Territoriality and the European infrastructure system

Abstract

The territorial state is at the core of the international system, with each state seeking to assert its territoriality (through a set of enabling strategies) over the portion of the earth’s surface that is recognised by all other states as being under its jurisdiction (Taylor 1994, 1995). Central to these territorial strategies is the provision of territorially extensive economic infrastructures (see below for formal definition) with sufficient capacity and development to enable the intense and prompt flow of both state and non-state tangible and non-tangible resources to enable the state to control, integrate, secure and develop that territory under its jurisdiction (Turner 2018, 2020). This underlines that the state needs to offer universal access to the infrastructure system as a means of enabling its territoriality. These territorial strategies have been subject to the adaptive tensions formed by economic, social and technological change. One such adaptive tension was and is the trend towards regionalism within the international system, where regionalism is defined as the formal and informal processes of economic, social and political interaction, interdependence and even integration across and between contiguous and semi-contiguous territorial states (Dehousse et al. 1990, Söderbaum 2012).1 This chapter explores the form and nature of the adaptive tension of regionalism on the territorial state largely within the context of the pressures this places on national infrastructure systems (NIS). In particular, the chapter will focus on the exemplar of this trend provided by the ongoing processes of European integration and how this is creating adaptive tensions promoting the re-infrastructuring of NIS as a response to these forces of change. In so doing, the focus is upon contemporary events and processes, not upon the history of regionalism and regional infrastructuring across Europe.2 Initially the chapter explores the form