The TEN-T Transportation Network and its Impact on European Integration
At the core of European economic integration lies the single market, which, since the creation of the EEC in 1957, has increasingly allowed the free movement of people, goods, capital, and services by abolishing physical, economic, and legal barriers to these four fundamental freedoms. However, a quite important obstacle to the free flow of goods and people was – and still is – the transportation networks of the Member States, which even though were built to connect cities within the same countries, they lack good connection across borders. For this reason, even if there are no legal barriers between EU countries, it often takes much time to transport goods across the Union.
For this reason, the Trans-European Transport Network policy, TEN-T for short, was designed. As the name suggests, it’s a network of different transport infrastructures that comprises railways, roads, airports, inland waterways, and short sea shipping routes. It links together different corners of the European Union, touching all major urban areas, and its purpose is to reduce bottleneck at border-crossings within the Union, thus reducing the time needed to move across the continent, the cost of doing so and the consequent extra pollution.
The first action plan on trans-European networks was adopted by the Commission in 1990, and the European Parliament together with the Council made the decision to plan a transportation network in 1996. During the following years the proposal was revised and amended, also to accommodate the EU enlargement.
A crucial step was made in 2013, when new Regulations defined two layers for this project: a Core network – divided into nine corridors, to be completed by 2030 – and a Comprehensive network, to be completed by 2050. The Core network will connect major cities and nodes, while the Comprehensive network will connect all regions of the EU to the Core.
The nine corridors span across the Old Continent, from the shores of the Atlantic to Ukraine, from the Baltic and North seas to the heart of the Mediterranean, linking countries and cities. They are the following: the Atlantic and the Mediterranean corridors, the Baltic-Adriatic corridor, the North Sea-Baltic, the North Sea-Mediterranean and the Scandinavian-Mediterranean corridors, the Orient/East-Med corridor, the Rhine-Alpine and the Rhine-Danube corridors.
Overall, all EU Member States are linked together, with many of them connected to more than one corridor: Italy, for example, is crossed by the Mediterranean, the Scandinavian-Mediterranean, the North Sea-Mediterranean and the Baltic-Adriatic corridors.
The two-layers framework was updated in 2021 with a revision carried out by the Commission, which introduced a third, intermediate layer: the extended-core network, which should be completed by 2040. The purpose of this revision is to line up the TEN-T project with the environmental goals of the European Green Deal. Indeed, this newer version should be able to cut transportation-related emission by 90%, by focusing more on railroads and short waterways.
The project is financed mainly by Member States, but the Union contributes through many programs together with private investments. The main EU funding instrument is the Connecting Europe Facility (CEF), which made available EUR 25.8 billion to co-finance TEN-T projects in the period 2021-2027. Other sources of European funding are the Cohesion Fund, the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF) and loans from the European Investment Bank.
We can better understand the importance of EU-level funding if we consider the idea of externalities: Member States may not be willing to accept the burden of linking their national transportation infrastructure with neighbouring countries because they don't consider the positive externality that a third-party country would receive. This is the reason why the presence of the EU is pivotal to the development of projects like this: when analysing costs and benefits, it factors in the positive externality of an infrastructure that links two MS over other countries, and thus is willing to fund them.
The TEN-T network’s primary goal is of course to foster socio-economic integration between Member States by allowing seamless transport across borders, but it has also another important strategic purpose. Indeed, it can be used to enable swift large or small-scale movements of military personnel and assets across the Union with short reaction times.
The infrastructures that are being built and upgraded must meet certain criteria of resilience in the event of natural disasters or security threats, in order to be capable of operating under any circumstance. Of course, nobody hopes to see troops marching to the front or tanks and military trucks running on our highways, but the recent developments of the international geopolitical situation cannot be underestimated. The TEN-T network is a key component of Europe’s ability to defend itself, even without a common security policy.
Despite the target of 2030 for the completion of the Core Network, delays all over Europe may push back this deadline. Indeed, in 2020, the European Court of Auditors found that most of the corridors are unlikely to become fully operational by 2030. The reasons for this are a general lack of effective coordination among most Member States, unforeseen costs that will likely make the projects more expensive by billions of euros, and – last but not least – the Covid pandemic and the consequent lockdowns which slowed down or even stopped the constructions for a certain period of time. For example, some German access lines to the Brenner Base Tunnel, which links Munich and Verona and is an essential section of the Scandinavian-Mediterranean corridor, are expected to be delayed by more than a decade, and in general the tunnel is likely to not be operable until over the 2030 deadline. Similar delays are expected to affect the Lyon-Turin high-speed rail, which is already one of the most controversial transport infrastructures in Europe, or the Basque-Y high-speed railway that links Spain and France.
Nevertheless, the TEN-T network remains a cornerstone of future European integration. Its construction will accompany the developments of the Union for the next few decades, and upon completion we will benefit from a true and total freedom of movement, a more environmentally and economically sustainable flow of goods and from a strategically resilient continent-wide infrastructure. Projects like this could not exists without the European Union, and the European Union would not be truly united without them.
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