Welcome to "The evolution of infra-systems: a historical perspective",
my name is Johan Schot, professor in History of Technology and Sustainability
Transitions from University of Sussex Science, Technology and Policy Research Unit, in short SPRU.
This lecture will deal with the question how infrastructures we know today came into being
and how this is still shaping our future.
I will address this very broad question from one specific angle,
which is the problem of interoperability across borders.
This is the ability of specific infrastructures to connect up to other infrastructures in
other countries.
Such interoperability is key to a successful development of infrastructural systems,
since they can only function when they are a network,
not only on a national level but also beyond, on a European and a global level.
Let me introduce the importance of this issue through an example:
the so called Berne key.
What is the Berne key? It is visible on the picture.
It is a key designed for the first time in 1886 and used to open wagons when they crossed borders.
Why was this such an important innovation and pivotal for the development of the rail
system in Europe?
Since this key made it possible to travel across the Europe without needing to transfer
freight from one kind of wagon to another at the borders of different national railway systems.
Before this invention, there were several different keys,
standardization was lacking.
It took many years of international negotiations to come up with design.
Why did it take so long?
Because companies and nation-states could not decide on which key should become the main key.
They all promoted their own solutions.
The design visible on the picture is typically European compromise:
it combines a French and German key into one.
Therefore it consists of two parts that need to be put together.
But we have to recall and understand that interoperability is never easy and will always
be based on compromises.
The Berne Key is a symbol for many other similar inventions.
Think about it! In the nineteenth century many hundreds of smaller railway networks
in Europe that all had started as local lines and networks run by private companies had
to connect up?
How could they connect up?
After all, in a period in which nation states were struggling with each other,
as is visible in this picture,
they were all using different gauges, trains, wagons, platform technologies,
signaling systems etc.
All these technologies had to become interoperable.
This process was further complicated by two facts.
First companies were competing and second, nation-states were competing,
they all had their national champions.
Hence standardization was shot through with tensions, as this comic map shows.
How was then interoperability achieved?
How was it made possible that in 1900 passengers and freight could move all over Europe in large numbers,
in a situation of deep political conflict between nation states, as made visible in the cartoon.
The answer is that the negotiation about standards was delegated to a community of experts,
who were working behind closed doors, on the national as well as the international level.
They became the mediators of the tensions between companies and states about standards.
How did they achieve this aim?
Through the development of a specific philosophy on how to negotiate interoperability and develop standards.
I would like to refer to as technocratic internationalism.
What is technocratic internationalism? Let me introduce it.
It is a background ideology, which has shaped the historical development
of infrastructures during the twentieth century.
It rests on three elements.
First, it assumes that nation-states are a natural unit for infrastructure development,
International, European and Global network development is not in conflict with network development.
On the contrary European and Global networks should be built out of national networks.
Second, infrastructure building across borders can help to avoid conflicts between nation-states
since they connect people and this will create mutual understanding,
cooperation and peace.
Infrastructures are public utilities to serve the people.
Third, infrastructures should be developed by experts, not by politicians.
The political and technical should be treated as completely separate spheres,
and as much power as possible should be delegated to experts, not to the politicians.
This will automatically lead to the best results.
Supposedly ideological neutral engineers will find and implement optimal solutions both
on the national and international level and be able to harmonize national
and international developments, because they work on both levels.
In short, infrastructures should be left to experts.
They should decide how the train will go from Amsterdam to Paris and where it should stop.
Needless to say that experts were far from neutral.
On the contrary they often stood behind specific political and nationalistic aims.
Yet, it is true that technification of problems might create a basis for negotiation and conflict resolution
and it did in the twentieth century.
The model of delegation of negotiation to experts had two path-dependent
impacts on the governance of the infrastructure industry.
I want to highlight two impacts:
First, infrastructure became an expert driven business and a national industry, with high ideals embodied in it.
Infrastructures became public utilities.
The experts wanted their systems to serve the people but without any explicit involvement
of the public; they wanted to make the decisions for the public.
Second, it became an industry dominated by national systems which were connected internationally.
Experts controlled both the national and international level,
and this made it possible for them to create interoperability.
They among themselves agreed on voluntary standards, which they could implement then nationally.
When the European Economic Community was set up during the 1950s it wanted to develop a
new European infrastructure policy in which nation-states would transfer their power over
national infrastructure development to the Community and the EU would create
one big liberalized market, also for communication,
transport and energy services.
On the picture we see the celebration of the opening of the common market for coal and steel,
symbolized by a train and 6 national flags.
The EEC promoters also embraced the working methods of technocratic internationalism,
in particular delegation to experts, but they wanted these experts to serve a new political project:
the integration of a new liberalized Europe.
This did not happen because experts in the industry did not want to work
with the European Economic Community.
Why not?
After all, also the Community preferred an expert driven model,
yet one in which experts would have to celebrate European Union ideals and not national ones.
They therefore perceived it as a political project and a technical suboptimal one.
Because the Community only consisted of six nation-states:
Italy, Germany, France, Luxembourg, Netherlands and Belgium.
see the 6 flags on the picture.
How could this be a rational basis for expert driven decision-making about infrastructure development?
Why should only experts of these countries be involved and not others?
In addition they did not believe in liberalism, but in national public service and national
monopolies for energy, transport and communication provision.
And they thought 'we do not need a new actor such as the European Economic Community',
which later became the European Union.
They had an alternative.
They could build European networks themselves, through their own expert-led organizations.
They perceived the new Community as a direct competitor.
In the 1980s the EU had gained a lot of power.
It was enlarged and it had become clear that the enormous internal growth of trade,
was made possible by the infrastructures provided by the experts
But also that the infrastructure development could not handle anymore all the problems.
If you look at the picture, at the UK, we can see, since they entered the EU in 1973,
there was a enormous growth of trade, so the UK redirected the trade from the world to European trade
and as a consequence, the system got jammed.
New solutions were necessary.
This paved the way for a new initiative called 'the Trans-European Network Initiative'.
Let's now look at the video.
In the 1980s the European integration process got traction again,
now under the banner of the completion of the internal market.
The idea was, among other things, we have to reduce all barriers
connected to lack of operability of infrastructure networks, and construct new missing links,
as is visible on the map here.
This time infrastructure experts aligned themselves with the EU,
The EU delegated the choice of new projects to experts,
without much involvement of stakeholders and in particular the broader public.
In this sense the EU followed the technocratic internationalist work methods.
Experts however, had their doubts about the EU political project of integration,
in particular its liberal face.
The projects they propose were in principle national projects,
which they relabelled as European, and they resisted full liberalization of European
infrastructure markets.
The future of the Trans-European Network Initiatives is still open.
Because old dilemmas are haunting its further development.
I want to highlight two:
1. Nation states want to keep control of their infrastructures.
and experts often act on behalf of the nation state.
Yet it is also clear that globalization is demanding governance of infrastructure to
move to a European and perhaps even a global level.
2. Technocratic internationalism sits uncomfortable with the clear wish for stronger public participation
and control over infrastructure development.
The dilemma is how to combine technocracy and democracy.
Many European citizens do not want experts to design new infrastructures without any
direct public involvement.
Yet it is unclear how to organize this involvement, and combine it with the necessary expert knowledge.
Thank you for your attention.