From Democracy to Dromocracy: The Citizen in European Dromotopia
First draft
‘The Dromocratic Condition: Contemporary Cultures of Acceleration’ Conference, School of English, University of Newcastle upon Tyne, 12-13 March 2005
Richard Ek
The Department of Service Management
Lund University, Campus Helsingborg
Box 882
S-251 08 Helsingborg
Sweden
Abstract
Since the European Community became the European Union in 1992, the emergence of an increasingly ambitious EU spatial policy and planning project has been manifested. Through strategic spatial policy and planning initiatives, a European monotopia, a frictionless and homogeneous space of mobility and flows, is meant to be institutionalised. In this geographical vision of a future Europe, the EU citizen’s function (as it is expressed in planning and policy discourses) is no longer to take an active part in decision-making processes, but to be a geographically mobile dromocratic being. Being mobile (and legitimate the monotopic vision), seems to be the dromocratic European citizen’s primary ‘bio-power asset’ in the contemporary global condition of economic competitiveness and rivalry.
The Production of New European Union Spaces[1]
Since the European Community became the European Union back in 1992, attempts to produce new EU spaces in order to adjust the political costume to the ‘economic reality’ (regarded as a volatile and borderless global economy) and increase economic competitiveness have accelerated and amplified in ambition. Following David Harvey’s historical-geographical materialism, the EU is currently searching for a new spatio-temporal fix, a historically specific temporarily stable sociospatial configuration upon which capital’s circulation process can be accelerated and intensified.[2] Part of this ‘search’ includes the aim to institutionalise new spatial scales, in open competition with or/and as a complementary addition to the nation state. The construction of new spatial scales has initiated an uncertainty about if, and in that case, which scale level will ultimately become a new anchorage point in political and economic life in the European Union, and enjoy as dominant a position as that held by the nation state during the Fordist epoch. While the number of possible scales and scale-connected horizons of action is immense, few are likely to become institutionalised.[3]
Two spatial scales seem about to be - and in some respects already are - institutionalised.[4] The first is the spatial scale that represents the European Union as a whole. The crystallisation of the European Union as a spatial scale takes many forms, often similar to that of the state (forms of government, choices of democratic model, similar symbols such as flags, etc.)[5]. Of particular interest here, however, is the emergence of an increasingly ambitious EU spatial policy and planning apparatus. A more active spatial policy and planning machine at EU level has been regarded as a necessity, since the negative consequences of integration in the EU (as increased regional disparity and uneven development) per se have been seen as threats to further integration.[6] However, as Giannakourou has stated:
If the needs of the European integration process seem to have added a European level of spatial planning policy to that of the national states, it is the economic and institutionalproperties and dilemmas of this same [market-oriented] integration process that circumscribe the conceptual identity and the normative value of the emerging policy.[7]
In a sense, the more ambitious spatial policy and planning apparatus at EU level embodies the return of a strategic and long-term spatial policy and planning practice (similar to the vogue of ad hoc and project-based planning practices of the 1980’s), but not a return of the spatial policy and planning philosophy intertwined with the Keynesian welfare national state.[8] Instead, the contemporary EU spatial policy and planning apparatus bases its planning philosophy and its ontological foundations on a business and market-led logic.[9] For instance, business management terms and practices like ‘marketing’, ‘branding’, ‘benchmarking’, ‘SWOT analyses’, ‘business intelligence’ and ‘visioning’ are omnipresent in the spatial policy and planning apparatus of today (and not only at EU level).[10]
In particular, the increased European Union spatial policy and planning ambition has been expressed in different visions and policy documents, as well as in several of the programmes about to be implemented. One of the most important documents are the European Spatial Development Perspective (ESDP), through which it is intended to impose a common vision and planning coordination in order to implement political, economic and social objectives in the member states.[11] An important programme is the Trans-European Transport Network (TEN-T), which is a strategy to transform different national networks into a pan-European transportation and infrastructure system.[12] The purpose of these initiatives is primarily to create a common approach to spatial policy within the EU, and to ‘Europeanise’ spatial policy and planning practices at lower spatial scales (national, regional and local).[13] In order to be more persuasive, maps and other visual representations have been expressly used and referred to.[14]
