivered. Poland, Romania and their neighbours already function as the logistics, financial and operational gateways into Ukraine; their ports, rail, firms and public administrations are being woven into Ukraine’s recovery ecosystem. Romania’s role here is structural rather than incidental: with Odesa lying just across its border and Russia’s blockade having repeatedly closed Ukraine’s own Black Sea ports, Constanța became the principal maritime outlet for Ukrainian grain at the height of the war, and the Romanian stretch of the Danube the artery through which much of that export moved. The region is no longer merely supporting reconstruction—it is becoming the indispensable channel through which reconstruction is delivered, which binds the region’s prosperity to Ukraine’s success.
Realism is part of the credibility here. The 588 billion US dollars is an assessment of need, not of committed finance, and disbursement at scale depends on conditions that are not yet settled: a durable ceasefire and credible security guarantees, the unresolved question of frozen Russian sovereign assets, and the absorptive capacity of Ukrainian institutions. The opportunity is historic precisely because it is not guaranteed—and the region best positioned to capture it is the one already doing the unglamorous work of keeping Ukraine supplied and connected.
A region that matters to every global partner
One of ASEAN’s defining strengths is its ability to engage multiple great powers at once, and a version of that dynamic is now visible across CEE. For the United States, the region is the eastern flank of NATO and the frontline of transatlantic deterrence—a flank where Romania now hosts one of the alliance’s largest emerging bases and anchors Black Sea security alongside Poland’s role on the northern land border. For the European Union, it is central to competitiveness, energy security, enlargement and the success of Ukraine’s integration; Romania’s offshore Neptun Deep gas project, the largest in the Black Sea and set to make the country the EU’s largest gas producer once it comes onstream, is precisely the kind of asset that turns energy security from aspiration into capacity. For India, the region offers an entry point into European markets in technology, pharmaceuticals and connectivity, increasingly framed through the India–Middle East–Europe Economic Corridor. For Japan, South Korea and the Gulf states, it is a fast-growing investment destination with access to the wider single market.
China is where the convenient version of this story collapses, and where the honest version becomes more interesting. The region is not a monolith. Poland, the Baltics and increasingly Romania are de-risking plays—beneficiaries of the Western pivot away from Chinese supply-chain dependence. Hungary is the opposite: China’s single largest bridgehead into Europe, absorbing some 31 per cent of Chinese outbound FDI to Europe in 2024 for the second consecutive year, anchored by CATL’s 7.3 billion euros battery gigafactory in Debrecen (Hungary’s largest greenfield investment ever) and BYD’s four billion euros plant in Szeged, the first Chinese passenger-car factory in Europe. The same region that benefits from diversification away from China is also where Chinese champions are building their European base. This is not a flaw in the thesis; it is the thesis. ASEAN’s centrality has always rested on hedging between Washington and Beijing rather than choosing cleanly between them. CEE now does the same thing—not as a single actor, but as a region whose members hedge in different directions. That internal heterogeneity is exactly why no serious global power can design a European strategy without engaging Central and Eastern Europe on its own terms.
The connectivity architecture
What turns geography into centrality is infrastructure, and here the region has acquired a genuine institutional spine.
The Three Seas Initiative, now a decade old and spanning the EU members between the Baltic, Adriatic and Black Seas, has shifted the continent’s infrastructure logic from a purely east–west axis toward the long-neglected north–south one. Since Greece’s association in 2023, it is increasingly imagined as the northern extension of the India–Middle East–Europe Economic Corridor (the connectivity project announced at the G20 in New Delhi in September 2023 and revived with notable momentum after Washington and New Delhi reaffirmed it as a strategic priority in early 2025).
The European Union’s Global Gateway adds further weight, with flagship projects including a subsea power and digital cable across the Black Sea to the Caucasus—a cable that makes landfall on the Romanian coast and turns the country into the western anchor of a digital and energy bridge to the Caspian. Through the northern Adriatic ports of Trieste and Koper, the Aegean gateway of Thessaloniki, and the Black Sea gateway of Constanța, these corridors increasingly run through Central and Eastern Europe, positioning the region as the hinge between the Indo-Mediterranean and the Baltic. This is the concrete mechanism beneath the abstraction: CEE is becoming a connector not by assertion but by laying the rail, cable and energy links that the rest of the system is coming to depend on.
Why ASEAN and CEE need each other
The comparison between the two regions should be more than analytical; it can become strategic. Both occupy pivotal positions within larger continental systems—ASEAN as a gateway to the Asian century, CEE as a hinge in Europe’s future. Both manage relationships among competing powers, balance integration against autonomy, and confront the same practical agenda: resilient supply chains, accelerated digital transformation, infrastructure gaps and regional connectivity. Both have hard-won experience navigating rapid transformation.
Yet the interaction between them remains far below its potential, with real scope for cooperation in trade and investment, infrastructure, the digital economy, the green transition, talent mobility, supply-chain resilience and security dialogue. A more deliberate ASEAN–CEE partnership could become one of the most productive interregional relationships of the century—one bloc that constructed its centrality offering its experience to a region still learning to recognise that it possesses centrality at all.
Toward a new understanding of European centrality
The concept of ASEAN centrality helped a generation of policymakers read the architecture of Asia. Europe now needs a comparable vocabulary for the role of its eastern half. Central and Eastern Europe is no longer Europe’s frontier; it is becoming Europe’s strategic centre of gravity, standing at the crossroads of security, energy, connectivity and reconstruction, and linking the West to Ukraine, the Black Sea, the Balkans, the Caucasus and increasingly the Indo-Pacific.
But centrality is not destiny. ASEAN’s example is instructive precisely because its centrality was built and sustained through institutions, doctrine and patient diplomacy. CEE’s centrality is, for now, an inheritance of geography and integration rather than an achievement of design, and it is shadowed by the demographic decline that could hollow it out from within.
Whether the region consolidates its position will depend on whether it can retain its people, deliver Ukraine’s reconstruction, and act with enough coherence to be treated as a strategic whole rather than a set of competing capitals. If ASEAN centrality became the defining lens for understanding Asia, CEE centrality may become equally important for understanding Europe—provided the region chooses to earn it.
The twenty-first century will be shaped not only by the rise of Asia, but by the regions that connect continents, bridge markets and anchor stability. In Europe, that region is Central and Eastern Europe.
Photo: Dreamstime.