Energy

Even before the First World War, the electricity supply was a key element in European networking and can be seen as ushering in the concept of European integration, as Vincent Lagendijk acknowledges by entitling his second chapter ‘Opening the doors to a revolution’. The idea really took off in the 1920s, when various suggestions were bandied about and the idea of a Europe-wide electricity supply policy crystallised, with the implementation of the first definite energy-exchange policies.

Robert Millward begins by stressing that the concept and organisation of European energy supplies varied greatly – and still does. Around the turn of the twentieth century the supply of energy in the Scandinavian countries, Britain and Germany was the responsibility of local government,Footnote ⁶ although in a mixed economy, whereas the energy markets in France, Spain and Italy were dominated by private enterprise. In the inter-war period efforts were made in (e.g.) Britain, France and Italy to nationalise energy supplies, while private providers remained in a very strong position in France, Belgium, Italy and Spain, and a little less so in Germany and Scandinavia. A number of regional networks developed, but by 1939 only Britain had a national electricity grid (Millward, pp. 33–58, 76–87, 111–45). Millward, whose study ranges in time from 1830 to 1990, points out that, despite some countries’ attempts at nationalisation (as noted above), Europe's energy supplies, including coal, gas and nuclear power, were developed overwhelmingly by private enterprise. At the end of the twentieth century even those countries that had nationalised their supplies were swept by a wave of privatisation and deregulation in the name of efficiency and productivity. This did not always work as intended, as Millward shows by comparing (state-controlled) British and (private) US energy providers: the former were more productive between 1950 and 1973, the latter between 1973 and 1995 (Millward, p. 276). Millward's book is a good overview of the development of public and private infrastructure and state intervention in Europe, but he does not go deeply into matters of European integration and co-operation.

Lagendijk provides this focus. He sees electricity, particularly the high-tension networks in the border regions between Germany, Switzerland, France and Italy, as a key element in European energy co-operation, involving not only energy supply companies but also the mainly Swiss, Belgian and German banks that advanced the cause of co-operation by providing finance (Lagendijk, pp. 40–50). In the 1920s the practical outcome of this networking gave birth to the idea of a Europe-wide electricity grid: 1925 saw the foundation of the Union Internationale des Producteurs et Distributeurs d’Énergie Électrique (UNIPEDE), and 1930 that of the Commission for Enquiry on European Union (CEEU). In 1932 a still more ambitious plan for an integrated European engineering and energy project was advanced by the German engineer Hermann Sörgel. But his Atlantropa projectFootnote ⁷ remained as utopian as other pan-European projects, not least owing to the Nazi takeover of power in Germany and the ensuing disintegration of Europe (Lagendijk, pp. 69–106; Gall, in van der Vleuten and Kaijser, pp. 99–128). The Nazis had their own plans for a tightly controlled energy supply, centred on Germany but covering the entire ‘greater European economic area’ (Maier, in van der Vleuten and Kaijser, pp. 129–58).

In the years immediately following the Second World War, approaches to Europe's energy supply, particularly electricity, reflected primarily the interests of the United States and its plans for European reconstruction. There was a special programme for electricity, involving the Economic Co-operation Administration (ECA), the Organisation for European Economic Co-operation, and the Office of the US Special Representative in Europe (OSR). The Americans saw the programme as a way to foster European co-operation, bolstered by the Technical Assistance Program (TECAID). In 1951 came the Union pour la Coordination de la Production et du Transport de l'Electricité (UCPTE), dedicated to improving co-ordination and co-operation in the European energy supply. This worked very well in some regions, such as Scandinavia (Norway, Denmark and Sweden); co-operation between Austria, Italy and Yugoslavia even continued into the Cold War and across the Iron Curtain. None of this amounted to a Europe-wide energy network, however, and nor was the process advanced by new European organisations such as the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC, which naturally dealt with coal), the European Economic Community (EEC, which dealt with electricity and gas), and Euratom (atomic power). Energy networks in the European Economic Community remained mostly regional; further synchronisation had to await the cataclysmic political changes of the late 1980s and the founding of the European Grouping of the Electricity Supply Industry (EURELECTRIC) (Lagendijk, pp. 204–10).

