The outer rim: on closer collaboration between Eastern Europe and East Asia

“And dawn approaches while the night bird sings.” Mamoru Oshii’s 1995 sci-fi anime masterpiece, Ghost in the Shell, opens with the riveting montage of a human’s cybernetic transformation to the sound of restrained drumming instruments and ancient Japanese singing. The song, titled “Making of a Cyborg”, was closely based on Bulgarian choral singing, and represents a fascinating instance of cultural synthesis. What is more, it exemplifies what can be created by defying distance and geography, and by choosing to associate out of resonance.

Separated by continental giants and thousands of kilometres, the democracies of Eastern Europe and East Asia have already built momentum towards overtaking geography and associating based on affinity. Supercharged artistic, commercial, political and scientific collaboration between these two regions has the capacity to further redefine power and agency to their advantage.

Power must serve a purpose

Structurally, the democracies of Eastern Europe and East Asia, understood here as Japan, South Korea and Taiwan, share a common asymmetry. They are relatively small states, bordering larger powers with substantial military and financial force alongside increasingly bellicose behaviour. Yet the strength of these constitutional democracies flows not from scale, but from what they can generate. Deeper integration between these democracies should therefore produce the power necessary to resist domination, while augmenting their capabilities to act and create. The defining characteristic of deeper cooperation between Eastern Europe and East Asia must ultimately be its generative nature.

A prerequisite for being able to act and create is security: defensive power deters aggression and external domination. Security collaboration between Eastern Europe and East Asia is already shaping up to be innovative. South Korea has become a major producer and supplier of heavy armaments in Eastern Europe, and is involved in a Polish acquisition programme of up to 1000 K2 Black Panther tanks, 290 K239 Chunmoo rocket launchers, and 364 K9 Thunder self-propelled howitzers. Romania and Estonia are also expecting more deliveries of South Korean artillery pieces, while Poland has shown interest in the Korean KF-21 Boramae semi-stealth fighter airplane. Importantly, South Korean companies have begun setting up local production facilities in Eastern Europe, with Hanwha Aerospace having started work on its Armoured Vehicle Centre of Excellence in Romania in early 2026. A European production hub for Korean companies not only strengthens Eastern European procurement and industrial resilience, but also consolidates South Korea’s own defensive supply chains. What emerges is a shared defence ecosystem, capable of a reciprocal transfer of hardware and technology.

The development of a shared defence ecosystem is currently held back by South Korea’s narrow status within the European Union’s Security Action for Europe (SAFE) programme. It is difficult to reconcile this limitation with the fact that South Korea has become a robust industrial partner in Eastern Europe’s security architecture. Canada has obtained a dedicated agreement permitting extensive Canadian industrial involvement in SAFE procurement, whereas South Korea, which has a more significant defence industrial presence in Eastern Europe, currently relies on its general but more restrictive Security and Defence Partnership with the EU. SAFE should also not be thought of as a programme concerning only heavy armaments procurement. As Stefanie Gottschalk argues, SAFE integration is vital in the outer space domain as well. In September this year, a working group was set up between the EU and South Korea to improve satellite linkage. Integration with IRIS2, a new EU satellite constellation that will be positioned in Earth’s low and medium orbits, ought to become a priority, with deployment beginning in 2029 to elevate European and South Korean autonomy in outer space.

Japan too should be better integrated within SAFE. Although it has a distinctive self-restraining constitutional framework that governs its defence and security policies, Japan has developed an advanced space industry, alongside a broader high-end technology defence sector with capabilities in precision manufacturing, radars, sensors, and communication relays. Russia has recently increased its pressure on Japan, showing just how interconnected Eastern European and East Asian realities ultimately are and why the two regions must become fully capable of defending one another’s freedom.

The rise of Sanseitō, a far-right ethnonationalist party in Japan founded in 2020 that shares many talking points with European sovereigntists, has been amplified by Moscow’s propaganda and disinformation outlet Sputnik. At the same time, Russia has embarked on a modernizing course concerning its Pacific Fleet and carried out missile tests in August 2026 around Japan’s Northern Territories. These small islands off the coast of Hokkaido were occupied by the Soviet Union in 1945 and are today still part of Russia. Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, visited the Northern Territories in August. A monument was revealed in Khabarovsk the following month that shows a Soviet soldier smashing a boundary stone from the time of Imperial Japan, which also bears the chrysanthemum crest, a longstanding Japanese symbol that predates Imperial Japan, but was heavily appropriated by its militarist state. Additionally, in July, the Japanese government conceded that the country has been facing difficulty in dealing with Russian espionage activities.

