Roads of Europe—On Infrastructural Time, Near, Distant, and Past Futures

ABSTRACT

This paper studies the temporalities of EU investments into Southeast European (SEE) roads. Road construction and maintenance and related institutional frameworks, regulation, and project planning signify different modes of infrastructural time. Roads carry narratives of development and progress, but they also confront visions of desired futures with ruins of forgotten pasts. Promises of infrastructural potential intersect with project cycles, financial flows, and construction timelines, and work delays and material malfunctions. As such, infrastructures are a productive entry point to understanding how Europeanisation works through different temporalizing practices and techniques. The paper maps complex temporalities and temporal politics that shape infrastructural development and showcases how Europeanisation works also outside of promises of linear progress to EU membership on the one hand and corresponding classifications of absent futures on the other.

KEYWORDS:

• Temporalities of infrastructure
• connectivity
• European integration
• Europeanisation
• Western Balkans

Introduction

Progress towards promised and imagined European futures carries Europeanisation and EU-driven transformations in countries aspiring for EU membership and enhanced relations with the EU. The EU has tied its transformative power in its near abroad to the promise of EU membership and the enlargement policy. At the same time, Southeast Europe (SEE) shows that the promise of Europe is becoming more abstract, uncertain, and questioned.¹ The region experiences uncertainties related to protracted transition and waiting for EU membership, which collide with Brussel’s pledge to support SEE countries towards EU integration. While Europeanisation is discursively signified as a process of becoming prosperous and stable, it also locks countries into a near-permanent state of transition. Several authors have already shown that Europeanisation and politics of EU enlargement in SEE are not separate from what was often described as discontents of transition such as ethno-nationalism or de-industralisation (Petrović-Šteger et al. 2020; Rexhepi 2016). Musliu’s (2021a) work makes visible how the EU concurrently promises future accession and suspends this very promise by sponsoring initiatives that demand alignment with EU regulation but are institutionally and procedurally detached from a real membership perspective. Thus, while the EU creates aspirations for and anticipations of an EU membership perspective, it also contributes to conditions in which prospects for achieving this future are uncertain. Moreover, we see that promised and anticipated European futures and paths to EU membership intersect with memories and remains of the region’s socialist past. Jansen (2014) describes that in the everyday lives of people in Sarajevo, Europeanisation was signified as a return to normal lives under socialism. European future was made tangible through tropes of forward mobility under socialism, such as stable employment or affordable housing.

Hence, SEE exposes the limits of progressivist accounts of Europeanisation and promises of linear movement EU membership. Europeanisation reveals promises of seemingly inevitable yet distant progress to EU membership, which intertwine with short and mid-term intervals of policy reforms and project cycles but also memories of the socialist past or socialist narratives of development. Careful consideration of time and temporality can shed light on complex processes and practices of Europeanisation that unfold outside of the linear movement towards EU membership and in contexts of distant and increasingly unknown futures.

The paper does this through the analytical lens of infrastructural time and temporalities of roads particularly. Infrastructures are relational arrangements. Roads, highways, and transport networks entangle distant and long-term horizons of development with tangible policy goals, project planning, and construction schedules. Roads carry promises of progress, mobility, and connections, but they also decay, disconnect, fail and disrupt. Future-oriented visions of progress and stability are entangled with the crumbling remains of the past transport systems and environmental ruination and lifespan of asphalt. Hence, because they connect multiple and at times conflicting temporal orders, road infrastructures provide a relevant take on EU-SEE relations.

I ask how EU investments into SEE’s roads order Europeanisation in temporal terms. I approach roads broadly as assemblages of ideas, aspirations, plans, and projects, regulation of investment flows, sites, and material forms that define, reproduce, sustain or undermine Europeanisation. I specifically focus on the EU’s Connectivity Agenda for the Western Balkans (CA) and the extension of the Trans-European Transport Network (TEN-T n.d.) to the region. I study temporalizing narratives, practices, and techniques that define the EU’s road investments in SEE and how these intersect with historical narratives and developmental promises of the remains of the socialist road network.

The scholarship that has examined the role of infrastructures in European integration has successfully pointed out that infrastructural policies, regulation, and investments configure Europe as a project defined through multiplicity, but it has done so predominantly through the focus on spatial connectivity (Schipper and Schot Johan 2011). The interest in the spatial effects of the EU’s transport infrastructures is understandable since roads and railways connect, disconnect and mediate distances. These infrastructures demarcate Europe as a topological space of transport corridors or high-voltage power lines beyond the territorial borders of EU member states. To this end, Charokopos (2022) discusses the role of infrastructural connectivity and road networks as a territorialized form of the EU’s region-building practices in SEE. The literature has also approached infrastructures as material enactments of the European political project that reproduce power asymmetries inherent to EU integration as some spaces are (re)configured as peripheral spaces or spaces of extraction and others become disconnected (Opitz and Tellmann 2015).

I agree that the infrastructural lens helps us see how Europeanisation works through the production of multiple spatial orders. I add that these processes are also inherently temporal (Massey 1999, 2001). Critical scholarship has successfully shown how Europeanisation works through the intersections of spatial and temporal dimensions and produces SEE as a category that embodies a gap between the West and the East (Boatcã 2006; Blondel 2022; Musliu 2021b). The focus on multiple temporalities of infrastructures can help us further understand the limits of progressivist accounts of Europeanisation. Anand, Gupta, and Appel (2018, 58) describe developmental time and developmental promise in infrastructures as a myth. Infrastructures sediment relations, tensions, and conflicting expectations of different actors over time (de Goede and Westermeier 2022). They carry promises of future development, but they entangle promissory notes with deferral, delay, or ruination (Anand, Gupta, and Appel 2018, 53). Cyclical maintenance practices and routines intersect with the linear ordering of infrastructural projects from project initiation to completion (Karasti et al. 2010). Infrastructures entangle decaying remains of past systems with aspirations for future development. Infrastructures are also always decaying. Infrastructural ruination starts with the first moment of their construction (Anand, Gupta, and Appel 2018). As such, infrastructures work through multiple temporalities and create possibilities and constraints beyond the promises of EU membership and progressivist accounts of Europeanisation.

