ABSTRACT
In its 1994 publication on the Trans-European Networks, the European Commission ingeniously concluded that ‘transport is many things to all people’. If not particularly eloquent, this statement still poignantly reminds us of the deeply conflictual nature of all transport-sector decision making. Given that transport infrastructure investments tend to be both large scale and long term, the stakes for planning and policy making in this sector are unusually high. Investments into different transport options are always also investments into different spatial development futures. To date, however, transport largely remains ‘an unusually fertile, though often overlooked, subject in the firmament of European studies’ (Ross, 1998, p. vii)
This article undertakes a discourse-centred investigation of the underlying rationales of EU transport-sector investments over the last decade. I focus on identifying the specific discursive practices by means of which the European Commission advances its eco-modernist transport investment rationales.2 My central contribution in this article is what I term the ‘conflicting storylines’ proposition: I propose that EU decision making for pan-European transport investments lacks consistence and sustainability due to the existence of several, partially complementary,
but also partially competing EU development objectives, which are in turn expressed through several, partially conflicting storylines.
