PLANNING FOR A SUSTAINABLE EUROPE? - TU Berlin

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having been an intergovernmental process, remained an effort without official legal
standing inside or outside the EU. 4
One of the overarching objectives of this “realities” part of the study is to attempt
to identify in how far conflicts of interests surrounding particular infrastructure
investments can in fact be linked back to different underlying investment rationales.
Using the international process culminating in the Commission-funded publication of the
Transport Infrastructure Needs Assessment (TINA) for the Central European candidate
countries as its case study focus, this chapter reveals the EU’s key underlying rationales
and rationalizations for investing in CEE transport infrastructures. The Pan-European
Corridor process simply demonstrates the primate of power and politics over economic
rationality at the history-making levels of EU decision-making. The TINA process,
however, is more interesting in that it proves to be a perfect example of a rationality-aspower
exercise within the discursive framework of ecological modernization.
The two central propositions for the next two chapters are the Decisional-Power
and the Challenges of Multi-Location Politics Propositions. The Decisional-Power
Proposition assumes that Pan-European Transport Network policies and plans are
primarily designed to satisfy national economic and multi-national corporate interests.
The Multi-Location Politics Proposition is based on the premise that despite being a
powerful Directorate General within the European Commission, the DG responsible for
4 In fact, under the old Transport Commissioner Neil Kinnock, the original plan was supposedly to hold a
ministerial conference on TINA, but due to corruption charges brought against several Commissioners at
the time, all Commissioners had to step down and extensive restructuring followed. The new DG TREN
Commissioners were then more cautious about working towards a ministerial decision. Nevertheless, DG
Transport & Energy representatives planned to elevate the TINA network’s informal status by attaching the
TINA report as an annex to the planned revision of the TEN guidelines, which are formal EU law. Since
these TEN guidelines are part of the so-called transport Acquis, i.e. the transport-specific sections of the
Acquis Communautaire, which form the basis of the accession treaties, they thereby become binding
legislation for the accession countries as well.