Infrastructural Interdependence, Energy Security, and Societal Inclusivity in East-Central Europe

Abstract

The 2022 gas crisis and the 2026 oil shock have made infrastructural interdependence the central axis of European security. This article asks how three East-Central European borderland states, Romania, Hungary and Slovakia, are managing that transformation and when infrastructure that transmits coercion can become a substrate of cohesion. The analysis joins multi-level governance to a neo-Schumanian reading of functional integration, complemented by securitization, weaponized-interdependence and energy-justice perspectives. The central claim is an alignment condition. The EU’s response operates at four scales at once, through a supranational architecture that authorizes and funds, a regional lattice of multi-state gas corridors, national governments that variously implement or obstruct, and a local borderland politics of cross-border energy cooperation, and genuine integration occurs only where the four scales align. A most-similar-systems comparison isolates the national scale as the decisive variable, with material constraints limiting ideology in all three countries. The geothermal cooperation between Oradea and Debrecen serves as the explanatory case for re-scaling the Schuman mechanism to a historically contested border. The case yields a partial confirmation. Functional pressure and institutional development are real, but the cooperation still runs on EU subsidy, and its inclusiveness for peripheral households and the borderland Roma remains to be achieved.