Paper has always been stronger than the sword, even stronger than a Leopard A2 tank with a 140mm smoothbore gun. In the hectic scenario of Eastern Europe and Russia's war of aggression against Ukraine, the resort to a community regulation begins to remove the foundations of post-Soviet geopolitics from that portion of the map. I am referring to article 49.6 of the community regulation referring to the trans-European transport network.
Let's back up a bit. May 5, 2022, dawn in Brussels with the sharp cool of the Belgian morning. Seven degrees that, due to the light wind from the northeast, transmits a colder feeling. Lapels of the coat turned up and glass of coffee in hand. The clear sky allows the sun to begin caressing the windows of the European Commission building. Inside, the soft orange carpets prevent the footsteps of the entourage heading towards one of the meeting rooms from being heard. The translation booths around her are empty.
Of the people who went to meet that cold morning, the Ukrainian delegation stands out. He is carrying under his arm the revision of the formal petition that a year ago the Government of Volodímir Zelenski presented to the European Commission: the activation of article 49.6 of regulation 1315/2013 of the European Union. That May 5, the Russian armored divisions had already entered tens of kilometers into Ukrainian territory, but that request had come months before. The country's diplomacy knew what was coming.
EU regulation 1315, approved in 2013, is a fundamental piece of the European project: it designs its transport network, that mesh, that grid of material realities that must support every political project and without which it would be smoke. On this exoskeleton of infrastructures, made up of railways, highways, ports, airports and connected urban nodes, the Union is developing an ambitious project: to articulate a mobility of people and goods suitable for civil and military use, fully interoperable, beyond borders and of legal provisions that, since the 16th century, have been forging the national identity of their states.
Officials determined to carry out this herculean project work oblivious to political statements and interviews in the media. This "imperial" scale European project, in the style of the roads that built, maintained and gave splendor to the Roman Empire two thousand years ago, began to be traced only ten years ago. And although the Roman antecedent may be the most appropriate for our history and geography, it is by no means the only one.
Possibly on some wall of an office of the General Directorate of Mobility and Transport in Brussels (better known as DG-MOVE) hangs a map of the North American National System of Interstate and Defense Highways, the ambitious plan that President Dwight D. Eisenhower launched. march to build a complete system of interstate highways that today exceeds 75,000 kilometers.
Curiously, it is often insisted that this initiative arose as a result of the request and pressure of the main automobile manufacturers in the country. It isn't true. In the official title of the plan, the strategic concept of the initiative is quite evident: when Eisenhower was Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces in Europe during World War II, he was amazed by the German autobahn network.
The American plan to build a network of highways that would allow the structuring of the North American territory and effective mobility in case of need was born with the arrival of Eisenhower to power in 1953 and was developed thanks to a federal law of 1956. But we must not forget that already in 1919, the American army had sent a convoy of vehicles from one part of the country to another to verify not only the time required for it, but also the material, logistical and road conditions of a movement of this style.
On board one of the 81 trucks that left Washington and 62 days later arrived at their destination, the Golden Gate in San Francisco, was a young 28-year-old officer: his name was Dwight D. Eisenhower. I wonder what the result of this trip would be if a unit of the Eurocorps, the embryonic army that the European Union is developing based on the Franco-German brigade that Kohl and Mitterrand launched in 1989, decided to travel with their trucks and armored vehicles route between Algeciras and Tallinn.
In 2021, with an intuition of what was about to happen, the Ukrainian government asked the EU to activate article 49.6 of rRegulation 1315/2013, which specifies that powers will be granted to the Commission to adopt delegated acts in order to adjust the Trans-European Transport Network to include or adapt indicative maps of neighboring countries, based on high-level agreements on their transport infrastructure.
Beyond the administrative jargon, what this article means is that the Commission has the capacity to include coordination and extension to neighboring countries among its plans regarding the material framework on which the transit and mobility of the continent will be based. Ukraine knew this and in 2021 requested its application, vehemently supported by Poland. It must be said that this same article is helping Brussels begin to analyze the adaptation of the road and rail map to the countries of the Western Balkans, that is, to Albania, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Montenegro, North Macedonia and Serbia.
Contrary to what is thought, geopolitics is not built with battle tanks, but with maps and projections. The mysterious Caucasus, the throbbing Balkans and the Ukrainian plains bustle like cassola en forn, as our Ausiàs March would say. The distance and the barrier of the Pyrenees can make us lose perspective, but matters are being decided that could substantially alter the map of the Europe of the future and we should be very attentive to their consequences for this portion of the Mediterranean.