I structure the analysis of how Europeanisation works through different infrastructural temporalities in three sections. In the first section, I position this research within the existing discussions on infrastructural Europeanisation and explain the importance of studying the EU’s road networks in temporal terms. I conceptualize infrastructural temporality to critique progress-based accounts of Europeanisation. To this end, I explore how infrastructures challenge the notions of linear time and visions of linear progress. In the second section, I outline Europeanisation as reconfigured through promises of distant and near futures. I examine how narratives of progress and promises of connectivity become entangled with project-driven rationalities of the CA and the TEN-T. Connectivity organizes the time of protracted waiting for EU accession into tangible goals and timelines of project planning, financing, and construction. Infrastructures hold the promise of development and organize politics in service to that progress. At the same time, they also strip Europeanisation off that sense of telos by presenting EU membership as a distant future that is yet to come. The third section studies the entanglement of the EU’s infrastructural investments with the materialities and symbolism of the decaying and fragmented Yugoslav road network. Infrastructural investments entangle promises of European connectivity with the remains of Yugoslav statehood and rationalities of socialist modernization and planning system, which again disrupts the linear temporality of transition from a socialist past to the anticipated European future.

Infrastructural europeanism, road connectivity and temporalities of europeanisation

Infrastructures are at the core of European integration (Laak 2010; Opitz and Tellmann 2015; Schipper and Schot 2011). Schipper and Schot (2011, 1) define Europeanisation as a process of infrastructural linking and delinking. Technological innovations and ambitions to align transport regulations across Europe forged the way for economic and political integration in the 1950s and 1960s (Schot 2010). Infrastructures have provided a material underpinning for people’s mobility and goods’ circulation. The EU has politicized infrastructural connectivity as a normative value. As illustrated by Schipper and Schot's (2011) work on the European road network illustrates, infrastructural development and efforts to achieve interoperability of transport systems have made possible the understanding of Europe as a political space defined by networked connections. Roads and road connectivity specifically have been central to the European integration efforts since the Rome Treaty. European road corridors delimit the EU’s institutional order politically and spatially and they also carry the symbolism of promised peace and prosperity (Schipper and Schot 2011).

Infrastructures also mediate Europeanisation processes and practices outside of the EU’s member states. The EU connects goals of infrastructural connectivity and regulatory frameworks related to green and safe transport or energy to its infrastructural investments. Road investments are often conditioned by broader reforms including market liberalization, political stability, or migration management. What is more, the EU attributes the desired Europeanness to these investments. For Southeast and Eastern Europeans, new roads, and improved and accessible mobility was a confirmation of their Europeanness. In SEE, the EU’s infrastructural investments materialize European values and ways of doing things. Infrastructures promise to bring the region closer to the EU in material and figurative terms. The EU builds and repairs roads and railways as an extension of the European transport corridors to the region. These infrastructures often carry symbolic names such as “Road of Europe” or “Peace Highway”. To this end, Dalakoglou’s (2017) ethnography of the Kakavijë–Gjirokastër highway that connects South Albania to Greece describes Europeanisation as a socio-technological and socio-material practice of building over or replacing socialist infrastructures.

At the same time, infrastructures including European road corridors reconfigure relations between EU institutions, spaces, materials, and lived experiences of Europe unevenly. In a historical account of the role of infrastructures in European integration, Schipper and Schot suggest that the European political project is co-constituted by “[material] connections and circulations that have ceaselessly made and unmade different Europes” (2011, 246). Demands for infrastructural connectivity make European integration contingent upon local policy frameworks and regulatory tools, existing material infrastructures, and diverse landscapes. Collisions between European standards and ground conditions solidify and endure in uneven ways how infrastructures are built, maintained and used. Road corridors also have their own political rationalities that work through goals of inter-operability, speed, or bottleneck elimination and might collide with promises of integration (Opitz and Tellmann 2015). Moreover, returning to the work of Dalakoglou (2017), infrastructural projects promise connectivity, mobility, and speed, but they also cause dislocation and entrapment. Whereas some mobilities and connections are made possible, others are discontinued or curbed. From Batel and Küpers (2022) research, we know that the EU’s infrastructural connectivity is defined by inherent power asymmetries as some spaces are bypassed, disconnected or reconfigured as spaces of waiting or extraction.

Thus, the analysis of Europeanisation through infrastructures reveals that uneven formations such as the above-described contingencies of infrastructural planning upon local contexts, contradictions, and power asymmetries that become internalized within—and endure through—infrastructures, or disconnections or disruptions that come together with connectivity are inherent to the European political project. Infrastructures are complex systems. They are relational and open-ended. The movement between political intent and infrastructural outcomes does not follow a linear, progressive path (Jensen and Asuro 2015). Because infrastructures emerge from, connect and reconfigure a diverse constellation of objects, regimes of governing, social and everyday practices across space and time, it is highly doubtful that they will reflect one particular order and function according to a given plan (Jensen and Asuro 2015).

This applies to highway networks and roads as well. Also roads have an open-ended, relational quality of always bringing together different political orders, expectations and materialities. Road infrastructures result from regional and state planning, financing, and construction and maintenance labour. At the same time, the move from their planning to construction and travel is not linear because roads also embody expectations, anxieties, and conflicts connected to their construction or absence and they are entangled with the people’s everyday experiences and practices of mobility.

Howe et al. (2016) list several examples of this infrastructural complexity and open-endedness. Infrastructures constitute some relations and political forms and destroy others. Roads are meant to facilitate mobility, but while they connect some places and communities they simultaneously disconnect others. Access to roads is uneven. Development of new highways and high-speed trains often stand in sharp contrast to the needs and lived experiences of local populations. Moreover, failure and ruination are integral to any infrastructural development. Regardless of the future-oriented character of a highway or a bridge, the degenerative nature of infrastructures implies that what is designed and constructed is always a future ruin. Additionally, infrastructural design and construction are always speculative. Infrastructural planning is defined by speculations and forecasting about uncertain futures but built with present technologies and materials.

