Building Europe on transnational infrastructures

Eindhoven University of Technology, Netherlands Abstract: The Treaty of Rome signed in 1957 considered the development of a Common Transport Policy (CTP) pivotal to the European integration process. Treaty articles 74-84 targeted the road sector, along with railways and inland waterways, as a core competence of the newly established European Economic Community. The CTP did not get off the ground, however. Instead it languished in obscurity for much of the first forty years of European integration. In 1985 this neglect even led to a ruling of the European Court of Justice, the so-called inactivity verdict. Several histories of the transport policy of the European Union (EU) and its predecessors have lamented the obvious lack of action. To explain the years of impasse they pointed to a strong divergence of interest among the signatories. They argued that 'the Six' (the Benelux countries Belgium, Luxembourg and the Netherlands, as well as France, Germany and Italy) advanced their own strongly divergent national transport policies, and were sceptical of a liberal regime, except for the Dutch, because this would support their highly export-oriented transport sector. This argumentation fits into the analysis by historians of European integration such as Alan Milward, who have argued that the nation states have consistently controlled the integration process, and evidenced that the anticipated expansive and irresistible integration logic, as suggested by neofunctionalist theory and promoters of the European integration process, never happened. Transport is particularly interesting for this debate because, in the processes leading to the treaty, it was seen as one of the sectors that would integrate first. As this did not happen, the transport case seems to validate the conclusion that Europe is first and foremost a Europe of nation states