PLANNING FOR A SUSTAINABLE EUROPE? - TU Berlin

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and World Bank-funded Global Environmental Facility (GEF), was initially only going to
fund transport projects related to alternative fuels and fuel cell technology. 14
As the following chapter will confirm, most of official EU-speak is very close to
the overall ideal of modernization and there is general agreement among scholars that the
ideas of ecological modernization have directly influenced European Union policy
making, particularly in the formulation of the influential 1993 White Paper on Growth,
Competitiveness and Employment. More specifically, it was Jaques Delors himself and
his think-tank Cellule de Prospective who picked up on the ideas of ecological
modernization (also see Massa and Andersen 2000a; and Massa and Andersen 2000b).
Tellingly, the White Paper also devoted a whole chapter to the TENs, “identifying them
as a means of promoting growth and creating new jobs” (Williams 1996:168). The
Commission itself then sold the ambitious TEN infrastructure plans with promises of
huge economic savings, packaged in glossy brochures. To present one typical example:
The EU could save transport users, and earn transport operators, a combined total of
ECUs 138bn a year by 2005 in terms of money, time and reductions in other indirect
costs like inflexibility. But such a big saving can only be reached if a whole building
block of measures is carried out. (Commission of the European Communities
1996b:131)
Pro-construction optimism is not limited to Eurocrats, however. Gerondeau
(1997) provides us with a recent example of a scholarly work defending the idea that
“only the road can relieve the road” (p.xxxv). For him, European transport is
increasingly dominated by road transport simply because “the road transport system is
almost always more efficient for the user than its competitors” (p.xxxvi). Taking up all
the major environmental and social problems associated with transport, such as
14 Due to the intervention of sustainable transport advocacy groups, the emphasis has now been refocused.
See www.ITDP.org.