A deeper look into the temporal dimension of infrastructural complexities exposes the limits of progress-based narratives of Europeanisation. Infrastructures are not only signified by promises of future improvement and linear movement from project planning to project implementation. The analysis of the EU’s investments into SEE’s roads makes visible that progressivist accounts of Europeanisation are complicated by multiple—and often conflicting—temporalities. To understand how Europeanisation works through multiple temporalities, I see infrastructural time as an entanglement of different temporal relations. Following Bear’s (2016) discussion of practices, knowledges, and values that order time, I study how infrastructural time is reconfigured, apprehended, made sense of, and valued by practices, knowledges, and values that arise from Europeanisation.

I problematize two aspects of temporal ordering that expose limits to thinking about Europeanisation in linear terms. First, following Guyer’s (2007) differentiation between distant and near-futures and dated time, I show how progress is concurrently uncertain due to distant EU accession prospects, yet also highly tangible through promises of connectivity and the extension of the EU’s road network to the region, including projects aimed at improvement of domestic transport regulation and road improvement. Infrastructures put together promises and desires of improved futures and temporal modes of different institutional and regulatory systems including policy cycles or project schedules. Second, by referring to infrastructural decay, maintenance and repair, I make visible continuities and entanglements between the region’s socialist past and European future that stand outside of the linear narratives of Europeanisation. Temporalities of infrastructural projects are always conditioned by the material and socio-political contexts in which they are embedded including materialized but also never realized visions of past regimes (Yarrow 2017). Attention to fragility, decay and maintanance makes visible how infrastructures embody and sediment earlier relations and help us grasp how future visions are defined by a palimpset of the past and present infrastructural forms (Anand, Gupta, and Appel 2018; Ramakrishnan, O'Reilly, and Budds 2021). Crumbling remains of the socialist road and railway network frame developement of future transport infrastructures. These ruins carry promises of the futures that might have been and—as such—reconfigure anticipations and visions of development defined by Europeanisation.

In what follows, I analyze how different elements of EU investments into SEE’s roads, including political discourses, policies, project planning, financial scheduling, and practices of constructing and maintaining, order infrastructural time. I examine the development and connectivity objectives of the CA, the TEN-T, and ensuing European and national strategy plans and how these intersect with the planning and construction of infrastructural projects as well as the endurance and fragility of road networks. The CA is taken as a starting point. The analysis traces how the promise of connectivity articulated in the CA assembles materialities of roads and road construction and maintenance as well as different policies, planning, and project documentation linked to the EU’s infrastructural investments. The analyzed corpus connects EU and national transport, environment or procurement policies and regulations and standards to investment-based project planning and implementation including donor meeting transcripts or public tenders, expert feasibility studies, environmental impact reports as well as domestic spatial planning archives. Eight in-depth interviews with EU and SEE policy-makers, experts, and civil society representatives conducted in 2020 and 2021 are used to complement the collected documentation.

Decentring the Europeanisation telos in the distant and near future

EU efforts to construct, improve and align highways, railways, bridges and energy infrastructure in SEE gained greater political visibility in 2014 as a part of the member-state driven, intergovernmental Berlin Process. The hope was to boost regional integration and maintain the EU’s transformative impact in SEE in view of the stalled enlargement (Interview 5 2021). As a part of these efforts, the Berlin Process has put forward the CA as an innovative mode of the EU’s engagement with the region outside of the enlargement framework and a possible way around the accession impasse. Whereas the CA also came in response to Chinese infrastructural presence in the region, its central objective was to connect SEE internally and to the EU (European Parliament 2017). Consequently, the EU has used the CA to streamline and coordinate its activities related to the extension of its TEN-T network to SEE form 2015 to 2020 (Interview 4 2021). These activities included projects that prepare, finance, reconstruct and rehabilitate some existing and construct new highways and bridges. Connectivity also addressed alignment of technical standards and regulation related to road safety, environmental, or travel length and simplification of border-crossings. After 2020, connectivity-related projects were integrated into the EU’s Economic and Investment Plan for the Western Balkans (EIP).

Investment priorities and projects under the CA and subsequently also the EIPWB were identified and implemented through a hybrid cooperation of the EU and its member states, non-EU donors and SEE governments. The SEE-based intergovernmental organization Transport Community (TC) coordinates the alignment of technical standards within the region and with the EU. In quantitative terms, the CA has supported 37 projects focused on technical assistance, rehabilitation and construction of transport infrastructure, of which 21 relate to road corridors. These projects have centred on Corridor V as the extension of the Mediterranean Corridor, Corridor X as the extension of the East Mediterranean/Orient corridor, and Route 7 connecting Corridors X and VIII. The EIPWB builds upon and continues these infrastructural projects in the form of so-called flagship investments (WBIF 2022).

Even though the CA stands outside of the enlargement framework, the European Commission’s reference to connectivity goals and infrastructural projects were always positioned in relation to the EU membership perspective. The EU’s political and policy discourses related to infrastructural development highlighted integration of the region with the EU as a priority and argued explicitly that the future of the whole region is within the EU. In parallel to assuring SEE about its European future and about the EU’s committment to this future, the Commission has addressed planned infrastructural investments as a concrete way of improving lives of the people within a defined time: “The Western Balkans is an absolute priority for my Commission since my very first day. The region's future is in the European Union. This plan can help you to change the daily lives of your people and the business of the region four to five years from now” (European Commission 2020b). Similar formulations can be found in the Commission’s communications about the extension of the transport corridors to third countries, the preparation of regulatory reforms, the CA planning and even in the more technical project documentation related to road construction. The section related to SEE in the Commission’s communication about the extention of the TEN-T to neighbouring countries emphasizes that the region has been “a priority for the Union” and refers to the 2021 State of the Union reference that “the future of the whole region lies in the EU” (European Commission 2020e, 5).

