Bottlenecks and Missing Links on the Map of Europe: High-speed Rail and the Infrastructural Territorialisation of Neoliberalism since the 1980s

The article interrogates the development of planning in the European Union since the 1990s by examining the case of the new Lyon–Turin line (NLTL), a major infrastructural project in the Trans-European Network of transport corridors. It focuses on the process of infrastructural territorialisation through which the project of European integration became embedded at the national and local scales. Drawing on ethnographic field research in Valsusa, an Alpine valley in Northwestern Italy that has been significantly affected by the NLTL’s development, the article shows how the territorialisation of an infrastructure megaproject has also coincided with the territorialisation of a distinctly contemporary form of neoliberal rule. Through a discussion of the concept of neoliberal planning, the article shows how megaproject development has been pursued in such a way as to allow economic interests to be shielded from democratic accountability. Such developments trouble linear conceptions of state sovereignty and have become concrete arenas for contemporary entanglements of sovereign power that recast relations among nation-states and between national and supranational actors. Ultimately, the case of the NLTL shows how megaprojects have the potential to become de facto guarantors of territorial development writ large far beyond the actual purpose of the infrastructure itself, subsuming local public actors to the emergent rule of cross-border partnerships in the process. This case study provides a worm’s-eye view on the politics of European governance, a perspective from the margins of Europe that provincialises European neoliberalism and highlights the sovereign entanglements through which contemporary planning occurs in practice.