Transport

The title of the collection edited by Roth and Schlögel – ‘New roads to a New Europe’ – is programmatic, and indicates that infrastructure and road networks have always been considered fundamental to European integration. The editors point out that industrialisation called for a European rail network, which in turn implied a ‘European history beyond nation-states’ (Roth and Schlögel, p. 14). The contributions begin with a concise overview of the history of transport and mobility in Europe by Hans-Liudger Dienel and Colin Divall (pp. 65–84). Starting from the observation that European frontiers were largely open between 1870 and 1914, Dienel discusses the ‘possibilities opened to the middle classes’ by the railways, particularly with regard to tourism and economic exchange, alongside technological standardisationFootnote ⁸ and the founding of numerous international organisations which prefigured European integration even before the First World War (Dienel, in Roth and Schlögel, pp. 106–23).

The bulk of the volume is devoted to ‘continuity versus change’ and ‘integration versus disintegration’ – an approach rather different from those of the other works considered in this review. Various indications emerge that the long-term process of European integration, including ‘hidden integration’, was discontinuous, with frequent setbacks, particularly in wartime and during the Cold War. The general demand for transport (including troop movements) naturally increased during the First World War, but as the war went on the railway network was both damaged and overstrained; what Christopher Kopper calls the ‘railway war’ was clearly conducive to disintegration (Kopper in Roth and Schlögel, pp. 222–34). The same tendencies are perceptible in the Second World War: while the German railway system was extended to the occupied zones of France and Belgium, elsewhere the war brought destruction and disintegration, as a result of direct war damage and also owing to the part the German railways played in transporting deportees from all over Europe to the extermination camps. Gottwald examines the ‘logistics of the Holocaust’ and the ‘vehicles of deportation’ (Gottwald, in Roth and Schlögel, pp. 261, 266; see also Polino in Roth and Schlögel, pp. 281–300). Further disintegration is observable after the war, with the division of Europe and consequent interruption of formerly coherent transport networks, such as the Oder waterways which Germany lost to Poland, the decline of Hamburg as a port after the loss of the Elbe hinterland, and the barring of roads across the internal frontier between the two Germanies and of certain routes in other parts of Europe (Trischler, in Roth and Schlögel, pp. 156–74).

From the 1950s onwards these disintegrative tendencies were offset by reconstruction in both Western and Eastern Europe, and by the construction of new transport networks as a necessary precondition for European integration. To begin with, transport integration advanced better in the Comecon countries than in the West, particularly air traffic under the domination of the USSR (Trischler, in Roth and Schlögel, p. 161). Western Europe concentrated on road and rail traffic, which expanded rapidly in the 1950s and 1960s, with co-operation on a number of railway projects and the construction of transalpine road links between the Federal Republic of Germany, Switzerland, Austria and Italy (the Brenner Pass, the St Gotthard tunnel), and the furtherance of a common transport policy through conferences (European Conference of Ministers of Transport), committees and contracts (Contract for the International Carriage of Goods by Road, CMR; see Vahrenkamp in Roth and Schlögel, pp. 452–75). The focus was not always on integration and networking, as Judith Schueler shows with her examination of the way in which symbolic meanings and the self-definition of Swiss identity and Swiss national consciousness are reflected in the construction of the St Gotthard Tunnel, as displayed in the Swiss Museum of Transport and Communication for Transport – not forgetting that German engineers and Italian workers contributed to the success of the project (Schueler, in van der Vleuten and Kaijser, pp. 71–96).

Per Blomquist discusses organisational and institutional aspects of European integration through road construction aimed at ensuring universal availability of motorised transport. Taking Sweden as an example, Blomquist stresses the importance of the UN Economic Commission for Europe (UNECE), founded in 1950, the Declaration on the Construction of Main European International Traffic Arteries, and the construction of ‘E-roads’ as part of a trans-Europe long-distance road network, which also owed something to the US-dominated International Road Federation (IRF) and to the oil, plastics and automobile industry in collaboration with the administrator of the Marshall Plan (Blomquist, in van der Vleuten and Kaijser, pp. 161–86). Corporate and economic interests were also involved in the carriage of goods and the influence of the tourist industry, which equally stood to benefit from the construction of a road, rail and air transport infrastructure (see the contributions by Ruppmann, Vidal and Spode, in Roth and Schlögel).

