Despite the victorious march of Sovietization and ensuing division of the continent into two halves, as epitomized by the Comecon waterway integration scheme, Czechoslovak engineers on the DOE project never abandoned the ideal scenario of a pan-continental waterways network. They tended to ignore the political barrier of the Iron Curtain that was threatening to detach their dream project from one of the three seas it once boasted to connect. The opening quotation comes from discussions on the DOE canal held in the early 1960s and shows, in condensed form, how the Comecon scheme was accompanied and enlarged by the broader picture of continent-wide integration. The situation was no different in the mid-1950s or 1970s. The bold visions sketched by Czechoslovak engineers depicted Europe as a unified whole, as if there was no Cold War.

In the 1950s, DOECS members clearly expressed their ideas on the spatial delimitations of the future waterway network containing the DOE. Advocating the necessity of the interconnection between the separated river basins of the Danube, the Oder, and the Elbe, articles published in the mid-1950s in DOECS bulletins positioned the DOE in the “European” inland water transport system or, following the then dominant force of Moscow and the USSR , the Eurasian network. Papers by engineer Karel Raba illustrate the latter.

In 1955, Raba published an article dealing with the development of Czechoslovak inland water transport and infrastructures. Raba, a lifelong crew officer on Danube vessels, turned scientist after World War II and was a member of the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences, established in 1953 based on a Soviet model. His paper addressed the DOE's position in the construction of the transnational waterways network. Raba, ignoring the Cold War, proposed developing four continental diagonal waterway axes: a northeast-southwest connection from Moscow to Marseille; a north-south corridor from Szczecin to Trieste; an east-west link from the port of Rotterdam to Sulina through the RMD canal; and, finally, a northwestsoutheast passage starting on the North Sea coast in Hamburg and terminating on the Aegean in Thessaloniki. Apart from the east-west connection consisting of the realization of the Rhine-Main-Danube canal, the other three routes would exploit a part of the DOE system.