At the same time, when asked to explain the origins and rationalities of the CA, EU officials have insisted that connectivity is achievable, tangible and yields immediate results in contrast to the protracted nature of the accession process (Interview 1 2020, Interview 5 2021). Against the backdrop of increased challenges to the transformative power of the enlargement policy in SEE, connectivity was introduced as a way how to still move forward while putting aside the difficult question of accession. The officials have described infrastructural connectivity as a “concrete goal that can be achieved in the near future in juxtaposition to the over-bureaucratised and complex accession process” (Interview 5 2021). When addressing EU’s connectivity efforts in SEE, these officials have repeatedly highlighed development of infrastructural connections as a condition for economic growth, political stability and a way how to establish foundations for further intergation within the region and with the EU (Interview 3 2021, Interview 5 2021). Put differently, the CA frames infrastructural connectivity, including the integration of SEE’s transport network with the EU, as a material fundament to any integration that can be achieved in the present or at least in the very near future. My argument is that the EU’s infrastructural connectivity reconfigures the linear teleology of Europeanisation. Through the juxtraposition of distant membership perspective to the concrete, tangible and time-bound connectivity goals and infrastructural projects.

In many aspects, developmental logics of EU infrastructural investments reproduce the linear account of Europeanisation. Connectivity and infrastructures rely on the promise of technological, economic and political progress. The EU is established as a measurement for this future progress and the SEE as a subject that chronically lags behind but anticipates progress. Transport connectivity and improvement of the SEE’s road networks are normalized as a sin-qua-non for SEE to catch-up with European standards of economic and political stability. Feasibility studies produced by the European Investment Bank (EIB) have problematized the region’s need for a better transport infrastructure as a result of SEE’s historically peripheral position at “the fringes of large empires and far away from the core regions of the industrial revolution” (EIB 2018, 6). These studies define the region as chronically backward with underdeveloped institutions and lacking modern infrastructure. Financial reports on the opportunities and challenges of infrastructural investments issued by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) or the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) blame the region’s chronic underdevelopment and political fragmentation as main causes of the contemporary gap in infrastructural development between SEE and the EU (IMF 2018, 5). These reports then link infrastructural development as a way to achieve European standards of economic and political stability and bring SEE closer to the EU. The CA and individual projects define infrastructures as a marker of future economic and political development and as something that provides an outlook for a joint future for the SEE and the EU.

However, infrastructures also complicate the linearity of developmental time because they problematise the promise of EU accession as an abstract, distant future in relation to connectivity as a tangible, near future. EU membership is maintained as a telos of Europeanisation, yet a distant one that is difficult to both reach and abandon. To illustrate, the EU has used connectivity discourse to reconfigure EU membership as a distant prospect or it has abstracted it through idioms such as “future defined by common challenges and opportunities”, “the EU’s continuous commitment”, “improved links”, “strengthened links”, “new dynamism in cooperation”, “key priority” or the “European path” (European Commission 2020a, 5). When I asked EU officials to explain the links between the CA and road investments on the one hand and membership conditionality on the other, they have been careful to differentiate “connectivity and EU integration as two related, but distinct, processes” (Interview 5 2021, Interview 3 2021). At the same time, they pointed out that integrated infrastructure regionally and with the EU will certainly help “in the long run” (Interview 5 2021, Interview 7 2021). Actors from national and non-state bodies within SEE read infrastructural investments through the lens of accession and acquis alignment, but they have also emphasized that the link between connectivity and integration is not direct nor guaranteed. One of the interviewees has described the prospect of EU membership as something that is “always there, no matter how unlikely it might be or how disconnected it seems from the actual problems of fixing holes in the roads” (Interview 7 2021, Interview 8 2021).

The distancing of EU membership as a telos of Europeanisation in relation to the positioning of connectivity as a prospect for the new future is best captured by the words of former president of the European Council Donald Tusk. In 2018, Tusk spoke of connectivity not as an alternative to enlargement, but as a goal for the meantime while waiting for accession: “[I]t is a way to use the time between today and tomorrow more effectively than before, so that [our] citizens and businesses are not waiting for all the benefits of EU integration” (European Council 2018). This statement displaces EU membership as the only telos of Europeanisation, but it also shows how Europeanisation works through other temporal modes including the near futures between what is “now” and what is “to be”. Similar temporal reasoning between the distant future of EU membership and the near goals of connectivity is expressed in the 2019 speech by the Regional Cooperation Council’s (RCC) Secretary General Majlinda Bregu. Bregu also rejects the idea that efforts to improve regional cooperation and infrastructural networks are a substitute for EU membership and speaks of connectivity as an opportunity to improve the now while waiting for accession: “ … we can’t keep crying and just point the finger at someone in hope that by doing that the unemployment in the region will decrease. So again, what’s next? I think that there are areas we have to be focused on immediately” (TCF 2019, 4).

Substantial efforts have been made—both institutionally and rhetorically—to position connectivity as a goal and a value in its own right. Different institutional bodies including the TC that work on the alignment of transport regulation regionally and within the EU have firmly stressed that connectivity is a value and not only a technical concept (TCF 2020). Interviewees have struggled to define connectivity, but they have agreed that “connectivity is different from integration on the one hand and more than simply building new highways on the other” (Interview 3 2021). Yearly CA agendas and official discourses define connectivity as a normative goal that is needed to close SEE’s development gap: “Connectivity is somehow always taken for granted everywhere where there is plenty of it already. This is why it is also difficult to explain sometimes to the audiences in the hyper-connected parts of the world why transport matters so much […] here in the Western Balkans” (TCF 2020). European and regional actors have positioned improved road infrastructure as developmental stage that needs to be achieved before SEE can follow other goals and catch-up with green and sustainable transport standards. What is more, the region’s belonging to Europe is expressed through the prism of infrastructural connectivity, which includes for instance the symbolisms of naming the Corridor Vc Road of Europe (WBIF 2021, 1).

Next to being defined as a value that one should strive for; connectivity becomes a telos of Europeanisation for the near future as a policy that corrects the protracted character of the accession process. Connectivity structures the uncertainty of waiting for accession into tangible and viable actions for the possible near future. Policy documents such as the CA and the EIPWB and even the EU’s renewed enlargement methodology single out connectivity as one of the core sectors in the political dialogue between the EU and SEE. These documents reproduce the differentiating rationale between efficiency and dynamism of connectivity on the one hand and the enlargement impasse on the other (Council of the European Union 2021b, 3). Connectivity re-frames monitoring of compliance with the EU’s transport acquis alignment as a support for building infrastructures that ought to primarily connect (European Commission 2020a, 25). EU investments into the development of road infrastructures are no longer positioned exclusively as a reform carrot and a tool in preparing countries for EU membership, but became a goal in their own right (European Commission 2020a, 10). Infrastructural investments become an “essential need” that is to yield “concrete” benefits to its citizens (European Commission 2015, 3).