Yet another programme that has been quite successful at ‘Europeanising’ spatial policy and planning practices at a regional level is INTERREG. INTERREG is one of the Community Initiatives funded by the Structural Funds, and adopted in 1990 to assist in the preparation of border areas for the removal of internal frontiers under the Single European Market.[15] These funds for regional cross-border cooperation lead us to the second spatial scale about to be institutionalised, that of the regional scale. The fact that regions in Europe have taken, and/or been given a more active role in economic, political and socio-cultural issues does not need to be elaborated upon at length here.[16] It is sufficient to say that regional ‘renaissance’ can be conceptualised in two broad categories: ‘regional democracies’ and ‘regional economies’.[17] ‘Regional democracies’ mainly refer to the subsidiary principle and the attempt to revitalise democracy and the civic condition on a regional scale.[18] Regional economies address the imperative to create or increase economic growth through an institutional co-ordination of regional ‘assets’, such as innovation capacities, learning capabilities, new forms of governance, entrepreneurial approaches, regional human capital and so on.[19] For several scholars, the contemporary regional economies embody neo-liberal ideological standpoints with regard to issues such as the relationship between economy and politics, the future of the nation state, the appropriateness of welfare equalisation and so on.[20]
The parallel processes of institutionalisation on both an EU scale and a regional scale are mutually reinforcing, since the two scale levels legitimise each other through different spatial policy and planning discourses, as well as through the establishment of network cooperation and organisations.[21] This is particularly the case when it comes to cross-border regions. These kinds of regions incarnate the efforts towards an economically integrated European Union, with political boundaries that do not prevent the flow of economic transactions, goods and services.[22] The Union has also encouraged peripheral regional areas to establish cross-border cooperation in order to reduce institutional barriers, prevent overlapping national borders, stimulate economic growth and increase competitiveness.[23] Central EU regions have initiated cross-border cooperation for similar reasons, and are also rationalising other policies in an attempt to be recognised as a ‘world city’ or a leading European urban agglomeration.[24]
Three Virilio-inspired observations concerning the production of new spaces at EU level and the (cross-border) regional level are included and discussed in this paper: ‘the importance of speed and mobility’, ‘spatial policy and planning makers as dromomaniacs’ and ‘from the democratic to the dromocratic EU citizen’. In conclusion, an exploratory discussion about the dromocratic condition in the European Union, based on the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben’s notion of the camp as a contemporary biopolitical paradigm, is put forward.
A Personal Note on Reading Virilio
Paul Virilio’s influence in the field of Humanities and the Social Sciences is been increasingly and emphatically asserted.[25] As a discipline, Human Geography has, however, been quite indifferent to or even critical of Virilio’s work.[26] One exception worth mentioning is Luke and O’Tuathail’s[27] perception of Virilio’s ideas concerning the spatiality of war, speed and vision. They put forward a strong argument for the usefulness of Virilio’s writings in the intellectual project of thinking about contemporary geopolitics, even though they have objections to his style of writing and way of reasoning.[28] Indeed, his argumentation techniques do not follow the usual academic tradition, since he does not believe in explanations and episodes, but in suggestions and tendencies.[29] He discusses social tendencies and (hints of) developmental trajectories, and suggests a possible societal direction by extrapolating the tendencies and trajectories brought forward. As a result, a literal reading of his texts is not consistent with the inward sense of his provocative course of reasoning.[30] An impressionistic reading, however, seems to be compatible to Virilio’s style of argumentation and writing.[31]
Reading Virilio’s work impressionistically is probably easier said than done, since for me, it is contrary to the positivistic training I received as a university student. In addition, it is contrary to the post-positivistic training I acquired as a PhD-student. (For instance, instinctively reacting to essential and timeless statements like ‘speed is the essence of war’[32], is to momentarily forget to read Virilio in an impressionistic way). Reading Virilio impressionistically works for me, though, when I am travelling and waiting for different forms of transport (at the railway station, the airport and so on). Virilio’s tendencies and extrapolations come alive when I, the reader, am physically embedded in the contemporary culture of speed and acceleration that Virilio writes about. I think that corporeal sensation of movement, and the impatient restlessness of waiting (for further movement) helps to shed light on Virilio’s texts. In consequence, the observations made below are, based on a reading of Virilio’s text in motion - literally.