Frank Schipper's book also examines organisational and institutional aspects of road traffic and their significance for European integration. After the foundation of the European Coal and Steel Community in 1952, the initiative of promoting European integration passed to the transport sector. Schipper shows that initiative was not the monopoly of the EEC and its subordinate organisations: many other players were involved, some before the foundation of the EEC itself. Schipper's study covers the period from the end of the nineteenth century to the 1960s. He mentions the automobile clubs that were founded in the late nineteenth century to represent the interests of motorists, and the vision of a certain Albert Thomas, who foresaw in the 1930s that European integration would depend on the development of European infrastructures. Post-1945 the integration of transport systems was pursued mainly by the Economic Commission for Europe (ECE), the Organisation for European Economic Co-operation (OEEC, the predecessor of the OECD) and its transport organisations, the European Central Inland Transport Organisation (ECITO), the International Road Federation (IRF), and the European Conference of Ministers of Transport (Schipper, pp. 45–82, 83–120, 159–86). Schipper also looks in detail at E-roads, which he identifies as ‘the main international traffic arteries of the continent’ (Schipper, p. 255) – but without Blomquist's critical undertone (Blomquist, in van der Vleuten and Kaijser).

The essays in Road History, edited by Gijs Mom and Laurent Tissot, are largely devoted to ‘large technical systems’, with only occasional references to European network-building and integration (Mom, in Mom and Tissaut, pp. 33–62). The authors concentrate on particular aspects of road-building and road transport in various European countries and the United States. For example, Richard Vahrenkamp and Bernd Kreuzer both link state-building with the construction of the autobahns in 1930s Germany and Austria. The essays in this volume are particularly enlightening when they adopt a comparative perspective, as does Massimo Moraglio's contribution, which shows that despite the political similarities between German National Socialism and Italian fascism and the fact that both states saw road building as an expression of nationalistic vision and a vehicle for modernist propaganda, Italian road construction was much more heavily dominated by private enterprise and scorned such aspects as landscaping, while the Nazis took them into account as part of a co-ordinated road construction plan (Moraglio, in Mom and Tissaut, pp. 117–32). Ueli Haefeli uses Germany and Switzerland as a basis for comparing attitudes to urban transport in the 1950s. The two countries took a broadly similar approach, but whereas war damage to German inner cities permitted a high degree of top-down decision-making with regard to reconstruction and transport, the Swiss political system was more conducive to the exercise of direct democracy (Haefeli, in Mom and Tissaut, pp. 163–86).

Robert Millward highlights once again the importance of state initiatives in the construction of a European transport infrastructure. He is not primarily interested in European integration, but his book is a useful complement to those already discussed, owing to its stress on the importance of regulatory policies. Before the Second World War the development of railways, roads and air transport was almost entirely state-controlled, and the situation was slow to change after 1945. Air transport, for example, remained a virtual government monopoly up to the 1980s as tourism and air freight both grew steadily in importance. During the Cold War this state control was motivated chiefly by a desire to safeguard vital resources; it was not until the end of that period that air transport and other key infrastructures (such as energy) could be privatised and deregulated – although many other factors were also in play (Millward, pp. 231–43, 287–99).

The end of the Cold War, and the seismic change in world politics in 1989, marked a turning point in the history of infrastructure and transport concepts as they affected European integration. Karl Schlögel calls it a ‘spatial revolution’ (in Roth and Schlögel, p. 29), pointing to the eastward extension of Europe in terms of transport and infrastructure – a subject that receives due attention not only from some authors in the Roth and Schlögel collection, but also in the volume edited by van der Vleuten and Kaijser. Post-1989 a considerable number of major infrastructure projects were developed in connection with ‘Trans-European Networks’ (TENs), particularly the fourteen ‘priority projects’ to improve transport links between Nuremberg and the Brenner Pass, Paris and London, and Lyon and Trieste. Other transport projects were the Oslo–Turku–Helsinki link, the Channel Tunnel, the Öresund bridge over the Great Belt and the new Swiss Alpine tunnel project. All were very capital-intensive, and several ran into financial problems (Kaschuba and Merger, in Roth and Schlögel, pp. 175–94; 417–30).

A key element of infrastructure that has hitherto received little attention is container and pipeline systems. Here, Michael Hascher talks in terms of a ‘low-tech revolution’ as he examines Germany's use of pipelines from 1957 and of containers for bulk carriage of goods from 1966 – both of considerable significance. Here again it was possible to draw on NATO's expertise in the construction of transport links for military supplies, which was based on experience during the Second World War. The most important achievement in this field, however, was the ‘North-West Oil Pipeline’ jointly developed in the 1950s by the German oil and chemical industries. The Federal German Transport Ministry devoted considerable attention to the regulation of pipelines, which meant government intervention in the construction of yet another kind of transport infrastructure, with particular emphasis on safety. Some pipelines, of course, crossed frontiers, from Rotterdam to Ludwigshafen and from central Europe to Marseille and Trieste; some even crossed countries in Eastern Europe. The use of containers not only increased the flexibility of transport by road, rail and sea, but also promoted rationalisation – and European integration (Hascher, in Roth and Schlögel, pp. 431–51).

