Why the Black Sea countries cooperate less than those from the Baltic Sea

Marius Ghincea, Priors and Posteriors, 1 April 2026

Summary

Here is a detailed summary of Marius Ghincea’s analysis of the security challenges in the Black Sea region, which notes that countries in the Black Sea region cooperate less than those in the Baltic Sea region.

The main question the author poses is: Why is there a lack of security cooperation in the Black Sea, even though the actual military threat there is significantly higher compared to the Baltic Sea? Ghință also offers his own answer as to why the countries of the Black Sea region cooperate less than those of the Baltic Sea.

1. Theoretical Clash: Walt vs. Buzan and Weaver

The author compares two theories to explain the paradox:

• Threat Balance Theory (Stephen Walt): It posits that a major common threat automatically leads to cooperation. According to this theory, the lack of such cooperation in the Black Sea is due to a “lack of political will.”
• Regional Security Complex Theory (Buzan and Weaver): It argues that cooperation depends on structural connectivity. The Baltic Sea is a “structured subcomplex” (all are part of a single system), while the Black Sea is an “unstructured space” where three different regional complexes (European, Middle Eastern, and post-Soviet) intersect.

2. Why does the Baltic succeed, while the Black Sea does not?

• Baltic Sea: The states share a common strategic axis, similar geographical vulnerabilities, and long-standing institutional frameworks (e.g., the Nordic-Baltic Eight). They can “import” security from outside (NATO).
• Black Sea: The strategic interests of the main players diverge:
  • Turkey: Its attention is divided between the Caucasus, the Middle East, and the Mediterranean. Its relations with Russia in the Black Sea are tied to interests in Syria and Libya.
  • Romania and Bulgaria: Romania looks to the northeast (Moldova/Ukraine), while Bulgaria is focused on the Western Balkans and the Mediterranean.
  • The “Montreux” restriction: The convention limits the presence of non-Black Sea states, which prevents NATO from balancing the region from the outside, as it does in the Baltic.

3. Key conclusions and implications

Ghincea concludes that the problem lies not with politicians, but with the structure.

• Top-down grand strategies (such as those of the EU) fail because they assume a unity that does not exist.
• Using diplomatic pressure to generate “political will” is the wrong prescription for a structural problem.

4. Recommendation: “Bottom-up” functionalism

The solution is to apply the logic of Schuman and Monnet (used in the creation of the EU):

Start with small, technical projects: Instead of grandiose alliances, cooperation should be built in specific niches where interests align.

The successful example: The trilateral group on mine countermeasures (MCM Black Sea) between Bulgaria, Romania, and Turkey. It builds trust and common operational practices without requiring full political consensus on Russia.

Next steps: Joint maritime surveillance and protection of underwater infrastructure (cables, pipelines).

5. Conclusion

The transformation of the Black Sea into a stable security region cannot be achieved by decree, but through the gradual accumulation of practical habits and operational trust. In this way, we will not witness the acute situation where countries in the Black Sea region cooperate less than those in the Baltic Sea.

Analysis

Last week I was in Varna, Bulgaria, at a Black Sea security conference hosted by the Nikola Vaptsarov Naval Academy. The panels brought together academics, military officers, and policy professionals from several NATO littoral states. As I was listening to the presentations, a question kept surfacing across the discussions, sometimes explicitly, sometimes as a background frustration: Why is it so difficult to build meaningful security cooperation in the Black Sea, especially if we compare it to the Baltic Sea? The answers offered at the conference did not convince me. I want to propose a different one here.

Prior

Two theoretical frameworks generate competing expectations about regional security cooperation that are useful for the case of the Black Sea region.

The dominant framework is Stephen Walt’s balance-of-threat theory. Walt argues that states balance not simply against power but against threat, which he defines as a combination of aggregate capability, geographic proximity, offensive capacity, and perceived aggressive intent. The core prediction of Walt’s theory is that when a group of states faces a common and proximate threat, they have strong incentives to balance against it through enhanced cooperation. The higher the perceived threat, the stronger the incentive. When the balance-of-threat prediction fails to materialize, analysts working within this framework tend to reach for a residual explanation. The problem must be one of political will. The structural incentives are there, but leaders have failed to act on them. Align the incentives, convene the right people, and cooperation will follow.

The challenger framework I want to introduce here is Barry Buzan and Ole Waever’s regional security complex theory. Buzan and Waever argue that security dynamics are not uniformly distributed across the international system. They cluster into regional security complexes, durable patterns of amity and enmity among geographically proximate states whose security concerns are sufficiently interconnected that they cannot be analyzed or resolved independently of one another. Within a structured security complex, states share linked threat perceptions. What happens to one directly affects the security calculus of the others. But not all geographic spaces constitute structured complexes. Some areas are what Buzan and Waever call ‘unstructured security spaces’, zones where the security dynamics of adjacent regional complexes meet without generating their own autonomous pattern of cooperation among the states located there.

