Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in

Myths of the European Network: Constructions of Cohesion in Infrastructure Maps

  • Chapter
Book cover Materializing Europe

Abstract

At the start of the 1970s, the energy committee of the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe (UNECE) set out to create an ‘International Map of Gas Transmission Networks in Europe’. As is common practice in assembling such maps, the committee asked every member nation to submit a map of its own gas network, conforming to certain specifications of representation and scale. Turkey duly supplied a map for the second edition that detailed its gas ‘network’: a single pipeline, 10 cm in diameter, stretching 130 km between three cities on the ‘European’ side of the Bosporus (see Figure 2.2). The accompanying letter acknowledged that this ‘network’ might not merit inclusion in such a lofty project, stating drily: ‘[i]t is up to you to decide whether to include it in the revision work being undertaken.’3

Here’s Europe wrinkled with new boundaries. But never you mind that … here Europe is.

Thomas Cook & Son, 19241

The concept of a European road network is an old one … … and it had complex infrastructure too.

European Roundtable of Industrialists, 19892

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

Log in via an institution
Chapter
USD 29.95
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
eBook
USD 39.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as EPUB and PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Softcover Book
USD 54.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Compact, lightweight edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info
Hardcover Book
USD 54.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Durable hardcover edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Institutional subscriptions

Preview

Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.

Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.

Notes

  1. Inscription over Europe in Thomas Cook & Son world map: ‘Mr Kennedy North’s entirely accurate map of the world …’ in Piers Brendon, Thomas Cook. 150 years of Popular Tourism (London: Secker & Warburg 1991), endpapers.

    Google Scholar 

  2. David Turnbull, Masons, Tricksters and Cartographers: Comparative Studies in the Sociology of Scientific and Indigenous Knowledge (London: Routledge 2000), p. 8.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  3. See further Michelde Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley: University of California Press 1984), p. 121.

    Google Scholar 

  4. Ole B. Jensen and Tim Richardson, Making European Space: Mobility, Power and Territorial Identity (London: Routledge 2004), pp. 41–50.

    Google Scholar 

  5. On the promise of spatial artefacts as historical instruments, see Karl Schlögel, Im Raume lesen wir die Zeit. Über Zivilisationsgeschichte und Geopolitik (Munich: Carl Hanser Verlag 2003).

    Google Scholar 

  6. Steven Graham and Simon Marvin, Splintering Urbanism: Networked Infrastructures, Technological Mobilities and the Urban Condition (London: Routledge 2001), p. 12, emphasis in original.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  7. See Erikvan der Vleuten, ‘In search of the networked nation. Transforming technology, society and nature in the Netherlands in the 20th century’, European Review of History, 10 (2003), pp. 59–78

    Article  Google Scholar 

  8. Charles S. Maier, ‘Transformations of Territoriality 1600–2000’ in Gunilla Budde, Sebastian Conrad and Oliver Janz, Transnationale Geschichte. Themen, Tendenzen und Theorien (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht 2006), pp. 32–55.

    Google Scholar 

  9. Andrew Barry, Political Machines: Governing a Technological Society (London: Athlone 2001), p. 25.

    Google Scholar 

  10. J. Peter Burgess, ‘Coal steel and spirit: the double reading of European unity (1948–1951)’ in Bo Strath (ed.) Europe and the Other and Europe as the Other (Brussels: Peter Lang 2000), p. 433, emphasis in original.

    Google Scholar 

  11. See also Cris Shore, Building Europe: The Cultural Politics of European Integration (London: Routledge 2000) pp. 113–14.

    Google Scholar 

  12. See Gerald Delanty, Inventing Europe: Idea, Identity, Reality (London 1995)

    Book  Google Scholar 

  13. Larry Wolff, Inventing Eastern Europe: The Map of Civilization on the Mind of the Enlightenment (Stanford: Stanford University Press 1994).

