PLANNING FOR A SUSTAINABLE EUROPE? - TU Berlin

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focused on regulatory or managerial aspects of European transport policy. 2 Interestingly,
the identified storylines do not only exemplify eco-modernist rationales, but sometimes
also evoke various other discursive frameworks.
The rest of the chapter is organized as follows: In the section following this
introduction, I introduce the German concept Leitbild in order to differentiate the EU’s
overarching (history-making) “guiding visions” of enlargement, integration and
sustainability, from second-order (policy-setting and –shaping) concepts (i.e. storylines)
such as “polycentricity” or “bottlenecks”. 3
I briefly discuss the three above-named
Leitbilder for EU decision-making before moving on to the core concept of “spatial
storylines.” I subsequently analyze what I identify as four main spatial storylines for EU
infrastructure decision-making: “cohesion,” “polycentricity,” “missing links,” and
“bottlenecks.” I also discuss their relationship to the EU’s eco-modernist understanding
of sustainable development. A concluding section summarizes the theoretical findings
and their implications for decision-making.
6.2 Three Overarching Leitbilder for EU Decision-Making
6.2.1 Defining Leitbilder (Guiding Visions)
There is no direct translation for the German term Leitbild (pronounced lite-bild).
As a compound noun, its most literal English translation is “guiding image.” I use the
general term Leitbild here in the same sense that Meinolf Dierkes and his colleagues at
2 It would be quite possible, for example, to do detailed discourse-theoretical analyses of eco-modernist
storylines such as “Intelligent Transport”, “Interoperability” or “Fair Payment for Infrastructure Use” or
“Safety”. These are beyond the scope of my project, but certainly present worthwhile areas for further
research.
3 This now commonly referred to three-level typology of EU decision-making (i.e. history-making / policysetting
/ policy-shaping) was introduced by Peterson and Bomberg (1999, see especially Chapter 1, p. 12).
They do not, however, develop a typology of pertaining discursive concepts the way I do here.