Arne Kaijser, KTH

2010-2013

This project aimed to describe and analyze how, why, and by whom transnational infrastructures have been brought about in Europe; how infrastructures and their uses (the flows through them) have transformed commerce, warfare and migration patterns; and how the building of infrastructural networks intertwined with a spatial restructuring of Europe affecting not only landscapes but also "waterscapes" and "airscapes". Our ambition was to present a novel, alternative and partly provocative perspective on transnational and European history.

In the course of our work on the project we decided to omit the study of European migration patterns. Apart from that, the project's purpose has remained the same as in the original application.

The three most important results are the following:

1. Europe's "infrastructure transition" during the past two centuries has by no means been a linear process with a clearly defined or predetermined direction. The increased access of Europe's inhabitants to new means of transport, communications and energy supply has often been counteracted by efforts to restrict and control flows of ideas, people and goods. There has thus been a tug-of-war between system-builders trying to develop transnational infrastructure (for economic, military and other purposes) and "border-builders". The latter were less visible in the 19th century, but their efforts gained momentum during World War I and lingered on as a dominant force in Europe's infrastructural history throughout the Interwar period. After World War II "Iron-Curtain builders" radically expanded this experience to a completely new scale. Currently the EU is a major border-building actor in terms of the attempts to restrict flows across the union's external border. Another point that similarly points to the ambiguity of infrastructural "progress" is that systems have not only been used for peaceful purposes, but that they have been crucial for transforming and "improving" warfare as well, particularly with regard to what we label the "logistics of war".

2. "Europe" looks different, in geographical terms, from the perspective of different infrastructures, and its external borders and internal structure has changed a lot over time. Infrastructural Europe did not necessarily coincide with political or cultural perceptions of Europe, and in particular it rarely coincided with the region covered by the EU and its predecessors. In the field of energy, for example, Europe was generally a wide geographical category that did not halt at the Urals or the Mediterranean. But its outreach was not unlimited: in the case of the natural gas system, it included northwestern Siberia and North Africa, but not to any notable extent the Americas, sub-Saharan Africa, India or the Far East. It included Iran, which supplied the Soviet Union with natural gas, but not the rest of the Middle East. 'Oil Europe', for its part, was nearly global from the outset, stretching from the United States and Azerbaijan to the Dutch East Indies. But in the course of the 20th century, it shrank. The Middle East, North Africa, the Soviet Union and the North Sea emerged as integral components of the European oil geography, whereas Trans-Atlantic and Far-East links became virtually irrelevant in terms of material flows of fuel. 'Electrical Europe' made halt at the Urals until 1978, after which it transcended this traditional geographical boundary. North Africa was subsequently incorporated, but not the Middle East, sub-Saharan Africa or India. The most globalized dimension of Energy Europe was found in nuclear fuel supply, the only field where faraway Australia was of any importance.

3. The interaction between Europe's infrastructure transition and the transformation of Europe's natural world has been formidable. European system-building processes have had a major impact on Europe's landscapes, waterscapes and airscapes, to the extent that there is hardly any part of Europe's nature that has remained unaffected. Europe's rivers, for example, have with few exceptions been radically transformed in accordance with the visions of system-builders who have sought to make them as similar as possible to artificially constructed canals. Even the seas have been radically "improved" - from the point of view of transport, communication and energy - through massive dredging, drilling and dynamiting and the use of the sea bottom for pipelines, electric transmission lines, telegraph and Internet cables, etc. The transformation of the sky above Europe is not as visible, but the development of aviation and wireless communication has implied new kinds of flows enabled by terrestrial infrastructures like airports and radio masts. Moreover the use of the sky as a sink for pollution has led to a gradual chemical transformation of the European sky, and new forms of international governance have been developed to handle it. Infrastructural activities have provided strong impetus to gain more knowledge of the European lands, waters and skies, and this has contributed decisively to the development of natural sciences such as geology, hydrography, meteorology, etc.

The project has generated several new research questions. For example, while the time period to be covered by the project was defined at the outset to 1850-2000, our research pointed to legacies from the 18th century that in some cases were so strong that it appeared doubtful whether the period from 1850, in the infrastructural realm, can really be regarded as a "long durée" in the Braudelian sense, as we suggested in the project application. Moreover, in our research we have found many different examples of new forms of cooperation and institutional frameworks for studying and counteracting changes of European waterscapes and airscapes that are worthy further research efforts.