    Google Scholar 

  14. Bruno Latour, We have never been modern (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press 1993), p. 117.

    Google Scholar 

  15. See Per Olof Berg, Orvar Löfgren and Anders Linde-Laursen (eds), Invoking a Transnational Metropolis: The Making of the Øresund Region (Lund: Studentenlitteratur 2000)

    Google Scholar 

  16. Eve Darian-Smith, Bridging Divides. The Channel Tunnel and English Legal Identity in the New Europe (Berkeley: University of California Press 1999)

    Google Scholar 

  17. Judith Schueler, Materializing Identity: the co-construction of the Gotthard Railway and Swiss national identity (Eindhoven: Aksant 2008); Vincent Lagendijk and Alexander Badenoch, ‘Myths of Kaprun: Material visions of Europe and Austria’, paper presented to European Identity and the Second World War conference, Amsterdam, 10–11 December 2007.

    Google Scholar 

  18. For a succinct overview of these issues see Chris Rumford, ‘Rethinking European Spaces: Territory, Borders, Governance’, Comparative European Politics, 4(2/3) (2006), pp. 127–40.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  19. See Wolff, Inventing; Michael Wintle, ‘Renaissance maps and the construction of the idea of Europe’, Journal ofHistorical Geography 25(2) (1999), pp. 137–65.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  20. James R. Akerman, ‘Introduction’, in James R. Akerman (ed.) Cartographies of Travel and Navigation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 2006), pp. 1–15. A recent conference on ‘Cartography as a Historiographical Argument in the Writing of Overlapping National Histories in Europe’ highlights the growing interest in maps as historical tools, but also an ongoing neglect of network maps. See http://hsozkult.geschichte.hu-berlin.de/tagungsberichte/id=1923&count= 1905 &recno=20&sort=datum&order=down.

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  21. See John Gerard Ruggie, ‘Territoriality and Beyond: Problematizing Modernity in International Relations’, International Organization 47(1) (1993), pp. 139–74

    Article  Google Scholar 

  22. William Walters, ‘Rethinking Borders Beyond the State’, Comparative European Politics 4(2/3) (2006), pp. 141–59.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  23. J.B. Harley and David Woodward, History of Cartography. Volume I: Cartography in Prehistoric, Ancient, and Medieval Europe and the Mediterranean (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1987), p. 3

    Google Scholar 

  24. See also: J.B. Harley, ‘Deconstructing the map’ in Trevor Barnes and James G. Duncan (eds) Writing Worlds: Discourse, Text and Metaphor in the Representation of. Landscape (London: Routledge 1992), pp. 231–47

    Google Scholar 

  25. Jeremy Black, Maps and History: Constructing Images of the Past (New Haven: Yale University Press 2000)

    Google Scholar 

  26. Denis Wood, The Power of Maps (New York: Guilford Press 1992); Wintle, ‘Renaissance maps’.

    Google Scholar 

  27. Roland Barthes, Mythologies (New York: Hill and Wang 1972), pp. 111–16 and passim.

    Google Scholar 

  28. David Gugerli and Daniel Speich show how the initial publication of Dufour’s topographic map of Switzerland met with considerable resistance because it was interpreted as the assertion of a central authority that did not yet exist. Topographien der Nation: Politik, kartographische Ordnung und Landschaft im 19. Jahrhundert (Zürich: Chronos Verlag 2002). Similarly, a recent article in Der Spiegel highlights the threat of European gas dependency with an image of the control room of the Russian gas company Gazprom where they gaze on a map of European pipelines. Erich Follath and Matthias Schepp, ‘Der Konzern des Zaren’, Der Spiegel, 5 March 2007, p. 122. Not producing a map can also be a means of asserting control over space. Jensen and Richardson show how, in order to keep nation states from competing over which projects to put on the map, the EU reduced or eliminated their use during phases of the TENs projects (Jensen and Richardson, Making European Space, pp. 107–11).

