PLANNING FOR A SUSTAINABLE EUROPE? - TU Berlin

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overall context of competitive European cities and regions which each pursue individual
growth strategies.
6.3.5 Missing Links
TEN-T as a policy has been around for a long time, developed from the “missing
links” and the European Round Table, and all this kind of business, you know.
Brussels Bureaucrat, quoted in Richardson 2000
The Missing Link storyline is predominately industry-created and represents a
masterpiece in infrastructure investment lobbying. As preceding discussions have shown,
EU transport infrastructure funding was obviously not backed up by unequivocal
economic reasoning. So how could the TENs so quickly advance from a mere paper tiger
to a multi-billion Euro investment program? How is it that the EU was willing to commit
billions of Euros in funds to a program that did not guarantee economic returns? The
explanation is that decisions were highly political. But it was also not simply a matter of
income transfers, as was indicated by realist interpretations in the case of cohesion
funding. The rapid adoption of the TENs concept in the early 1990s is primarily due to
their timeliness and due to the ability of the concept to respond to urgent industry and
high-level political needs. The pro-investment infrastructure & construction lobby and
the EU joined forces on the idea of the TENs. In some ways, it may be even more
accurate to say that most official European Union transport infrastructure investment
proposals, and the priority Trans-European Network projects in particular, originated as
industry lobby proposals that were only later transformed into EU policy. There are
several key reports prepared for the European Roundtable of Industrialists (ERT) which
resemble future Commission proposals in startling ways.