By far the most important publication generated by this project is the co-authored volume "Europe's infrastructure transition: economy, war, nature" (by Per Högselius, Arne Kaijser and Erik van der Vleuten), the complete manuscript of which will be submitted for external review in spring 2013 and published in early 2014 by Palgrave Macmillan. The book has the following structure:

Chapter 1: Introduction. Europe on the eve of the network revolution

Part I: CREATING NETWORKS

Chapter 2: Manipulating space and time (on the construction of transport and communication networks)

Chapter 3: Fuelling Europe (on the construction of Europe's energy systems)

Part II: FLOWS OF CHANGE

Chapter 4: Networked Food Economy (as the book's main case study of the interaction between infrastructures and the European economy)

Chapter 5: Factory and Finance (offering two additional cases of economy and infrastructures, from the perspectives of the chemical and finance industries)

Chapter 6: The Logistics of War (on military uses of infrastructures)

Part III: EUROPEAN SPACES

Chapter 7: Troubled Waters (on infrastructures in relation to European waterscapes)

Chapter 8: Common Skies (on infrastructures and airscapes)

Chapter 9: Faces of the Earth (on infrastructures and landscapes)

Two other publications generated within the scope of the project is Erik van der Vleuten's and Per Högselius's book chapter "Resisting Change? The transnational dynamics of European energy regimes", in Verbong, G. & Loorbach, D. (eds.), Governing the Energy Transition: Reality, illusion or necessity? (London: Routledge, 2012) and Arne Kaijser's book chapter "Under a Common Acid Sky: Negotiating Transboundary Air Pollution in Europe", in Disco, N. & Kranakis, E. (eds.), Cosmopolitan Commons: Sharing Resources and Risks across Borders (forthcoming on MIT Press in July 2013). The first of these is a study that deepens analysis of Europe's energy systems in historical perspective while bringing it in touch with the field of transition studies. The second was generated in the course of our work on Part III of the book, putting our analysis of European airscapes in relation to other studies of transnational or "cosmopolitan" commons.

These publications have been produced within the scope of wider European collaborative activities, notably the Making Europe Book Series project mentioned above, and the institutional frameworks for their publication have not enabled us to present them as open-access works.

Apart from publications, the project has involved a number of presentations at national and international conferences and research environments, which are specified in detail in a separate document.

The project has been communicated extensively through various websites, the most important of which is Making Europe. The project has also been communicated through a "Virtual Exhibit", which may be regarded as a path-breaking experiment of bringing about close web-based interaction between academic research in the history of technology and activities at a number of leading European museums in the same field.

Publications

Högselius, P., Kaijser, A. and Van der Vleuten, E., Europe’s Infrastructure Transition: Economy, War, Nature (forthcoming at Palgrave Macmillan in early 2014)

Van der Vleuten, E. & Högselius, P., “Resisting Change? The transnational dynamics of European energy regimes”, in Verbong, G. & Loorbach, D. (eds.), Governing the Energy Transition: Reality, illusion or necessity? (London: Routledge, 2012), pp. 75-100.

Kaijser, A., “The Trail from Trail: New Challenges for Historians of Technology”, Technology and Culture, 52 (2011), 1, pp. 131-142.

Kaijser, A., “Under a Common Acid Sky: Negotiating Transboundary Air Pollution in Europe”, in Disco, N. & Kranakis, E. (eds.), Cosmopolitan Commons: Sharing Resources and Risks across Borders (forthcoming at MIT Press in 2013)

Popular science articles:

Högselius, Per, ”Tillbaka till framtiden: de fossila bränslenas uppgång och fall”, KTH&Co, 4, 2011.

Högselius, Per, ”Havet – från hem till utsikt och badbalja”, Svenska Dagbladet, 16 juni 2011.

Contributions to conferences and workshops:

Högselius, P., Kaijser, A. and Van der Vleuten, E. (2012), “Europe’s Infrastructure Transition: Economy, War, Nature”, presentation at the 5th Tensions of Europe Conference, Copenhagen, 3-4 October 2012 (invited presentation).

Kaijser, A. (2012), “Under Acid Skies: Negotiating Transboundary Air Pollution in Europe”, presentation at Nordic STS-meeting at KTH, 2-4 May, 2012.

Kaijser, A. (2011), “European infrastructures”, Annual meeting of the Dutch Foundation for History of Technology (SHT), Eindhoven, 13 October 2011 (invited plenary speaker)

Kaijser, A. (2011), “Politics of Pollution in Cold War Europe”, presented at the biannual conference of the European Society for Environmental History, Turku, 28 June-2 July 2011.

Högselius, P. (2011), “The Making of Europe’s Critical Energy Infrastructures”, StandUp Academy, Sigtuna, 30 May (invited plenary lecture).

Högselius, P., Kaijser, A. and Van der Vleuten, E. (2011), “From Nature to Networks: The Infrastructural Transformation of Europe, 1850-2000”, presentation at the Making Europe workshop, Wassenaar, 11-13 May 2011.

Kaijser, A. (2010), “Transnational Infrastructures”, invited lecturer in a lecture series on “Infrastructure and Power” at Darmstadt University, November 30, 2010

Högselius, P., Kaijser, A. and Van der Vleuten, E. (2010), “From Nature to Networks: The Infrastructural Transformation of Europe, 1850-2000“, presentation at the STS seminar, Maastricht University, 19 November.