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How far this leverage is then pro-actively and positively used in actual infrastructure
support programs is another matter that is likely to vary on a case-by-case basis. My
CEE examples show that the Commission is likely to be strict about procedural issues
such as open tenders and compliance with basic EIA rules, yet less inclined to raise the
bar any further on matters concerning strategic environmental assessments or the
integration of longer-term land-use impacts into transport decision-making.
10.3.5 Different Rationalities at Different Levels of Decision-Making
Apart from the persistence of competing interests and investment rationales, there
is an additional, cross-cutting explanation for the apparent inconsistencies in EU
decision-making: different decision-making rationalities apply at different levels of
decision-making. This insight brings us back to Peterson and Bomberg’s (1999) useful
distinction of three different rationalities for history-making, policy-setting and policyshaping
types of decision (see table 1.1 in the introductory chapter). As a particular
policy issue is handed through various decision-making ranks, super-systemic policy
goals get transformed, and sometimes even perverted, at the systemic or sub-systemic
level. The policy-making process for Pan-European transport infrastructures is a salient
example of this. The decision to consider CEECs as potential candidates for enlargement
was certainly a history-making event. The subsequent history-making / policy-setting
agreement on ten Pan-European transport priority corridors to connect Europe was made
by national ministers of transport in a bargaining mode that was predominantly
intergovernmental and with a rationality that might best be characterized as
(geo)political. So actual traffic flows along the corridors were not very important, yet