PLANNING FOR A SUSTAINABLE EUROPE? - TU Berlin

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With regard to the TINA exercise, we have to somewhat reconsider our
“Decisional Power” proposition which assumed a predominance of multi-national and
national transport interests. The bias towards international, long distance infrastructures
which the Helsinki Corridor and the TINA processes aim to justify is certainly in the
interest of the kinds of multinational corporations active in the European Round Table of
Industrialists (ERT). However, the overall process of drawing up the CEE Transport
Network plans displays quite a different dynamic from the type of targeted “Missing
Links” industry pet project lobbing that went on during the development of the TEN
priority projects. Participants confirm that both the Helsinki Corridors and the TINA
processes were driven by the Commission and national governments, without any real
influence of either private sector interests or civil society. Much of this has to do with the
fact that during the time of their development, the Helsinki Corridors bore no concrete
promise of a special EU grant fund budget line looming in the background. There was
thus more room for national government-dominated politicking. This politicking,
however, was limited to debates over the inclusion of additional transport infrastructure
links of inter-urban and supra-regional importance. Whether or not even these additional,
secondary links in fact represent the true priority interests of these countries from a
sustainable transport development perspective is yet a different question – one that will
be answered affirmatively by highway and high-speed rail-oriented modernizationists and
negatively by political economy or renunciation-oriented sustainability advocates, and in
fact by almost everyone else. In any case, even very mainstream transport experts (e.g.
World Bank and EBRD senior transport specialists) emphasize that given the
maintenance backlog and dire financial situation of CEE countries, the expensive new