    Google Scholar 

  29. Jeremy Black, Maps and Politics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 2000) p. 22

    Google Scholar 

  30. Vincent Del Casino Jr and Stephen P. Hanna, ‘Representations and identities in tourism map spaces’, Progress in Human Geography 24(1) (2000), pp. 23–46, here 28.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  31. Rob Shields, Places on the Margin: Alternative Geographies of Modernity (London: Routledge 1991), p. 60.

    Google Scholar 

  32. On the former point, see Mark Monmonier’s seminal and humorous How to lie with maps (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1991).

    Google Scholar 

  33. H. Schreiber, Sinfonie der Strasse: Der Mensch und seine Wege von den Karawanenpfaden bis zum Super-Highway (Düsseldorf: Econ-Verlag 1959).

    Google Scholar 

  34. See, for example, Vincent Lagendijk, ‘High voltages, lower tensions. The interconnections of Eastern and Western European electricity networks in the 1970s and 1980s’ in Éric Bussière, Sylvian Schirrmann and Michel Dumoulin (eds) Milieux économiques et intégration européenne au XXe siècle. La crise des années 1970 de la conférencede La Haye à la veille de la relance des années 1980 (Brussels: Peter Lang 2006), pp. 135–67

    Google Scholar 

  35. Frank Schipper, ‘Was the road to Europe paved with good intentions? Building highways in the Balkans’ (2007), TIE working document 18

    Google Scholar 

  36. Per Högselius, ‘Connecting East and West? Electricity systems in the Baltic Regions’ in Erikvan der Vleuten and Arne Kaijser (eds) Networking Europe: Transnational Infrastructures and the Shaping of Europe (1850–2000) (Sagamore Beach: Science History Publications 2006), pp. 245–78.

    Google Scholar 

  37. Mark Monmonier, How to lie with maps (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1991).

    Google Scholar 

  38. James Buzard, The Beaten Track: European Tourism, Literature, and the Ways to ‘Culture’ 1800–1918 (Oxford: Clarendon 1993), pp. 77–9; Akerman, ‘Introduction’.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  39. Barthes, Mythologies; James G. Duncan and Nancy Duncan, ‘Ideology and Bliss: Roland Barthes and the Secret Histories of Landscape’ in Trevor Barnes and James G. Duncan (eds) Writing Worlds: Discourse, Text and Metaphor in the Representation of Landscape (London: Routledge 1992), pp. 18–37.

    Google Scholar 

  40. Alexander Gall, ‘Atlantropa: a technical vision of a united Europe’ in Erik van der Vleuten and Arne Kaijser (eds) Networking Europe: Transnational Infrastructures and the Shaping of Europe (1850–2000) (Sagamore Beach: Science History Publications 2006), pp. 99–128, here 114. Both the Marshall Plan film Clearing the Lines, Kay Mander (Wessex Films, 1951) and the EU promotional film, Europe of Railways (2003), available on the website of the European Commission, use a relief map of Europe as a key part of their argument that nation states present ‘unnatural’ barriers to European transport networks. For the latter, see http://ec.europa.eu/dgs/energy_transport/video/rail/2003_rail_en.mpg (accessed 2 March 2007).

    Google Scholar 

  41. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflection on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso 1991), p. 144

    Google Scholar 

  42. Gabrielle Hecht, The Radiance of France: Nuclear Power and National Identity after WWII (Cambridge, Mass: MIT 1998), p. 13.

    Google Scholar 

  43. Erik van der Vleuten and Arne Kaijser, ‘Networking Europe’, History and Technology 21(1) (2005), pp. 23–4, and see Johan Schot’s contribution in this volume.

    Google Scholar 

  44. See Kurt Möser, ‘World War I and the Creation of Desire for Automobiles in Germany’ in Susan Strasser (ed.) Getting and Spending: American and European Consumer Society in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge 1998), pp. 195–222

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  45. Stephen L. Harp, Marketing Michelin, Advertising and Cultural Identity in Twentieth-Century France (Baltimore 2001), chapters 3, 6.

