and Bern in rapid succession. 2 He travelled the Orient Express of the international railway company Wagon-Lit, and proudly testified as to the ease, speed and comfort of travelling. In his articles, he expressed the view that the European nation-states were ready to unite in a Union comparable to the United States of America in order to escape the ‹blighting curse of the armed peace›, and prevent war. He was full of hope, because the countries he passed through were not at war and permission to cross borders was obtained with ease. He noted with great satisfaction that ‹for travelling purposes Europe is already a commonwealth›. 3 Stead appealed to an oftinvoked conception. In the second half of the nineteenth century, many intellectuals before him had argued that trade between countries, facilitated by transport and communication networks, not only promoted economic growth but also made those countries unlikely to go to war. 4 One of the best known expressions of this set of ideas was Norman Angell's book The Great Illusion, published in 1909, 196 1 This article is a result of many interactions. We have the good fortune to work in a growing community of scholars working on transnational infrastructure development. For more information, we refer to www.tensionsofeurope.eu; For comments we are grateful to Kiran Patel, two anonymous referees and to our colleagues Alexander Badenoch, Suzanne Lommers, Frank Schipper, Geert Verbong, Erik van der Vleuten and Irene Anastasiadou who work with us in the research programme Transnational Infrastructures and the Rise of Contemporary Europe (www.tie-project.nl). We thank Alexander Badenoch also for his editing suggestions, and Martin Kohlrausch for his invitation and encouragement to publish in this special issue. We gratefully acknowledge the support of the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research for our research. The first author is indebted to the European University Institute of Florence, which proved to be an excellent environment to work on this article. 2 Stead contributed articles to the Daily News and the Review of Reviews and to the Associated Press of America. They were put together in his The United States of Europe on the Eve of the Parliament of
This article explores what kind of 'Europe' was produced in the processes of transnational infrastructure building. It focuses on international organisations dedicated to Europe's infrastructural integration as a promising research site, where infrastructural collaborations (or the lack thereof) were articulated and negotiated. Case studies of the Bureau International des Autoroutes (1931), the Union for the Coordination of Production and Transport of Electricity (1951) and the European Conference of Transport Ministers (1953) explore the challenges of transnational system building. They also suggest that Europe's infrastructural interlacing was a contested process, producing, if successful, multilayered networks in which corporate, national and mesoregional borders remain clearly discernable. Every successful undertaking, serving the general well-being, started out as a utopia and ended as reality.
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