Connectivity positions infrastructural projects as a principal way of thinking about what is seen as “tangible”, “real” and “grounded” involvement of the EU in SEE. The CA and subsequent connectivity packages are implemented through project-based yearly investment agendas. The Commission, donor partners and national representatives use these agendas to coordinate and prioritize infrastructural investment projects. The agendas are aligned with nationally-defined project packages called Single Project Pipelines (SPPs). Moreover, project-based thinking about and approach to infrastructural development is translated from the EU to national levels because the EU conditions its grants and loans to countries’ having institutional and administrative capacity for strategic and project-based planning. Meetings between EU and national representatives on infrastructural development have continously emphasized the need for the region to improve its capacity to plan, prioritize and co-ordinate investment projects (Interview 1 2020). Infrastructural development was generally described by the involved actors as project-based work (Interview 2 2020).

Li and Murray (2016) argues that such a move towards projects is made possible by rationalities of improvement which first define deficiencies and then outline technical solutions to these deficiencies. At the same time, projects reorder temporalities of continuing improvement into smaller actions with fixed goals, deadlines, and budgets and establish a sequencing where projects come first, then followed by a defined deficiency that is rendered solvable by the project at hand. Accordingly, projects inscribe into the Europeanisation process a tension between distant promises of accession on the one hand and concrete and temporary phases of the project cycle in conjuction with repetitive and routinized rhythms of project implementation.

This temporal tension between distant EU accession on the one hand and a tangible, near future of promised connecitivity is negotiated through project time (Karasti et al. 2010). Project time reorients Europeanisation into near-term plans and projects with set objectives and series of connected activities, phrases, and milestones of these plans. Accession remains in the long-term horizon of the EU’s involvement in SEE, while the CA reorganizes Europeanisation into time-bound plans and projects that offer exact and materially tangible objectives to construct new highway sections, define monitoring schedules, improve road safety or reduce border-crossing times. Those involved in the EU’s infrastructural investments in the region see and speak of connectivity and the construction and maintanance of road networks in project terms (Interview 1, Interview 6 2021, Interview 8 2021). The whole methodology of the TEN-T extension to SEE is project-based. In the context of the road network, this means that the future compliance of regional roads with the TEN-T network is based on the SPPs as national project planning systems. Infrastructural investments are defined on the basis of a project-ranking model and project-maturity and project-implementation evaluations (TC 2022a). The promise of connectivity defines and organizes Europeanisation through periodization of the EU’s investment priorities into yearly packages and national priorities into timespans of SPPs, timetables of project financing and time spent and designing, applying for, planning, executing, and accounting for infrastructural projects. Material, institutional and regulatory changes intended to align regional road networks with the EU rely on rationalities and temporal sequencing and routines of a project-based system, which many of the involved actors referred to as a “way to get things done” and “a tool that brings immediate and direct benefits to citizens” (Interview 3 2021). Similarly, the NGO sector, while highlighting multiple challenges related to timely implementation of planned infrastructural development, outline infrastructural projects as a way to bring tangible improvement to citizens’ lives as opposed to vague and difficult to navigate acquis or progress reports (Interview 7 2021; Rexha 2021).

There are further tensions as the assumption that infrastructural projects move in a linear trajectory from project definition to competition are reoriented by incomplete knowledge, political struggles or material breakdown. Carse and Kneas (2019) suggest that whereas infrastructural projects are considered complete or their materialization imminent, upon a careful analysis we can see that infrastructures in fact signify open-ended temporalities as plans remained unrealized, blocked or delayed. In SEE, construction of different sequences of roads and highways are continuously announced in a spectacular manner but the works are almost always delayed or suspended for indeterminate periods. Often, roads are being declared finished while the construction is ongoing. Due to the sharp increase in the construction of new highways and other infrastructures, countries such as Serbia have been described as one large construction site and a laboratory of ongoing infrastructural development. This creates a sense of continuous expectations that the new road is always about to come. Referring to the status of the government’s efforts to build new highways, an NGO representative suggested that in Serbia something is always under construction (Interview 7 2021). The same interviewee suggested that “in the Balkans, roads are very political, projects are started and then funds get lost and there is an absence of responsibility” when asked to explain why EU and national project programming and planning does not respond to realities on the ground.

A good case in point is the construction of Route 7 that is to connect Serbia and Kosovo, which is also known as the Peace Highway. The Kosovo-Serbia agreement to start the construction of the Route was highly prioritized and politicized by the EU as a breakthrough in relations between the two countries and national elites have praised it as a part of the national infrastructural boom. At the same time, the Route has been announced and then postponed for over six years and once the construction finally started in 2021, it was stopped two weeks after because of the topologically difficult terrain, inconsistencies in the planning process, but also because of political reasons (N1 2022). The Route is seen as a political project and experts have ascribed reasons for delays in its implementation to inconsistencies in the political and policy processes such ad hoc approach to and lack of coordiantion in project planning and general exclusion of experts from project development (Interview 7 2021, Demostat 2019). Experts have also asigned delays to the inadequate familiarity of foreign construction companies or the specificieties of the local terrain (Demostat 2019).

Hence, the EU reproduces the logics of project planning that sees the construction of new roads as an uninteruppted move from the inital stages of project development to a concreate and time-bound project finalization. It promises tangible near-futures defined by exact objectives related to the construction of new roads or rehabilitatio of the exhisting ones. Grant applications include detailed timelines of project phases and risk assessment mitigation plans while projects are evaluated on the basis of regular progress reports and compliance forecasts. At the same time, infrastructural delay and open-endedness of project completition are build into the programming system as many of the investments are identified but completely excluded from the forecasting predictions because of the level of their administrative and technical preparedness. Projects are delayed before they even start, deadlines are continuously shifted and oftentimes project implementation takes so long that the material and technical conditions of the road deteriorate even before the projects are completed (TC 2022a).