In other words, Walt expects cooperation to track threat intensity. The higher the threat, the more cooperation we should observe. Buzan and Waever expect cooperation to track structural linkage. Even under conditions of high threat, an unstructured security space will produce low levels of cooperation because the states within it do not share structurally linked security dynamics. Their threat perceptions may be similar in content, but they are not functionally interdependent.

For the Black Sea, Walt predicts robust cooperation. The threat is high and proximate. Buzan and Waever predict weak cooperation, if the Black Sea is an unstructured security space where multiple regional complexes overlap without generating their own coherent pattern. The opposite is the case for the Baltic Sea. Because the threat in the Baltic Sea is lower and there is no active naval warfare, cooperation should be weaker. Conversely, Buzan and Waever predict strong cooperation because the Baltic Sea is deeply embeded in the European security complex and thus it is a highly structured security environment.

Evidence

The Black Sea region experiences objectively higher levels of threat than the Baltic. There is an active naval war in these waters. Russia has deployed its fleet aggressively, mined shipping lanes, attacked civilian port infrastructure, and maintained a posture of coercive escalation against NATO littoral states. NATO’s Sea Shield 2026 exercise, which launched from Constanta just days before my Varna conference with 2,500 personnel and 48 ships from 13 nations, is a direct response to this threat environment.

The Baltic states face lower levels of active military threat. No naval warfare, no mine contamination, no direct attacks on civilian shipping.

And yet the Baltic has produced significantly higher levels of regional security cooperation. The Nordic-Baltic Eight format has evolved into what some analysts now call Europe’s most reliable security engine, jointly financing a 500 million dollars Ukraine military support package in 2025, constructing the Baltic Defence Line along their borders with Russia and Belarus, and approaching defense spending of 5% of GDP. NATO’s Operation Baltic Sentry has turned the Baltic Sea into one of the most monitored maritime spaces in Europe.

The Black Sea, by contrast, remains a space of strategic fragmentation. The EU published a Black Sea strategic approach in May 2025, but it lacks a concrete action plan, a clear timeline, and a dedicated budget. Previous frameworks like the Black Sea Synergy and the Eastern Partnership failed to address regional security challenges that systematically emerged over the past three decades.

This pattern is anomalous for Walt but is quite expected by Buzan and Waever.

The Baltic fits the model of a structured security subcomplex. Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania share the same strategic axis, the Russian western military district. They share the same geographic vulnerability, as small states on NATO’s northeastern flank. And they share the same institutional embedding, through Nordic-Baltic cooperation formats accumulated over decades. Their threat perceptions are structurally linked. What happens to one directly and immediately affects the security of the others. This structural linkage, not the level of threat per se, is what enables the dense cooperation we observe.

The Black Sea displays the characteristics of an unstructured security space. It sits at the intersection of at least three regional security complexes, the European, the Middle Eastern, and the post-Soviet Central Asian. Turkey illustrates this most clearly. Ankara has security commitments and strategic relationships spanning the Eastern Mediterranean, the Middle East, and the Caucasus. Its strategic attention is structurally dispersed across these spaces. This is a geographic reality that any Turkish government would face regardless of ideology or alliance preferences. Turkey’s relationship with Russia in the Black Sea cannot be isolated from its relationship with Russia in Syria, in Libya, in the South Caucasus, or in the energy transit corridors connecting Central Asia to Europe. Russia understands this. As a recent Chatham House analysis observed, Moscow’s preferred vision for the Black Sea is a de facto condominium with Turkey, with Russia asserting control over the northern basin and Ankara over the south.

Romania and Bulgaria face a different version of this structural problem. Both are embedded in the European regional security complex, but their strategic orientations diverge. Romania’s security axis runs northeast, toward Moldova and Ukraine. Bulgaria’s pulls toward the Western Balkans and the Eastern Mediterranean. They share a coastline, but not a single strategic depth.

Moreover, in the Baltic the limits of indigenous cooperation among smaller states have been partially compensated by external force projection. The United Kingdom, Germany, Canada, and the United States all maintain enhanced forward presence battlegroups on NATO’s northeastern flank. The Black Sea has no equivalent option. The 1936 Montreux Convention gives Turkey sovereign control over the Straits and limits the tonnage and duration of stay for non-littoral warships. Since February 2022, Turkey has invoked the Convention’s wartime provisions to close the Straits to belligerent warships altogether. Non-littoral NATO allies cannot sustain a meaningful naval presence in the Black Sea. The Baltic can import balancing from outside. The Black Sea cannot. This legal-institutional constraint further isolates the Black Sea from the compensatory mechanisms available to other NATO flanks and reinforces the structural fragmentation that Buzan and Waever’s framework predicts.