Beyond security

South Korea’s most expensive film production, Hope, directed by Na Hong-jin, was released in Romania this September, with its Polish theatrical premiere following in October. Parts of the movie were shot in Romania’s Retezat and Făgăraș Mountains, and involved Romanian production specialists. An example of the kind of generative cultural collaboration that Eastern European and East Asian democracies should strive to nurture, Hope also raises the question of why efforts have not already been made to this end, given that both regions are home to talented and acclaimed filmmakers and artists. An institutionalized form of cinematographic cooperation between European and non-European states already exists: the Council of Europe facilitates the Eurimages support fund for independent filmmaking, of which Canada has already been a full member since 2022.

There is certainly ample scope for increased cultural collaboration beyond cinematography as well. While South Korea and Japan occupy a leading place in immersive storytelling through video games, Warsaw and Bucharest have become key hubs within this creative industry in their own right. The European Commission has recognized the need for bolstering the immersive storytelling potential of the video games industry in the MEDIA+ strand of its proposed Regulation establishing AgoraEU, the European Union’s framework for supporting culture and civil society between 2028 and 2034. In May 2026, the fourth EU-Japan Digital Partnership Council announced that information exchanges on video game and audiovisual strategies will become recurrent in further Council meetings. The way forward lies in developing a transregional system that can facilitate fertile collaboration between European and East Asian immersive storytelling industries. Such collaboration could, for instance, involve co-productions, joint commissions, talent mobility, and IP adaptations.

Another area in which an institutionalized framework of transcontinental cultural collaboration would be welcomed is that of performing arts. Both Eastern Europe and East Asia share rich traditions of dancing, music, theatre and opera, yet cooperation in the domain of performing arts remains project-based and episodic. There exists an EU-Korea Protocol on Cultural Cooperation, in which the domain of performing arts is discussed at the annual meeting. However, what is needed for durable and sustained collaboration is a nexus that extends to Japan and Taiwan too, in which transcontinental co-productions, residencies, exchanges, joint commissions, tours, rotating festivals, and fellowships are jointly managed and coordinated.

Friendship is a virtue 

The most solid foundation for association and integration is friendship. Friendship is an organic phenomenon, appearing first and foremost among individual citizens as they encounter each other in the world. Youth mobility in education is central to the development of friendship. Institutions cannot manufacture friendship. However, what they can do is manufacture conditions for citizens to encounter each other and build human relationships by themselves. Europe’s most extensive youth mobility mechanism remains the European Union’s Erasmus+ Programme. Full access to Programme Actions is granted to the member states of the European Union and other third countries located in Europe, with states across the globe being able to partake in only a limited number of Programme Actions. However, if transcontinental youth mobility in education is to be supercharged, the Erasmus+ Programme needs to be thoroughly revamped. This is especially true since Canada is being considered for a prospective new status as the European Union’s first Associate Member, as European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen revealed in her 2026 State of the Union speech. By choosing a new name to reflect a more cosmopolitan youth mobility scheme, and modifying the full access requirements so that Canada, South Korea, Japan and Taiwan may stand on an equal footing despite geographical distance, a redesign of the current Erasmus+ Programme should signify rebellion against the traditional geographical paradigm of integration, as well as the embrace of a new approach unhindered by geographical constraints.

The scientific field has witnessed such a paradigm shift in recent years. In 2025, South Korea became the first Asian state to join Horizon Europe, the European Union’s scientific research funding nexus, as an associated member. This was followed by Japan in July 2026. Both states are associated with Pillar II of Horizon Europe, which deals with global challenges and industrial competitiveness. Taiwan has not yet been admitted as a member, despite participating in Horizon Europe projects through a domestic funding mechanism and thereby demonstrating an established capacity for functional scientific integration.

Studying the wind

As has become evident, the European Union is the principal vector for deeper association and integration between Eastern Europe and East Asia, since it is through the EU that significant cooperation between the two regions has already been institutionalized. Whether deeper collaboration can bloom therefore depends much on Western and Eastern Europeans alike. Through the European Union, Europeans have recovered an alternative to the deficient sovereigntist political imagination that characterizes freedom as self-containment and consequently equates it with sovereignty. This worldview is self-defeating for small and medium states because it understands freedom as a condition brought about by political separation. Such a misunderstanding of freedom ensures that small and medium states will be at the mercy of large powers, suffering as they must, like dandelions in the wind.

The European Union embodies an understanding of freedom that, in Europe, has its roots in Hellenistic political thought, namely that freedom emerges through association and acting together. Europeans should look to institutionally upgrade the Union to better support a reciprocal association of democracies beyond Europe’s borders. Under the conventional conception of power emanating from fixed centres, democracies in Eastern Europe and East Asia are rendered peripheral, their relationships with their large neighbours being viewed by outsiders primarily from the perspective of Moscow or Beijing. Deeper transcontinental collaboration thus has the capacity to produce a new form of power, that of mobile power, collectively generated through small and medium democracies acting and creating in concert.

Radu Cornea holds a bachelor’s degree in international and European law from the University of Groningen and a master’s degree in European law from Maastricht University. He has worked as a policy researcher regarding the rule of law in the European Union and as a democracy rapporteur on Romania.