Infrastructures and past as the future

Whereas the previous section of the paper has focused on how Europeanisation works through the differentiation of distant futures of the accession and near futures of connectivity, I further the argument about multiple temporalities of Europeanisation by discussing how infrastructures obscure a distinction between the SEE’s socialist past and promised European futures. Analyzing the never completed socialist retirement home in Bihać, Hromadžić (2019) raises two important points about ruination and durability of socialist infrastructures. First, Hromadžić suggests that in the eyes of many of its citizens, socialist Yugoslavia was not only an imagined community but also a concrete accomplishment embodied in the roads, railways or bridges that these citizens have built (Bihać, Hromadžić 2019, pp. 121). Second, these socialist infrastructures are today abandoned and decaying, but they also endure and resist the narrative of linear progress. Hence, EU investments into SEE’s infrastructures do not operate in a tabula-rasa environment, but are moulded by local histories and contexts. Dimova’s (2021) work on endurance and porosity of the Ottoman railway network in SEE makes a related point about how the region’s histories become entangled with different visions of its future. Similarly, by looking into infrastructural fragility, ruination and maintenance, I aim to show that infrastructures connect registers of the past to future promises of Europeanisation. I examine how narratives, regulation and planning practices of socialist Yugoslavia become sedimented and endure in the decaying remains of the Yugoslav roads, which the EU is now promising to extend, rehabilitate or build anew.

I start from the realization that the contemporary EU’s road corridors that run through SEE are built upon by the now fragmented and decaying remains of the Brotherhood and Unity (B&U) highway, which originated in socialist Yugoslavia. When examined from the analytical take of infrastructural decay and endurance, it is not completely surprising that the connectivity-driven efforts link SEE’s capitals, economic centres and ports internally and with the EU and that these efforts are thought about and even described as “a way of connecting all capitals of the former Yugoslav republics” (Interview 5 2021). Such an effort is normalized as a given condition of any infrastructural development and legitimized as a way of building from the foundations that are already there (Dimova 2021).

Remains of the B&U highway signify not only the dissolution of Yugoslavia, but also carry state narratives, aspirations and contradictions of socialist Yugoslavia into the present and condition possible imaginaries of the future. Despite the disintegration and ruination of the Yugoslav road system in the aftermath of the 1990s, material remains of the highway challenge linear temporality of Europeanisation. These infrastructures are crumbling but they endure. As ruins of the socialist past that continue into the present and determine possible conditions of the future, these infrastructures unsettle teleological understandings of the end of socialist Yugoslavia followed by transitory postsocialism and awaited Europeanism. Moreover, we can observe that infrastructures are fragile and do not follow the linear project-logic of “plan-construction-competition”. They help us grasp how Europeanisation works through the intersection of different temporal orders including incompleteness, decay, maintenance and repair.

The B&U highway was depicted in state-building narratives of socialist Yugoslavia as an avant-garde projection of the future in the present. Alike other infrastructural projects, the highway embodied modernist efforts to correct challenging landscape and to break with the difficult past by anticipating personal and collective progress. In the specific Yugoslav context, these visions of progress were underpinned by promises of a historic break with structures of domination and underdevelopment and a move towards a new normative order with Yugoslavia as the new telos of this order (Dawson 2021, 88). The construction was initiated under the 1947–1951 five-year plan and it was for a large part undertaken by volunteer work. Matošević (2017) analyzes the ideological underpinnings of this volunteer work to classify the B&U highway as part of a broader set of infrastructural-anthropological projects, which were meant to establish a new socialist subject through the experience of collective work across ethnic or urban/rural differences.

At the same time, the highway also carried asymmetries and controversies inscribed into the politics and society of socialist Yugoslavia. Promises of transethnic unity collided with hidden political hierarchies as well as with the necessity to quickly develop a transport network that would support the economic growth and consumption desires of the rising middle class. Political salience of linking Zagreb and Belgrade was compatible with the economic rationale to connect the industrialized north (via Ljubljana) with agricultural Vojvodina and further to the south (via Skopje). However, the highway has bypassed other capitals and the extension to Skopje remained unbuilt at the time. Additionally, the volunteer labour that has underpinned the construction soon lost its initial appeal. The enthusiasm of the public to participate in these projects and the overall legitimacy of such work was increasingly contested, particularly at later phases of the construction (Matošević 2017, 74).

State-building discourses have also created further controversies by meshing glorifications of the B&U highway as something that was built by and belongs to citizen-workers on the one hand and the aspirations to integrate Yugoslav roads into the European networks on the other. Attempts to open Yugoslavia to world markets in the 1960s have marked a shift in framing the highway as part of global transportation flows. The International Bank for Reconstruction and Development’s 1963 loan appraisal to Yugoslavia mentions the relevance of the construction of Yugoslav road infrastructure to West European motor traffic (IBRD 1963, 11). The report highlights the importance of the geopolitical position of Yugoslavia to European transit traffic and the importance of transit routes through Yugoslavia for the European common market project. This particularly relates to the function of the Brotherhood and Unity highway as a connection between Austria, Italy and Greece (IBRD 1963, 12). The report also testifies about the efforts on the side of the Yugoslav leadership to better connect the country to Western Europe and support the opening up of Yugoslav tourism and industrial and agricultural products to Western consumers (Mikula 2010). EU’s investments into Corridor Vc and Corridor X entangle these visions and controversies of socialist Yugoslavia that became embodied and endure in the remains of the Brotherhood-and-Unity-Highway with the promised futures of Europeanisation.

Corridor Vc, also refered to as the Road of Europe, is a part of the EU’s efforts to extent the TEN-T to SEE as a part of its Mediterranean network. The corridor runs through BiH to connect northern and central Europe to the Adriatic Sea. Corridor Vc is a good case in point to discuss how Europeanisation works through multiple temporalities. My argument is that the already discussed narratives of transethnic unity and modernizing promises of socialism and knowledge and practices that have arose from the Yugoslav spatial planning have defined the field of what is possible for the EU’s investments even in the absence of material infrastructure. I explain this argument by showing how the construction of the Corridor Vc is contingent upon socialist promises and aspirations for a highway through BiH that were outlined and planned in the 1970s and 1980s but have never materialized.

