The Case of Trans-European Corridors

Tweet

The progressive enlargement of the European Union and the subsequent Œrestructuring‚ has led to a redefinition of identities and boundaries, including, political, economic and symbolic boundaries. Such ongoing process of redefinition poses disciplinary challenges and the question of how to link academic research to responsible and legitimate policy. The construction of the Trans-European Corridors has brought to a head critical aspects of this problematic. While the dominant political rhetoric has portrayed the Corridors as an opportunity for economic development and integration, they and their ramifications have been either hailed or vilified at grassroots level, often with equally strong feelings. Environmental and cultural concerns have been voiced. Economic development and sometimes conflict have been stimulated, particularly by the growing participation of the private sector in urban affairs. Legal problems remain unsolved in highly significant fields, such as the regulation of international business deals, citizenship rights and cultural conflict. Such complexity has raised both fundamental issues of legitimacy at the various levels of the decision-making process and significant questions on how this process is experienced at the local level, particularly in urban areas; on how it is affecting urban change and expansion; on what impact the internal and international demographic movement, particularly, though not only from outside the European Union, is having on urban life and identity; on the attendant competition; on whether the new social, economic and spatial situation is contributing to entrenching or to solving existing problems and on whether new forms of inequality and exclusion or new opportunities and forms of integration are instead taking shape. The mixture of graded timidity and political determinism with which the ruling élite in various countries have addressed this problematic has visibly compounded on their difficult relationship with citizenship. An anthropological approach based on a contested understanding of the empirical situation at the local level illuminates key methodological and theoretical issues with specific reference to relations of power among different States and between governing élite groups (national and international) and the rest of society.