The Black Sea: Economic Region or Intersection?

For those who study the countries and regions that surround it, the Black Sea is many things — a global trade thoroughfare, a zone of contestation, a cradle of civilizations, and a dying ecosystem. But, curiously, one of the more opaque factors is whether the Black Sea region — the states and polities on its littoral and immediate hinterland — is a region at all, properly speaking. Although a regional cultural or political identity has long proven elusive, there was a time when the Black Sea began to possess the rudiments of an economic one. It could again.