Highway development objectives set in the 1970s reappear in all subsequent documentation related to BiH’s transport infrastructure. The initial push from the local socialist leadership to integrate Sarajevo and BiH in the Yugoslav highway network was voiced already during the construction of the B&U highway. These failed to materialize and new plans to build a section of what is now called Corridor Vc through BiH were outlined in the 1970s. The route was set by the 1981–2000 Spatial Plan and related technical, feasibility and environmental impact studies (NN 1989). Archival material shows that public expectations for a north–south highway connecting Sarajevo to the Adriatic were strengthened by participatory consultations that preceded the definition of the route and that, apart from the general public, included local representatives and different expert groups (NN 1989, 10). In the 1980s, the planned highway was prioritized as a way to broaden the Yugoslav transport network together with other planned connections of Sarajevo to Belgrade and Podgorica and to better connect Europe to the Mediterranean and the East. Yugoslav infrastructural development planning speaks of improved infrastructural connectivity as a key condition for the anticipated industrialization, urbanization, demographic growth and trade ties with Europe (Kolarić and Popesku 1990). Despite of all this, these plans have never materialized. Renewed discussions about the highway’s construction in the late 1990s and early 2000s were framed as goals of improved connectivity with the EU and economic growth. Already the socialist transport network was outlined as a part of broader European routes. This is why the meeting of the European transport ministers in 1997—where the decision to extend the TEN-T to BiH was taken—talks about the return to traditional traffic flows in the Balkans that were interrupted by a period of conflict and disintegration (ECMT 1997, 101). Similar words reappear in the 2016 transport planning documentation that codifies the construction of the section of the Vc Corridor in BiH (IMF 2004, 14–19).

Moreover, the construction of Corridor Vc is further contingent upon the knowledge produced by socialist spatial planning inscribed in the material remains of the Yugoslav road network. Continuities of knowledge produced by socialist planning and regulation establish certain development plans as given, while silencing for instance indeterminacy of geological structures or past resistances of local communities. The route of Corridor Vc through BiH was adopted already by the 1980–2020 Spatial Plan. The then established prioritization of the motorway construction as well as the classification of certain terrains as difficult or landscapes as vulnerable and protected by cultural and natural heritage conservation frameworks are repeated by the contemporary infrastructural planning and construction. Rationality of seeking development through control of nature and natural resources—that was articulated and codified by the socialist planning—is reproduced in the now built EU corridor. Socialist plans repurposed landscapes to be fully in the function of infrastructural development. Socialist planning talks about the need to topographically organize, secure and rationalize space for road constructions, particularly in difficult terrains. The consequent topographical re-drawing of designated agricultural land, river basins or natural resources and cultural heritage in relation to and as a part of the highway’s route becomes embodied in the maps and carried across time to define the field of possible for EU infrastructural projects (Korolija and Palini 2020). When asked to comment upon local resistances to certain corridor routes, EU officials argued that “these plans have been here forever” (Interview 3 2021).

More concretely, Corridor Vc repurposes the river basins of Neretva and Bosna as zones of transit connecting northern and southern Europe and BiH to Europe and the Adriatic Sea. Topographical capture of the river valleys as part of the European transport route defined by the 1970s and 1980s socialist planning documents determines how these spaces are understood also in the context of contemporary infrastructural investments. This particularly refers to the abstraction of socioeconomic and cultural ties of local communities to the land as well as complex ethnic composition of these areas into measurements of economic growth and transit-time efficiency (Bankwatch Network 2022). The environmental impact and feasibility studies issued in support of EU investments cite the 1970s and 1980s route and the spatial planning that proceeded it as a starting ground for administrative and material alignment of BiH’s infrastructure with Corridor Vc. Feasibility studies of the EU’s investments are determined by the socialist planning embodied in the topographical maps and materialities of the existing transport network (EBRD 2006). The topographic and regulatory tools of socialist project planning conditioned the very calculation of what is possible in terms of spatial, environmental, traffic and economic impacts of EU investments. What becomes silenced are for instance shifts in local responses to infrastructural projects, long-term aftermath effects of road constructions which escape temporalities of different project cycles, or the indeterminacy of the hydro-geology of the region such as porousness of the terrain or the uneven rainfall distribution of the soil (Bankwatch 2021). Considered alternatives are always evaluated as indeed alternatives; hence, alterations to the established route, while concerns about the impact of Corridor Vc on local farming traditions and production or questions of inter-ethnic relations are mostly abstracted as risk mitigation indicators and actions.

Contradiction in which visions of the region’s European future revive its Yugoslav past is also visible in the efforts to include Corridor X as a SEE section of the Orient-East Mediterranean Core Network Corridor. Corridor X partially overlays with the route of the B&U highway and as such relies on its material infrastructure. Whereas EU investments are politicized through discourses of novelty and promises of future stability and growth, Corridor X shows that efforts to expand the TEN-T to SEE are neither new nor fully based on the actual construction of new infrastructure. The entanglement between the construction, maintenance and repair works on Corridor X on the one hand and the decaying B&U highway on the other brings into focus a relationship between futurity, ruination and endurance. In the context of Corridor X, next to investments into new roads—which again similarly to Corridor Vc build upon and enhance the socialist highway network—the EU’s interventions relate to the alignment of national safety and maintenance standards and targets with EU regulation. These so-called soft measures are central to the incorporation of SEE’s roads into the EU’s corridor system, while they essentially repair and reconnect the fragmented and decaying highway network of socialist Yugoslavia.

