PLANNING FOR A SUSTAINABLE EUROPE? - TU Berlin

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7.1 Introduction
Previous chapters demonstrated that development objectives for EU support for
transport infrastructures in member states are internally contradictory, attempting to
simultaneously achieve greater cohesion (i.e. economic convergence) and
competitiveness (economic differentiation and hierarchization) among different EU
regions. Chapter 6 further indicated that EU’s Trans-European Network plans and
related transport infrastructure investment rationales are ultimately dominated by two
powerful storylines, namely the notions of “missing links” and “bottlenecks”. Policymakers
and analysts have not sufficiently assessed the implications of such contradictions
and biases for enlargement-related transport investments. 1
The EU accession literature is
equally unhelpful. Recent books and articles on the EU’s Eastern enlargement do not
give much thought to the transport-specific aspects of accession (compare e.g. Avery and
Cameron 1998; Grabbe and Hughes 1998; Fink Hafner 1999; Smith 2000; Hughes, Sasse
et al. 2001). Moreover, few articles properly acknowledge the problematic fact that
structural assistance for CEE candidate countries is based on a model of structural
assistance that is heavily criticized by regional development experts and Green EU
parliamentarians. 2
To make matters worse, conflicts of interests surrounding EU-CEE
links are more geo-politically complex than in the case of internal EU connections
1 Note that parts of the information assembled in the following sections were collected as part of a two-part
research consulting project for the German Environmental Agency (Umweltbundesamt) which I co-directed
in 1999 and 2000. However, this research project focused exclusively on international transport
infrastructure investment-decision making processes in the Baltic Sea region, and therefore did not include
any information on the Hungarian international corridors and/or investment priorities. More importantly,
the focus of the research was not to analyze European Union transport policy but rather to analyze and
critique the lending activities and mechanisms of the International Financial Institutions active in the Baltic
Sea region (i.e. the World Bank, the EBRD, the EIB and the Nordic Investment Bank). The resulting report
(HELCOM 2000) is therefore partially guilty of the same default.
2 See for example the Hiltner report, a German Green Party position paper on the revision of the Structural
Funds, available on the Green-Party affiliated Heinrich Böll Foundation website (www.boell.de).