PLANNING FOR A SUSTAINABLE EUROPE? - TU Berlin

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decision-making, and instead re-emphasized the Helsinki corridors. Others were, and
still are, mostly concerned about the maturity of individual projects. The ongoing ISPA
program is therefore faced with bringing together rather different rationales at the
national and at the EU level. And at least for the recipient national governments,
“missing links” of course mostly means “missing links (and nodes) within our national
territory.”
So once again, we see how discourses related to “missing links” serve to satisfy
different development goals. Conversely, this example also once again explains the great
appeal of the “missing links” storyline: unlike many other discursive concepts, the
imagery of “missing links” can be very conveniently applied both at the abstractuniversal
and at the locally specific level. Moreover, the term “missing” conveniently
fosters a pro-investment attitude by implying that all links are in fact needed and should
be “found.” Suddenly, the issue is not a potentially controversial choice between
different infrastructure alternatives, but merely an agreement on different priorities.
10.3.6 Different Rationalities at Different Times of Decision-Making
There is also a temporal dimension to decision-making. Infrastructure needs
change over time, and these needs change more rapidly in the Central European context
of economic transition than in the mature economies of Western Europe. As the sociospatial
transition to market-oriented, post-Fordist production and consumption patterns
progresses, new winning and losing regions and cities constantly emerge, thereby
continually rearranging inter-regional traffic flows. The general expectation that new
“missing links” and “bottlenecks” would primarily emerge along the Western borders,