Posterior

The comparative evidence we have favors Buzan and Waever over Walt. Walt’s balance-of-threat prediction fails the Black Sea-Baltic test. The region with higher threat has produced less cooperation. The region with lower threat has produced more. Political will is not the missing variable. The Baltic states do not cooperate more because their leaders are more willing. Instead, they cooperate more because they inhabit a structured security subcomplex in which their security concerns are functionally interdependent. The structure generated the cooperation, not the other way around.

The Black Sea’s cooperation deficit is structural. Romania, Bulgaria, and Turkey may share a similar view of Russia as a threat, but they do not inhabit a common security system. Their threat perceptions converge in content but diverge in structure. Each state faces Russia through a different strategic axis, with different stakes and different constraints. The Black Sea is an unstructured security space, and it behaves like one.

This does not mean cooperation is impossible, however. It only means that the pathway to cooperation runs through structure-building rather than through appeals to political will. If the Black Sea is to develop higher levels of security cooperation, it must first be transformed from an unstructured security space into something resembling a structured security subcomplex linked to the European security architecture.

Implications

Three policy consequences follow directly from this diagnostic.

First, comprehensive top-down security frameworks will continue to fail. The EU’s May 2025 Black Sea strategic approach is the latest in a series of attempts to impose coherence on a structurally fragmented space. Like its predecessors, it will underdeliver, not because the EU’s intentions are wrong but because it assumes a level of strategic alignment among the littoral states that the underlying structure defining inter-actions in the region simply do not support. A framework that requires Turkey, Romania, and Bulgaria to coordinate across their divergent strategic axes will collapse under the weight of those divergences.

Second, the political will diagnosis that permeates analyses of Black Sea security cooperation produces, in my view, the wrong prescriptions. If the obstacle were volitional, then the answer would be more high-level engagement, more diplomatic energy, more joint declarations. But a decade of shared threat perception has not produced meaningful trilateral security cooperation. The fact that cooperation has not emerged despite strong incentives is itself the evidence that the obstacle is structural.

Third, Montreux forecloses the most common compensatory mechanism available to other NATO flanks. If external balancing is legally impossible in the Black Sea, then whatever security cooperation exists must be generated from within, by and among the littoral states themselves. This makes the pathway to cooperation narrower and more demanding, but it also clarifies the task at hand for security planners and political leaders.

Recommendations

If the problem is structural, the response must be structural. The Black Sea needs to be transformed from an unstructured security space into a structured security subcomplex. And the most promising way to do this is from the bottom up.

I am advocating for a Schuman-style functional logic applied to Black Sea security. Monnet and Schuman understood in 1950 that Franco-German reconciliation could not be achieved through grand political declarations. It had to be built through concrete, limited cooperation in specific sectors that would create material interdependencies and generate spillover pressures toward broader integration. The design principle was accretion, not comprehensiveness. Start small. Let functional spillover do the work of expanding cooperation over time.

The encouraging news is that this logic is already at work, even if it has not been recognized as such. The Mine Countermeasures Naval Group (MCM Black Sea), established through a trilateral memorandum of understanding signed in January 2024 and operational since July of that year, is precisely the kind of narrow, technically focused cooperation that can serve as a foundation for something larger. The group has completed four activation cycles under rotating Bulgarian, Romanian, and Turkish command, conducting joint mine reconnaissance and surveillance in the western Black Sea. Romania’s former defense minister Ionut Mosteanu has already signaled that this format should expand to include patrol forces protecting energy facilities and trade routes.

This trajectory follows the functional logic I am describing. Once officers from three navies share a common operating picture, they develop habits of communication that did not previously exist. Once mine countermeasure crews train together and develop shared protocols, they create a baseline of interoperability that can be extended to other domains. Once shared operations generate after-action reviews, they create institutional feedback loops that require further coordination. Each functional step generates pressures for the next.

The critical insight from this is that the design should aim for accretion rather than comprehensiveness from the start. A comprehensive trilateral security framework would collapse under the weight of the divergent strategic priorities described above. A narrow functional arrangement focused on mine countermeasures does not require Turkey, Romania, and Bulgaria to agree on their respective relationships with Russia across multiple theaters. It only requires them to agree that drifting mines are a shared problem. And they are.

Beyond mine countermeasures, two further domains offer immediate potential for functional deepening. Joint maritime domain awareness, meaning shared surveillance and intelligence-sharing for monitoring Russian naval activity and environmental hazards. And joint exercises focused on the protection of undersea infrastructure, which build interoperability without requiring agreement on the more politically sensitive questions of force posture and threat response.

None of these measures are dramatic. None will make headlines. But that is precisely the point. The objective should be to transform the Black Sea from a space of security liminality into a structured security subcomplex linked to the European security architecture. This transformation cannot be decreed. It must be grown from below, through the slow accumulation of shared practices, institutional habits, and operational trust.

Photo: Black Sea (source: Pixabay, CC0)

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