Europe's System Builders: The Contested Shaping of Transnational Road, Electricity and Rail Networks

This article explores what kind of ‘europe’ was produced in the processes of transnational infrastructure building. It focuses on international organisations dedicated to europe's infrastructural integration as a promising research site, where infrastructural collaborations (or the lack thereof) were articulated and negotiated. Case studies of the bureau international des autoroutes (1931), the union for the coordination of production and transport of electricity (1951) and the european conference of transport ministers (1953) explore the challenges of transnational system building. They also suggest that europe's infrastructural interlacing was a contested process, producing, if successful, multilayered networks in which corporate, national and meso-regional borders remain clearly discernable.