Europe’s Infrastructure Transition

My new book, co-authored with my colleagues Arne Kaijser at KTH and Erik van der Vleuten in Eindhoven, has finally been published: Europe’s Infrastructure Transition: Economy, War, Nature. It’s definitely the heaviest book I’ve ever written – weighing more than a kilo! – and I do hope it’s also one of the best, although that will be up to readers to judge!

In any case we’re certainly proud of the book, and it is published at an interesting moment in European history. As transnational relations in Europe are reshaped in response to the refugee crisis, worsening EU-Russia relations, tensions between northern and southern Europe, and so on, our book adds historical context and depth to the current debate about the future of Europe and its relations with the rest of the world, discussing in historical perspective a variety of cross-border issues relating to transport, communications, and energy.

One of our main conclusions is that cross-border infrastructure systems in Europe – which are crucial now in everything from EU imports of Russian natural gas to migrants’ possibilities to move from south to north – are shaped historically both by “system builders” and by “border builders“. At the moment, obviously, of these two actor categories the border builders seem to be the most powerful.

The book is published as part of a six-volume series, Making Europe, in which the overall argument is that technology – in our case represented by transport, communications, and energy systems – is a vital object of study for anyone trying to grasp Europe’s modern history. Most books about the history of Europe fail to take technology and, more generally, material aspects of life, into account when setting out to narrate the fate of our part of the world. New ways of talking about European history are direly needed!

Read the introductory chapter in Europe’s Infrastructure Transition here!