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8.5.2 The Hungarian ISPA Transport Strategies and their Priorities 29
The initial 1999 draft ISPA National Transport Strategy document was very much
a cut-and-paste document that did not undergo much final editing. Different sections
even display different type fonts and sizes (and sometimes even colors). There is no table
of contents. The entire document is separated (i.e. segmented) into an introductory part,
and a road and a rail sector annex which sometimes repeat information and do not relate
to each other. The draft does not [yet] contain any priority projects for inland navigation
or civil aviation. Not surprisingly, the document was not well received in Brussels. On
an editorial level, the responsible Brussels desk officers demanded a more coherent, more
consistent document with a clearer argumentation leading to a logical set of ISPA priority
projects. On a pragmatic level, the 1999 draft version listed priorities within the road and
rail sectors, but did not allow for any prioritization between road, rail or other projects.
Within the rail sector, however, the 1999 draft was already unproblematic. The three top
ISPA priority projects were identical with the Széchenyi Plan priorities (see Table 8.4
above). These were in turn identical with Helsinki corridors IV and V, so there was thus
a mutual interest from the Hungarian and the EU sides to first modernize these lines.
The road sector, however, was more problematic. In the 1999 draft, the “key
projects forming part of the government strategy” are introduced as follows:
29 Much unlike the Polish officials, Hungarian officials were extremely reluctant to provide me with inside
insights into the gestation and formulation of the Hungarian ISPA strategy when I conducted my interviews
in Budapest in August 2000. At that time, final consultations on the second, dramatically changed version
of the strategy had not been completed, and the material was still highly politically sensitive. Contrary to
the Polish case, I therefore was not able to conduct detailed, first-hand interviews with the actual author(s)
of the ISPA strategy documents. As evident in this chapter, I still managed to obtain a significant amount
of information, including copies of both the draft 1999 and the final 2000 versions of the Hungarian
National ISPA Strategy, but this information did not come from official governmental channels. Note,
however, that by 2002 (and possibly earlier) the final ISPA version could be found on the Transport
Ministry’s website.