Alexander Badenoch  

Status: Completed 

It is now a common practice for those who seek to define “Europe” as an entity distinct from various Others to make reference either alternately or simultaneously to Europe’s ‘history’ as well as its ‘progress’[1]. Particularly as the loosely-defined geographical space of Europe becomes increasingly synonymous with the institutions of the European Union, the latter have sought to legitimate themselves by appropriating the various pasts of the former to invent a common European tradition based on democracy, law and civil society. Historians have quickly and rightly pointed to the number of European ‘traditions,’ such as colonialism, slavery and fascism, that such narratives were forgetting. They have been slower, however, to explore the material connections between the regions and nations of Europe that were in place before the formal processes of political integration had begun, and what effect this might have had in generating generating such a sense of a common European history and identity.

This project seeks to explore this question by adopting a methodology of collective memory, asking whether and how images of a common European past were mobilised in and around Europe’s transnational infrastructures as they developed in the 20th Century. This approach draws generally on the work of Benedict Anderson and Michael Billig on national identity[2], both of whom look to the way people are reminded through a series of everyday interactions of their connection with unseen, imagined others; it draws more specifically on the collective memory methodology of Alon Confino in his study on local and national identity in Wurttemberg, where he shows how the various conflicting local memories became accommodated in national narratives, thereby making the nation ‘everyday mental property’[3]

Adopting such an approach that looks to expressions of the past in everyday interactions is well-suited to the study of transnational infrastructures. Infrastructures seem at once stable parts of everyday existence, and yet they constantly change and develop. Their ongoing expansion and innovation give users a sense of ongoing progress, while, by building on top of pre-existing systems, they create links with the past. The ubiquity of such systems makes them available to a wide range of users to mobilise not only people and goods across vast areas of space, but memories and symbols as well. Through everyday use and through periodic re-symbolisation, infrastructures are not only systems through which communities are imagined, infrastructures can also become symbols that stand in place of those communities, can be imbued with gender traits, given moral value, or otherwise be used as expressions of belonging or exclusion. While they are ready frameworks for many narratives of memory, infrastructures also provide ready means of forgetting the contestation in their own development  s well as those who are excluded from them. By exploring these processes of narrative formation historically, such moments of contestation and exclusion can be made visible.

One aspect of this project, in co-ordination with the PhD projects on the various infrastructures, will be to engage in a large scale collection of the images produced through and by the various infrastructures involved. This will include company logos, promotional materials for various projects, posters, cartoons, and other materials that come to light. By analysing this collection, I will be able to see if a consistent pattern of symbols and symbolic strategies can be observed in use around Europe's various transnational connections.

In addition to the ‘normal,’ everyday symbolism of infrastructures, this project will also look to how the meanings of transnational infrastructures in Europe have shaped and been shaped by two ‘exceptional’ processes of mass mobilitity in the 20th Century: war and tourism. Both activities involve the mobilisation of large numbers of people into standardised, stylised encounters with stereotyped ‘others’. This mobilisation, futhermore, demands the co-ordination of a large number of technical systems to move, accommodate and feed their participants. Because of this, both processes have drawn on many of the same physical systems (roads, rail, hotels, communication) as well as similar symbolic systems (both calling on and compromising specific national images), and many of the same sorts of symbolic materials (posters, pre-printed postcards, journals). In addition to their similarities, and in spite of the fact that they are considered antithetical, warfare and tourism have also been linked in a number of ways, not least through the technological systems they use. The building of infrastructures for tourists has long been seen as peace-promoting activity. Tourism has been seen after both World Wars as a means of generating badly-needed revenue. Many of the transnational systems that were built to wage war were quickly re-adapted for tourists – even while war still continued, as was the case in many of the places occupied by Nazi Germany. Furthermore, visiting sites seen during war has been a major motivation for tourism.

Case studies under development will examine the shifting uses of various infrastructures between modes of war and tourism to explore the continuities and discontinuites of the symbols employed around them, and the processes of remembering and forgetting this symbolic usage implies.  

[1] Donald Rumsfeld’s recent revival of
the term “Old Europe” shows that these definitions are not always
positive.

[2] Benedict Anderson Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread
of Nationalism (London: Verso 1991); Michael Billig Banal
Nationalism (London: Sage 1995)

[3] Alon Confino The Nation as a Local Metaphor (Chapel Hill: UNC Press
1999).