    Google Scholar 

  46. See Gijs Mom, ‘Roads without rails: European highway network-building and the desire for long-range mobility’, Technology and Culture 46(4) (2005), pp. 745–73

    Article  Google Scholar 

  47. Lando Bortolotti, ‘Les Premières Propositions d’un Système Européen d’Autoroutes, 1926–1937’ in Albert Carreras, Andrea Giuntini and Michèle Merger (eds) European Networks, 19th–20th Centuries: New Approaches to the Formation of a Transnational Transport and Communications System, B8 Proceedings 11th International Economic Congress, Milan, September 1994 (Milan 1994), pp. 47–59

    Google Scholar 

  48. Frank Schipper, Driving Europe: Building Europe on roads in the twentieth century (Eindhoven: SHT/Aksant 2008), pp. 83–158.

    Google Scholar 

  49. Jo-Anne Pemberton, ‘New worlds for old: the League of Nations in the age of electricity’, Review of International Relations 28 (2002), pp. 311–36.

    Google Scholar 

  50. On technical networks, see Helmut Maier, ‘Systems connected: IG Auschwitz, Kaprun and the building of European power grids’ in Erikvan der Vleuten and Arne Kaijser (eds) Networking Europe: Transnational Infrastructures and the Shaping of Europe (1850–2000) (Sagamore Beach: Science History Publications 2006), pp. 129–60.

    Google Scholar 

  51. The overall connection between Nazi visions and European ideas is stressed by John Laughland, The tainted source: the undemocratic origins of the European idea (London: Little, Brown and Company 1997), although particularly approaching this history from a technical perspective leads to a much more nuanced reading than Laughland’s.

    Google Scholar 

  52. The sudden closing of the Friedrichstrasse train station in the middle of Berlin caused hysteria in a number of residents. See Joe Moran, ‘November in Berlin: The End of the Everyday’, History Workshop Journal 57 (2004), p. 217.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  53. See Clearing the Lines, Kay Mander (Wessex Films 1951).

    Google Scholar 

  54. See Ernest W. Wimble, European Recovery and the Tourist Industry (Report prepared for the International Union of Official Travel Organisations) (London 1948)

    Google Scholar 

  55. Valene Smith, ‘War and Tourism: An American Ethnography’, Annals of Tourism Research 25(1) (1998), pp. 202–27

    Article  Google Scholar 

  56. Christopher Endy, Cold War Holidays: American Tourism in France (Chapel Hill: UNC Press 2004).

    Google Scholar 

  57. See, for example, Susan Gal, ‘Bartok’s Funeral: Representations of Europe in Hungarian Political Rhetoric’, American Ethnologist 16(3) (1991), pp. 440–58.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  58. D.J. Zeigler, ‘Post-communist Eastern Europe and the cartography of independence’, Political Geography 21 (2002), pp. 671–86.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  59. J. Hagen, ‘Redrawing the imagined map of Europe: the rise and fall of the “center”’, Political Geography 22(4) (2003), pp. 489–517.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  60. Ginette Verstraete, ‘Timescapes: An artistic challenge to the European Union paradigm’, European Journal of Cultural Studies 12(2) (2009), pp. 157–74.

    Article  Google Scholar 

Download references

Authors
  1. Alexander Badenoch
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Utrecht University, The Netherlands

    Alexander Badenoch (Lecturer in Media and Culture Studies) (Lecturer in Media and Culture Studies)

  2. Maastricht University, The Netherlands

    Andreas Fickers (Associate Professor Comparative Media History) (Associate Professor Comparative Media History)

Copyright information

© 2010 Alexander Badenoch

About this chapter

Cite this chapter

Badenoch, A. (2010). Myths of the European Network: Constructions of Cohesion in Infrastructure Maps. In: Badenoch, A., Fickers, A. (eds) Materializing Europe. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230292314_4

Download citation

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230292314_4

  • Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London

  • Print ISBN: 978-1-349-31313-6

  • Online ISBN: 978-0-230-29231-4

  • eBook Packages: Palgrave History CollectionHistory (R0)

Publish with us

Policies and ethics

Search

Navigation