Europe's System Builders: The Contested Shaping of Transnational Road, Electricity and Rail Networks

Abstract

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.

Ideas, Individuals and Institutions: Notion and Practices of a European Electricity System

“…Building European infrastructures has been a contested process that also met with opposition. 73 The emerging system evolved continuously, with the geographical scale of European cooperation first contracting in the post-war period and ultimately expanding. While most Scandinavian countries (with the exception of the continental part of Denmark) are still not part of the synchronised system, it has come to include Central and Eastern Europe.…”

The politics of accelerating low-carbon transitions: Towards a new research agenda

“…Other work looks at the role of external actors, such as donors and businesses, in shaping the nature and pace of energy transitions [79], and the historical circumstances in which more rapid and disruptive change has been possible [7,82,83]. This includes historical examples where transformative change has been facilitated by new normative frames imposed by circumstances such as wartime or technological "revolutions" [67,[84][85][86]. Haley's [87,88] work on the political economy of Canadian energy shows another way that political economies can make low-carbon transitions much more difficult.…”

The Making of Europe’s Critical Infrastructure

“…For something special on energy infrastructures, see Van der Vleuten and Kaijser 2005. For a sample of the first crop of histories of electric infrastructures that were written in response to this invitation, see Van der Vleuten and Kaijser 2006, Van der Vleuten et al 2007, and Lagendijk 2008. All the above works refer explicitly to the historiographical orientation of the "Tensions of Europe" network of historians of technology.…”