Frank Schipper briefly considers the use of pallets as an aspect of European technical transport co-ordination, and the importance of the International Organisation for Standardisation (ISO) for the development of container traffic (Schipper, p. 251). Here he touches on a hitherto little-studied aspect of transport infrastructure which is currently being examined by Monika Dommann. Again there are precedents, both civil and military, reaching back to the 1920s United States. The use of pallets was stimulated by the demands of military logistics and was then extended throughout Western Europe through the OEEC, spread to Eastern Europe in 1964, and has since become a feature of bulk transport worldwide.Footnote ⁹

Telegraph and telecommunications

In the field of telegraph and telecommunications it is clear that European networking was encouraged not only by industrialisation but also by state-building and colonialism; some organisational structures and property rights, dating back to the mid-nineteenth century, were not seriously called in question until the 1980s.

The telegraph, like the railways, was of great importance to the development of the nation-state in nineteenth-century Europe. The first electric telegraph was set up in Britain in the 1840s, after which the number of telegraph stations grew rapidly, serving both civil and military purposes. State support was a key factor, particularly in new nation-states such as Belgium, Germany and Italy, where it was important to link formerly separate regions by both telegraph and rail. In most countries the telegraph was developed alongside the postal service, partly with a view to delivering lower prices; economic efficiency was a secondary consideration (Millward, p. 62). Alongside these political and national priorities, many European states were also interested in what the new technologies could do for their colonial empires. This led to the construction of international telegraph networks, as examined by Anna Paula Silva and Maria Paula Diogo with regard to Portugal and Britain. In the 1860s, Britain, as one of Portugal's leading allies, assumed responsibility for building a telegraph network to link Portugal with its colonies in the Cape Verde islands and the Azores: the ‘Atlantic Strategic Triangle’. This major project was not only a triumph of technology but also a significant political and economic step, the model for similar projects by such leading European powers as France, Italy and Germany; by the end of the century this culminated in a ‘cable boom’ and a ‘global telegraph competition’, in which a number of companies strove to obtain lucrative contracts. The end result was a European-inspired global network resting on a complicated tangle of economic and political interests (Silva and Diogo, in van der Vleuten and Kaijser, pp. 51–69).

Telecommunications networks did not really contribute to European integration until after the Second World War; such is the conclusion of Léonard Laborie's researches into this relationship, focusing on organisational and institutional aspects. He attaches particular importance to the European Conference of Postal and Telecommunications Administrations (CEPT, set up in 1959), whose purpose was ‘the establishment of closer relations between member administrations and the harmonizing and practical improvement of their administrative and technical services’ (Laborie, in van der Vleuten and Kaijeser, p. 189). There had been predecessors to the CEPT before the Second World War, such as the 1924 Consultative Committee for International Telephony (CCIF): another indication of the lengthy antecedents of European infrastructure networks whose development was pushed forward by post-1945 moves towards European integration. However, while it may be true, as Laborie argues, that ‘the CEPT remained the most important institution within which European telecommunications cooperation was negotiated’, national networks remained dominant, with the stress on co-operation rather than further integration (Laborie, in van der Vleuten and Kaijser, pp. 208 ff.).

This dominance of national interests is the result of government monopolies on telecommunications dating back to the late nineteenth century, which were extended to telephony in the wake of telegraphy. The prominence of state intervention in the development of the new technology was another significant factor. Millward shows that almost all countries imposed a state monopoly on such developments in the pioneering years from the end of the nineteenth century to the First World War, a monopoly that endured up to the 1980s. Millward attributes the late-twentieth-century wave of privatisation and deregulation, which arose in the United States and subsequently swept over first Britain and later other European countries, not primarily to politics or ideology but to technical and economic developments: from the 1980s onward computers, modems, fax and telex, all the offspring of private enterprise, successively undermined Western state monopolies and ended by hijacking even their core business, leaving them no alternative but to deregulate (Millward, pp. 103 ff., 244–56).