The Production of New European Union Spaces – Virilio-inspired Observations[33]
The Importance of Speed and Mobility
The variables of speed and mobility are deemed as being tremendously important in the spatial policy and planning discourses at EU-level as well on the regional scale. Jensen and Richardson argue that a vision of a monotopic EU has emerged and crystallised. Its advocates (politicians and the spatial policy and planning apparatus) imagine it as a future European Utopia.[34] This Monotopia is a conceptualisation of the European Union as a trans-national territory that is organised and planned in order to obtain a frictionless mobility (no barriers to slow down or hinder different flows) and allows the highest possible speed.[35]
However, even if Monotopia is expressed through such metaphors as ‘level playing field’, it is based on a very hierarchic geographical imagination.[36] Different places and regions within and outside the EU are conceptualised, juxtaposed and related to each other and functionally restructured from an EU perspective in a new entirety with new centres and peripheries, ‘bottlenecks’ and ‘corridors’, ‘missing links’[37] and central ‘nodes’ and so on. Monotopia therefore contains a hierarchy of speeds:[38]
In a larger perspective, a Europe in different speeds reveals itself – regions with growth and new technology, connected to the future, and regions with traditional and shrinking industries. Advocates of high-speed landscapes and low-speed landscapes will find each other across the old national borders …[39]
According to the promoters of Monotopia, in order to gain frictionless mobility and increase the speed of flows (of people, goods, services, capital, etc), a more developed infrastructure is necessary. Infrastructure therefore has a unique significance in the spatial policy and planning discourses concerning the EU, as well as in political and economic discourses of European integration in general. There are several reasons for this. The most crucial is that the notion of the necessity of a trans-national infrastructure network has become deeply embedded in European policy[40] (at least since the early 1980’s) that it permeates - and even constitutes - the raison d’être of the European Union integration per se.
The same could be said when it comes to regions. As a monotopic vision, the Öresund region is based upon and rotates around the Öresund Bridge as the fixed link between its two main cities, Copenhagen and Malmö. Although the Öresund region is conceptually wider than the Öresund Bridge, it could not survive as a spatial policy and planning discourse without it. On the other hand, the decision taken in 1994 to build the bridge was, at least partly, the result of a collective understanding that regions and trans-national cooperation would be more common in the future.
Öresund is not the only example of ’region-infrastructure link’ interplay. Recently, the geographical notion of megacorridors (sometimes called ‘eurocorridors’), defined as a combination of at least one important infrastructure axis with heavy flows of cross-border traffic and linking urban agglomerations together, has increased in importance within EU spatial policy and planning discourses, not least through strategic documents such as TEN-T.[41] The megacorridor is not only regarded as a criss-cross infrastructure created by the European Union spatial policy and planning apparatus, but also as a development area in a wider sense. In the ESDP it is argued that:
The spatial concept of eurocorridors can establish connections between the sector policies of, say, transport, infrastructure, economic development, urbanisation and environment. The development perspective for eurocorridors, should clearly indicate the areas where the growth of activities can be clustered and the areas which are to be protected as open space.[42]
The corridor is defined in terms of traffic engineering (an infrastructure axis) as a relationship between opportunities for economic development and a major traffic axis (an economic development axis), and the basis for the directions of future urbanisation (an urbanisation axis). The assumption is that infrastructure and traffic are not only derived from social and economic processes in general, but also determine these processes.[43] Since it is about infrastructure, economic development and urban growth, it is in every major city’s or region’s interest to be a part of as many corridors as possible, or at least be a part of one major corridor in the European landscape of infrastructure.[44] As the infrastructure map of Europe is in the process of being rewritten, an advantageous position in terms of European space is seen to be of the uttermost importance.
