Eda Kranakis

This project will explore the history and governance of European airspace since 1918, viewing airspace as a transnational commons. It aims to highlight the enduring role of commons in developing and maintaining traditions of cooperation, sharing, and collective management. Airspace is a unique commons for several reasons. First, although often overlooked, or seen merely as empty space beyond human society, airspace has helped to generate social, cultural, and economic wealth through the many activities and relationships that stem from air mobility. Air travel depends on a transnational system of governance of airspace, and it is this system of collective governance that has made it possible for millions of passengers and parcels to travel through European airspace every day, where and when they want, generally with a high degree of safety and limited delays, knowing in advance when and where they will depart and land. The resulting flow of ideas, traditions, people, and goods has played a key role in building Europe as a social, cultural, economic, and political space. Without ignoring powerful, negative consequences of airspace use (e.g. military, environmental), this project focuses upon European airspace as a commons of civil society, exploring how growing accommodation to civilian traffic has also affected its use as a military tool. Second, airspace is unique because it is highly technologized. The ability to exploit airspace as a common resource, the limits of its exploitation-the level and density of the traffic flows that can be safely accommodated-depend on a profusion of technologies as well as organizational arrangements. Airspace is thus a useful context in which to understand how technology has figured in accessing, exploiting, and sustainably managing commons. Third, as suggested above, airspace is a commons that links national security concerns in unique ways with market and mobility issues. National military use of airspace must be balanced against goals of increasing transnational mobility and extending transnational markets, both of which lie at the heart of the European integration project. It is important to understand how this balance has been regulated in Europe since WWI and with what consequences. Fourth, European airspace is an instructive commons because its governance evolved as an intricate coordination between public and private entities, civilian and military authorities, and organizations and legal regimes at the national, European, and global levels. Commons scholarship has tended to foster an "either/or" approach to governance: to prevent tragedies of overuse and decline, it was argued, commons either had to be privatized or controlled by a central authority. Yet it is now recognized that more complex solutions might be preferable. European airspace offers a significant example of a more complex, and largely successful system.
European airspace has become partly nationalized, partly privatized, partly Europeanized, and partly liberalized, while its system of governance has become more open and transparent. Cultural theorists have been sensitive to airspace as a site and symbol of modernity, as one of the defining "non-places" of the 20th century and its culture of mobility. Yet whereas cultural theorists have viewed airspace mainly from the consumption side, this study will focus on its production side-how airspace has been constructed and controlled over the 20th century, focusing on the specificity of European airspace. The history of European airspace offers a unique example of technopolitical and technocultural change. The dynamic interaction between technology, governance, and use of airspace deserves to be explored for what it can tell us about the process of European integration and its relation to globalization, about the collective governance of transnational resources, and ultimately about the creation and control of one of the defining locations of 20th century mobility.

Full proposal

Prof.Eda Kranakis works at the University of Ottowa, Canada.

This project is funded by Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) for a period of three years.