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Reviewed by:
  • Driving Europe: Building Europe on Roads in the Twentieth Century
  • Hans-Liudger Dienel (bio)
Driving Europe: Building Europe on Roads in the Twentieth Century. By Frank Schipper. Amsterdam: Aksant, 2008. Pp 318. €30.

Frank Schipper writes in the context of the large European (and indeed transatlantic) research consortium Tensions of Europe, which seeks to recount and illuminate European integration with a history-of-technology focus on the twentieth century. A revised dissertation, his work is in the true spirit of the "ToE" Network: it takes a European perspective, uses [End Page 500] supranational archives primarily, emphasizes the importance of the subject matter for Europe, and, above all, relates the history of transport with the history of Europe's political integration.

Schipper delivers persuasively structured evidence that a European network of highways was the subject of intense cross-national debates and planning during the interwar years—long before the age of mass motorization and the beginning of most major highway construction programs. But a disadvantage of emphasizing the interwar years—with their often-visionary plans not yet pared down by the travails of everyday political life—might be a lack of attention to the actual epoch of transcontinental European highway construction after 1970 and to the activities of the European Union, particularly after 1985. These periods are truncated in the book, as is Schipper's attention to the causes of EU passivity between the transport-politically ambitious 1957 Treaty of Rome and the European Commission's successful action concerning a lack of transport-political activity that was brought against the European Council of Ministers in the European Court of Justice from 1983 to 1995.

Schipper more then makes up for this with striking new material about many supranational organizations before and after the formation of the EU. In the postwar period, the influence of these organizations resulted, among other things, fromthe geographic restrictions of a European Economic Commission (EEC) that was still quite small and limited to Western Europe. Europe itself and many European transport-political movements were significantly larger, even on the other side of the iron curtain. Only when the curtain fell could the EU grow toward the East to absorb the transport-political functions served by other organizations. The influence of the EEC was based on the fact that, as a United Nations committee, it also had Eastern European members and could speak for Europe at large, while groups like the European Conference of Ministers of Transport (ECMT) were predominantly—but not entirely—limited to the West. The ECMT could, however, have implementation-based debates because the responsible minister of transport was right there at the table.

In the quite-independent chapters of the book, Schipper captivates the reader with a clever mixture of descriptions of strategic perspectives and very concrete processes of implementation. He has discovered many contrastive plans, ranging from the vision of a "European Public Works" for joint transnational road construction developed in 1930 by Albert Thomas, director of the International Labour Organization (related to the League of Nations)—which was enthusiastically welcomed by highway enthusiasts throughout Europe—to Francis Delasi's 1931 visionary plan for the Comité Federal de Coopération Européenne to create an Eastern European road network as a feeder for the existing rail and canal system in order to integrate the agrarian Europe of the East and the industrialized Europe of the West. Examples of an enthusiastic planning history before 1945 are followed [End Page 501] by case studies of concrete transport projects after 1945, particularly the introduction of E-road networks, the regulation of European long-distance bus travel, and the debate over the maximum weight and standardization of freight vehicles and Euro pallets. Schipper does not sufficiently address the perspective of transport users, but the important dimension of leisure transport and tourism is represented by an analysis of motor clubs in the early decades of the twentieth century and their fight for free travel across borders, and by a study of international bus lines.

The book's great strength lies in the differentiated description of the multiplicity of transport-political associations in the twentieth century. The League of Nations, which has previously been perceived primarily as...

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