Testimonies of local experts suggest that integration of the regional road network into the European transport network implies de facto rehabilitation of the Brotherhood and Unity highway (Milijić et al. 2003, 3-4). Consultations that have underpinned spatial planning of the Serbian section of Corridor X speak of repair of the B&U highway in terms of a renewal of the economic and other connections that were interrupted throughout the 1990s. Media have reported about the EU’s investments in Corridor X as the finalization of the B&U highway, which has now received a European “facelift” (Stanojlović 2008). The investments have been represented as a renewal of both material roads as well as connectivities established by socialist Yugoslavia. Put differently, the EU’s connectivity goals along Corridor X restore post-WWII East to West traffic flows. As argued earlier, the B&U highway was a key transit route connecting the Western European needs for industrial growth, efforts of SEE governments to “export” unemployment and control emigration as well as variegated desires and experiences of migrant workers. As the route was discontinued by, among others, the 1990s wars, the CA’s infrastructural investments and related institutional and regulative reforms restore the route while adding the new language of connectivity, uninterrupted trade flows and supply chains to the existing symbolism of Yugoslav worker self-management or East–West worker mobility.

Rather than working through linear trajectory of project initiation-construction- completion, EU maintenance and repair programmes and practices conceptualise roads as open-ended and always potentially decaying. Representing SEE’s road network as always potentially decaying is at odds with the teleology of the collapse and progress to a given end goal that underpins the linear Europeanisation. The objective of soft measure reforms is sustainability and asset preservation to avoid future breakdown. In the case of road infrastructures, Europeanisation works through a continuous struggle between the process of ruination and practices of renewal.

EU’s efforts to rehabilitate regional road network restores connections established by the B&U highway. As such, whereas the EU promises future improvement, the repair work that it makes possible is also a quite contestation of the erasure of the past by the systemic neglect of particularly those infrastructures that were overdetermined by the symbolism of Yugoslav unity and socialist development. Dawson (2021) uses the metaphor of crumbling road infrastructures to challenge the narrative of Yugoslav socialism’s collapse. In the context of our discussion, this implies that the EU’s normative and regulatory frameworks of road construction, rehabilitation and maintenance management are transplanted into the now crumbling socialist highway network. Often, the newly built or rehabilitated road sections are defined by public discourses as a way to reach other regional capitals “again” (Pogledaj.to 2014).

Repair work conducted to align SEE’s road network with Corridor X shows how Europeanisation operates literally in the cracks of socialist infrastructures. Europeanisation works through maintenance regulation and repair, which means patching potholes, sealing or replacing cracked asphalt and rehabilitating the existing infrastructures. EU reforms and works are there to make the decaying socialist network fit for the European future in terms of climate resilience, estimated increase in traffic flows or targeted decrease of road deaths or injuries (Interview 1).

Subsequently, one can observe a temporal shift of Europeanisation away from promises of progress and innovation to demands for durability and adaptation for potential future decay.

Technical documentation refers to maintenance as a crucial yet mundane, routinized and therefore politically unattractive work (CONNECTA 2018, 32). EU maintenance plans criticise political elites for prioritizing new roads, because this comes at the expense of having a sustainable road network. Rather than completed or ruined, roads are rendered as always potentially decaying. This open-endedness is also evident in the framing of road maintenance as primarily a managerial and only secondarily an engineering problem. Assessments, needs calculations and project planning describe roads as preservable and maintainable (CONNECTA 2018). The Commission has continuously asked for the alignment of national regional maintenance system and road management routines with its standards and regulations (Interview 4 2021). Most of the EU recommendations contrast costly and often postponed ad-hoc repairs and rehabilitation with the need for systematic, routinized and periodic maintenance activities (CONNECTA 2018).

Conclusion

Infrastructures are a promising entry point to understand how Europeanisation works through multiple temporalities and outside of promises of linear progress to EU membership. Specifically, the paper has analysed different institutional structures and practices that stem from the EU’s connectivity goals in SEE and related extension of the TEN-T network to the region. I have examined practices of alignining national and regional road safety, maintanance and environemntal regulation with the EU’s regulation and standards, infrastructural project planning, project development, implementation, and control, financial flows, and finally road construction timelines including delays and road malfunctions and ruination. This analysis has provided a map of complex temporalities and temporal politics that shape EU’s infrastructural development in SEE. I have shown that Europeanisation works also outside of narratives of linear progress because infrastructures bring together, in a non-linear way, different temporal orders including near and distant futures of promised connectivity, cycles and timelines of infrastructural projects, and the ruination and endurance of the past Yugoslav road networks.

In line with Guyer’s (2007) work that differentiates between distant and near-futures and dated time, I have shown that connectivity becomes a concrete, tangible and time-bound goal of Europeanisation in opposition to the distant membership perspective. This near-future of promised connectivity is then organized by temporal structures of a project-system and related logics of time-bound improvement, completion and fixed deadlines. At the same time, EU investments into SEE roads are built upon the now fragmented and decaying remains of the Yugoslav B&U highway, which further complicates linear narratives of Europeanisation based on the idea of progress from the socialist past to the promised accession-driven European future. Conceptual references to infrastructural ruination, endurance and maintenance have made visible that narratives, institutional forms and regulatory frameworks produced in socialist Yugoslavia have defined what is possible for the EU’s even in the absence of material infrastructure. Corridor Vc illustrates that Europeanisation is contingent upon rationalities and knowledge produced by socialist planning and regulation. Even if plans to build a highway in BiH never materialized, the socialist period has established certain plans as a given while silencing alternatives and this has defined what kind of constructions are possible, where and on what terms also for the EU. Corridor X partially overlays with the route of the B&U highway and as such relies on its decaying material infrastructure. While discourses of novelty and improvement accompany infrastructural projects, Corridor X shows how Europeanisation rehabilitates the existing remains of the socialist road network and maintains it for the future.

Acknowledgements

The author is grateful to participants of the EWIS 2022 workshop “Temporality and International (dis)order” and two anonymous reviewers for their generous engagement with earlier versions of this paper.

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Senka Neuman Stanivuković

Senka Neuman Stanivuković is an Assistant Professor in European studies at the University of Groningen. Her research studies links between Europeanisation and production of marginality and peripherality in the contexts of citizenship and migration, labour and territoriality.

Notes

1 I follow Kolstø (2016) and choose the term Southeast Europe (SEE) as an umbrella term to address Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo, Montenegro, North Macedonia and Serbia as SEE post-socialist countries that aspire for EU membership.