Since the stakes are deemed to be so high, ‘corridor thinking’ has come to be more than just a question of fast trains and highways. ‘Corridor thinking’ and ‘region thinking’ melt into each other as much of Europe becomes covered by ‘super regions’ based on infrastructure and urban clusters.[45] For instance, the self-claimed ‘European Corridor’ infrastructure project (stretching from Stockholm to Berlin) argued:
The European corridor is not a railway project, and it’s not about how to get from A to B as quickly as possible. The corridor is a region where development and growth is important for Sweden and other Nordic countries – and for Europe as a whole.[46]
Spatial Policy and Planning Makers as Dromomaniacs
A couple of planning theorists have pointed out that planners and policymakers in the EU are themselves constantly on the move, like ‘a roving band of planners’.[47] As for other professionals ‘on the move’ (such as academics[48]), mobility is natural and at the same time regarded as a natural condition. The roving band of EU planners (as well as other spatial policy makers), seen as a ‘speed class’[49] embedded in a professional culture of mobility, either do not seem to question mobility, or internal critical voices are silenced or marginalized by the spatial policy and planning apparatus in the EU and in the regions alike.
At risk of being regarded as rather drastic, I would nevertheless argue that, in a schematic comparison, spatial policy and planning makers behave like ‘dromomaniacs’. In psychiatry, the term dromomaniac refers to compulsive walkers. Virilio, however, discusses the term in relation to the mobilisation of the street as a political territory; where the dromomaniacs are the mob in motion.[50] Luke and O’Tuathail instead use the word ‘dromointellectuals’, which advocates a freely floating interaction in space without any barriers, and for actions and practices that result in a homogenisation of space so that the friction of distance is minimised.[51]
In the case of the Öresund region, several of the spokespersons that set the tone in the 1990’s could easily be counted as dromomaniacs or dromointellectuals. To take one example, in the Danish futurologist Uffe Paludan’s visionary book, ‘The Possibilities of the Öresund Bridge’,[52] ten snapshots of the future are presented.[53] The book unfolds a future ‘landscape of events’.[54] We can read stories about a sociology student attending seminars at the universities of Copenhagen and Lund on the same morning; a Danish pensioner that easily and conveniently travels from his house in Hvidovre (south of Copenhagen) to his summer house in Falsterbo (in the extreme south-eastern part of Scania); and a Danish youth who acts on an impulse while in a cafe in Copenhagen in the morning and goes skiing in Småland (a landscape to the north of Scania) that afternoon.[55] In similar vein, the Danish and Swedish Ministers of Industry, Employment and Communications wrote in a joint newspaper article that:
A lot can be changed when an hour on the water [by ferry] becomes ten minutes across it [by the Öresund Bridge]. It should not take longer than that to take the train or the car to work, to go to the cinema or restaurant, or to meet your boy or girlfriend. That’s what integration is all about.[56]
A Swedish ethnologist commented upon this belief in speed among regional dromomaniacs or dromointellectuals. In a newspaper interview, Fredrik Nilsson argued that:
There is a blind faith among the Establishment regarding these questions [about speed]; an almost frightening accord. They talk about what it will be like to take the train and how you can “whiz” over to Copenhagen. They are incredibly fixated with the time that you can save. Even if the bridge doesn’t really change the journey very much, travelling acquires a different political significance.[57]
In a sense, the regional dromomaniacs or dromointellectuals seems to have a geographical imagination, which is very similar to that of Italian Futurists like Marinetti: ‘Hoorah! No more contact with the vile earth’,[58] and ‘this delirious joy of speed that transcends the infinity of dreams’.[59] These chronopolitical statements also seem to be based on a geographical imagination that favours a relative conception of time-space, rather than an absolute conception of space and time.[60] Repeatedly, the vision of an integrated Öresund region has been represented as a compressed area, with a shape that is not based on physical geography or geology but on changes of travelling time. This particular chronopolitical representation has usually been visualised through maps used for the purpose of specific cartographic practice and knowledge developed in the spatial policy and planning apparatus (aided by scholars in human geography) in the 1990’s and early 21st Century.[61] Almost like colonial powers, regional dromomaniacs or dromointellectuals have been cutting Europe up into pieces/regions since the early 1980’s. Matthew Sparke regards this mapping practice as something: ‘akin to the kinds of military cartography that once filled European war rooms’[62] or bunkers.