PLANNING FOR A SUSTAINABLE EUROPE? - TU Berlin

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while previous “priority connections” in the East (particularly freight rail) would
increasingly become obsolete has generally proved to be correct. Nevertheless, traffic
volumes along certain links have exceeded expectations, while they have been lagging
along others. In Hungary, the end of violent conflict in Former Yugoslavia has brought
particularly dramatic changes.
Additionally, infrastructure priorities, of course, also change over time without
any real changes in traffic flows. National infrastructure priority lists typically get
rearranged whenever national elections bring about political change in the government.
This is simply due to the fact that different political parties cater to different national
constituencies – which brings us back to the issue of legitimacy of interests and political
support (see above).
10.3.7 “A Bottleneck is a Bottleneck is a …”? How Language Frames Policy
As the “missing links” example shows, employing the “right” kinds of images,
metaphors or storylines within a particular policy discourse becomes an important form
of agency. The rhetorical framing of a particular policy problem to some extent already
limits the range of possible solutions which are allowed into the debate. In common
usage, Gertrud Stein’s famous phrase from Sacred Emily, “A rose is a rose is a rose” is
typically intended to mean that, when all is said and done, a thing is what it is.
Poststructuralists take issue with this even in the case of tangible objects such as flowers.
Yet even without having to take social constructivist viewpoints to their linguistic limits,
it seems clear from my study that such “object objectification” is particularly
unacceptable when it comes to selecting and defining abstract terms such as “cohesion”