Pioneering the CEE–India–Brazil triangle Opinion September 28, 2026 Radu Magdin About the author View All Posts Radu Magdin Radu Magdin is a global analyst and consultant, and former prime ministerial advisor in Romania and Moldova. Why three regions that believe in their future should discover each other now . Walk through São Paulo, Mumbai or Bucharest and, beneath the obvious differences, you feel the same thing: ambition, expressed less as the performative optimism of a conference stage than as the working assumption, held by ordinary people, that tomorrow can be bigger than today.
Entrepreneurs want to scale, families want the next generation to do better than the last, companies want to internationalise, cities want investment and recognition, and countries want a larger place in the world. That shared assumption is rarer than it should be. Most of today’s international debate is organised around decline: demographic, industrial, Western, institutional, the decline of order itself and of rulesets.
It is an entire vocabulary of managed retreat. Yet there are other regions of the world that are far more interested in historic rise than in managed decline, and it does not map neatly onto the old North-South line. India belongs to it.
Brazil belongs to it. And, while this may still surprise Western European observers, Central and Eastern Europe belongs to it too. The case I want to make is simple: these three stories are converging without anyone deciding that they should, and the countries that notice first will write the terms the others inherit.
A clean slate in a fragmenting world Start with the context, because for once it is working in our favour. The European Union is accelerating its diversification beyond its traditional relationships. In January 2026, the EU and India concluded negotiations on what the Commission calls the largest trade agreement either side has ever done.
EU-India goods trade reached 118 billion euros in 2025, having grown more than 80 per cent over the decade. The Western side of the triangle moved in the same month: the EU and Mercosur signed their Partnership Agreement and interim Trade Agreement in January 2026, with the interim text provisionally applying from May. Brazil, Latin America’s largest economy, is deepening cooperation with Europe on clean energy, critical raw materials, sustainable transport and digital connectivity.
Brussels, Brasília and Delhi are therefore skirting the same strategy: diversification. For the future-minded, what looks like the world coming apart is also the world rewiring itself. Companies and governments no longer want to depend on one market, one supplier, one financial centre, one relationship.
They want optionality, trusted alternatives, and several doors into the global economy rather than one grand entrance that someone else controls. The CEE-India-Brazil relationship comes prepackaged with a counter-intuitive advantage: its lack of development means that it is almost empty of accumulated grievance. There is no century of disappointment to work around, no colonial ledger, no frozen disputes.
Sometimes the absence of history is the asset, and a clean slate lets ambition write the first lines. The missing European piece is CEE Central and Eastern Europe should be far more present in this conversation than it is, and the reason is partly one of choice and of historical contingency. For three decades, the region’s success was fundamentally European: accession, convergence, integration into German industry, Western investment, EU funds, the Single Market.
That model delivered one of the most successful economic transformations in modern history. But it also trained the region to look in exactly one direction, West, and to wait for that direction to hand it the next opportunity or dictate the model. The next stage requires a mental shift: looking to the South and East with the same confidence the region has always looked West.
Central Europe and the Baltics together are roughly 100 million people. More to the point, they are one of the EU’s still relatively non-saturated economic spaces: industrial capacity, increasingly sophisticated services, competitive talent, EU and NATO membership across much of the region, infrastructure still catching up, and proximity to what will become the largest reconstruction effort on the continent since 1945. CEE should stop selling itself abroad as Europe’s low-cost production platform.
That story is fading as wages rise and the cost advantage erodes. The region can present itself instead as Europe’s next core, a complementary growth platform in manufacturing, defence, energy, IT, logistics, agrifood, infrastructure and, increasingly, innovation. For an Indian or Brazilian company looking for its next European chapter, Warsaw, Prague, Budapest, Bucharest and their neighbours deserve a serious look rather than a footnote after Frankfurt and Paris.
This is not a hypothetical repositioning. A cohort of mid-sized, specialist, export-oriented firms with the structural DNA of Germany’s Mittelstand, and a crisis metabolism the German original never had to develop, is already taking shape across Warsaw, Bucharest, Tallinn and Prague. The numbers back the impression: a 2025 EY poll spanning sixteen CEE countries and over a thousand entrepreneurs found 41 per cent reporting revenue growth of six to 20 per cent the previous year, with another 18 per cent growing faster still, at precisely the moment Western Europe was absorbed in arguing about stagnation.
Estonia has climbed to tenth worldwide on the StartupBlink Innovators Business Environment Index, ahead of several larger Western economies, and UniCredit together with the European Investment Fund has released close to 890 million euros in SME financing across the region, with demand still running ahead of what is on offer. Call them Europe’s next hidden champions: firms built for unsaturated markets, which is exactly what India and Brazil currentl
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