ABSTRACT
But let us get back to Europe’s great engineering projects and the political significance of this initial programme of European infrastructural development. The whole point of all this development – the building of bridges and roadways, the digging of tunnels, the laying of railways and highways on expropriated land – is to make the territory more dynamic, in order to increase the transit speed of people and goods. That great ‘static vehicle’ constituted by the road and railway networks promotes the acceleration of the small ‘dynamic vehicles’ that use them, allowing whole convoys to glide smoothly; and, pretty soon, resistance to the forward motion of mobile vehicles, shown, from time immemorial, by a nation’s geographical depth, will disappear. But so will all topographical asperities, those hills and steep valleys that were the pride, the splendour, of the regions traversed, being ironed out. And the (sole) winner will be the outrageously outsized metropolitan agglomeration capable of absorbing, on its own, most of the power of the nations of Europe, along with a whole country’s productive output.
