The Re-Emergence of a European Rail Network: Battles Between a National Socio-Democratic, Neo-Liberal and Cosmopolitan Socio-Political Stream

In spite of many calls for improvements to international rail connections, an integrated European rail network of high-speed, inter-regional and night trains is still lacking. This study considers how political economy structures influence the integration of the European network. We introduce the concept of sociopolitical stream, “A set of interests, belief systems, practices and affects about the relative importance of societal problems and the most appropriate actor and geographical scale to address these problems” to analyze the dominant rationales regarding the international rail sector. Traditionally, rail traffic has been the domain of national, publicly owned companies. Due to liberalization, also new private companies have entered international rail. An alternative stream entails the organization of international rail as a European public good. We ask the following questions: 1. How do sociopolitical streams surrounding international rail, as well as the actor coalitions supporting them, relate to the European rail revival? 2. What can a perspective of sociopolitical streams add our understanding of market governance in the context of sustainability transitions? Our study adds to political economy debates on privatization and market governance in sectors fulfilling key societal functions such as energy, mobility and housing (Bognetti & Obermann, 2008; Megginson & Netter, 2001). These debates were largely conducted in the stable socio-economic climate of the nineties, and centered solely on the criterion of economic efficiency. However, it remains unclear what optimal governance structures are in current times of profound socio-technical transformations, marked by international sustainability crises and different evaluation criteria. Conceptually, our approach centering sociopolitical streams also adds to the sustainability transitions literature (Geels, 2002; Köhler et al., 2019). This field has recently recognized the importance of different varieties of capitalism for the trajectories of sustainability transitions (Feola, 2020; Loewen, 2022a), yet still lacks conceptual tools to better integrate these structures in the highly process-oriented frameworks for understanding socio-technical change towards sustainability. Methodologically, we use discourse analysis and discourse network analysis (DNA) to map the development of sociopolitical streams governing international rail, as well as the actor coalitions supporting them. The latter method has recently proven fruitful to analyze and visualize the social and political dynamics of sustainability transformations, in a variety of sectors (Markard et al., 2021; Yap et al., 2023). We study the development of socio-political streams in international rail for seven European countries forming the core of the Western European Network (Belgium, The Netherlands, France, Austria, Switzerland, United Kingdom, Germany) for the period 2000-2024 using the Nexis Uni database. We also conduct interviews with key sectoral informants. Our study provides insight in how political-economic debates about the role of state and market, as well as international integration, shape sustainability transformations. Empirically, we provide insights and recommendations for the political and policy process to decarbonize long-distance travel, which has so far proven to be very difficult.