Networking Europe: Transnational Infrastructures and the Shaping of Europe, 1850–2000 (review)

Networking Europe investigates the role that infrastructure has played in connecting as well as separating the countries of Europe. Nine well-researched case studies demonstrate the close connections between the linking and delinking of technological systems on the one hand and the integration and disintegration of political and economic structures on the other hand. Taken together, these case studies prove the relevance of the history of technology to political and economic history. If we want to understand the process of European unification, for example, we cannot look at political documents alone; we also need to immerse ourselves in the archives of organizations such as the International Road Federation and the European Conference of Post and Telecommunications Administrations.

Coeditors Erik van der Vleuten and Arne Kaijser locate their book within the historiographic tradition of “large technological systems.” Rather than focusing primarily on individual system builders or the emergence of nationally delimited infrastructures, however, they address the activities of international institutions and analyze the development of cross-national systems. Not unexpectedly, this involves the study of communications, energy, and transportation networks. Helmut Maier examines the place of the power grid in the terror politics of the Third Reich. Léonard Laborie considers efforts to create a more efficient Western European telecommunications system. Per Högselius’s exciting chapter on the “Electricity Systems in the Baltic Region” shows that large technical systems, despite their inertia, remain heavily dependent on political processes. The editors are to be commended for having solicited contributions from areas not usually considered in the Anglo-Saxon literature. Aristotle Tympas and Irene Anastasiadou discuss the many attempts to link Greece with eastern and central Europe by means of railroads and highways, while Ana Paula Silva and Maria Paula Diogo analyze how Portugal managed to position itself in international affairs by means of its telegraph policy.

Personally, I was most intrigued by Judith Schueler’s analysis of the Gotthard Tunnel and the Swiss railroad system in terms of “the rich symbolic role of the Gotthard Railways and its environment in Swiss society” (p. 72). Her sources are not timeworn archival materials; rather, she has initiated conversations with people living along the railroad lines, and hers is a kind of historical-anthropological study of how traditions are invented and how technology becomes integrated into national mythologies. The Gotthard, she writes, is not just a tunnel or a mountain; it is “a junction of symbols, icons, images, and narratives embedded in the history of the Swiss nation” (p. 83).

Although van der Vleuten and Kaijser’s volume deserves the attention of historians, their introductory and concluding chapters are somewhat weak. Who would expect the development of large technical systems not to be “characterized by ambiguities and tensions” (p. 4) or not encompass “ideological, sociotechnical, and contested aspects” (p. 306)? Their title refers to both the “soft” cooperation between individuals and organizations and the “hard,” grid-based connections between different countries. It could also be a label for the art of collaboration which made the volume possible in the first place: thirteen authors from six countries, under the auspices of Tensions of Europe, a network of some two hundred researchers, primarily but not exclusively historians of technology, who have been engaged with one another since the turn of the millennium. Networking Europe is the first collection of essays to be published as a result of this collaboration. More is to come.