From Democracy to Dromocracy: The Citizen in European Dromotopia

First draft

‘The Dromocratic Condition: Contemporary Cultures of Acceleration’ Conference, School of English, University of

Newcastle upon Tyne, 12-13 March 2005

Richard Ek

The Department of Service ManagementLund University, Campus Helsingborg

Box 882S-251 08 Helsingborg

Sweden

Richard.Ek@msm.hbg.lu.se

Abstract

Since the European Community became the European Union in 1992, the emergence of an increasingly ambitious EU spatial policy and planning project has been manifested. Through strategic spatial policy and planning initiatives, a European monotopia, a frictionless and homogeneous space of mobility and flows, is meant to be institutionalised. In this geographical vision of a future Europe, the EU citizen’s function (as it is expressed in planning and policy discourses) is no longer to take an active part in decision-making processes, but to be a geographically mobile dromocratic being. Being mobile (and legitimate the monotopic vision), seems to be the dromocratic European citizen’s primary ‘bio-power asset’ in the contemporary global condition of economic competitiveness and rivalry.

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The Production of New European Union Spaces1

Since the European Community became the European Union back in 1992, attempts to produce new EU spaces in order to adjust the political costume to the ‘economic reality’ (regarded as a volatile and borderless global economy) and increase economic competitiveness have accelerated and amplified in ambition. Following David Harvey’s historical-geographical materialism, the EU is currently searching for a new spatio-temporal fix, a historically specific temporarily stable sociospatial configuration upon which capital’s circulation process can be accelerated and intensified.2 Part of this ‘search’ includes the aim to institutionalise new spatial scales, in open competition with or/and as a complementary addition to the nation state. The construction of new spatial scales has initiated an uncertainty about if, and in that case, which scale

1 I would like to thank Øforsk and the Centre for European Studies, Lund University, for financing the research projects ’Two Nations for the Price of One?’ and ’European Mega-corridors’ respectively, from which this paper arises.2 See Harvey 2003 for an accessible description.

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level will ultimately become a new anchorage point in political and economic life in the European Union, and enjoy as dominant a position as that held by the nation state during the Fordist epoch. While the number of possible scales and scale-connected horizons of action is immense, few are likely to become institutionalised.3

Two spatial scales seem about to be - and in some respects already are - institutionalised.4 The first is the spatial scale that represents the European Union as a whole. The crystallisation of the European Union as a spatial scale takes many forms, often similar to that of the state (forms of government, choices of democratic model, similar symbols such as flags, etc.)5. Of

3 Jessop 2002, Brenner 2004.4 The Finnish geographer, Anssi Paasi, has written about the institutionalisation of territories of a specific scale, which he divides into four stages: the development of territorial shape, the formation of symbolic shape, the emergence of institutions and the reproduction of the territory. The first stage includes the demarcation of space, the inclusion of a territorial unity and, simultaneously, an exclusion of surrounding areas. Secondly, the formation of symbolic shape refers to the establishment of a number of territorial symbols crucial to creating a symbolic significance for the demarcated territory. Of specific importance is the naming of the region. Furthermore, symbols, such as flags, monuments and buildings, are developed in order to represent the common interests of the inhabitants. Thirdly, the emergence of institutions includes the crystallisation of local and non-local practices in the spheres of politics, legislation, economics and administration, and in formal organisations in the media, education and so on. Finally, the territory is reproduced when it has achieved an established status in a wider spatial structure. For Paasi, the ‘culmination point’ of this stage is when the territory gains an administrative role that integrates it with a surrounding system of public administrative practices (Paasi 1991 & 1996).5 Anderson 2002.

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particular interest here, however, is the emergence of an increasingly ambitious EU spatial policy and planning apparatus. A more active spatial policy and planning machine at EU level has been regarded as a necessity, since the negative consequences of integration in the EU (as increased regional disparity and uneven development) per se have been seen as threats to further integration.6 However, as Giannakourou has stated:

If the needs of the European integration process seem to have added a European level of spatial planning policy to that of the national states, it is the economic and

institutional properties and dilemmas of this same [market-oriented] integration process that circumscribe the conceptual identity and the normative value of the emerging policy.7

In a sense, the more ambitious spatial policy and planning apparatus at EU level embodies the return of a strategic and long-term spatial policy and planning practice (similar to the vogue of ad hoc and project-based planning practices of the 1980’s), but not a return of the spatial policy and planning philosophy intertwined with the Keynesian welfare national state.8 Instead, the contemporary EU spatial policy and planning apparatus bases its planning philosophy and its ontological foundations on a business and market-led logic.9 For instance, business management terms and practices like ‘marketing’, ‘branding’, ‘benchmarking’, ‘SWOT analyses’,

6 Kunzmann 1998, Lovering 1998, Hudson 2003.7 Giannakourou 1996: 602.8 Hull 1996, Healey 1998.9 Brenner 1997.

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‘business intelligence’ and ‘visioning’ are omnipresent in the spatial policy and planning apparatus of today (and not only at EU level).10

In particular, the increased European Union spatial policy and planning ambition has been expressed in different visions and policy documents, as well as in several of the programmes about to be implemented. One of the most important documents are the European Spatial Development Perspective (ESDP), through which it is intended to impose a common vision and planning coordination in order to implement political, economic and social objectives in the member states.11 An important programme is the Trans-European Transport Network (TEN-T), which is a strategy to transform different national networks into a pan-European transportation and infrastructure system.12 The purpose of these initiatives is primarily to create a common approach to spatial policy within the EU, and to ‘Europeanise’ spatial policy and planning practices at lower spatial scales (national, regional and local).13 In order to be more persuasive, maps and other visual representations have been expressly used and referred to.14

Yet another programme that has been quite successful at ‘Europeanising’ spatial policy and planning practices at a regional level is INTERREG. INTERREG is one of the Community Initiatives funded by the Structural Funds, and adopted in 1990

10 Shipley and Newkirk (1997, 1999) have written about ‘visioning’ in planning and policy-making. See also Shipley 2000 and 2002.11 Richardson and Jensen 2000, Faludi and Waterhout 2002.12 Richardson 1997, Scott 2002, Peters 2003.13 Gualini 2004.14 Faludi 1996, Jensen and Richardson 2003 and 2004, Dühr 2004.

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to assist in the preparation of border areas for the removal of internal frontiers under the Single European Market.15 These funds for regional cross-border cooperation lead us to the second spatial scale about to be institutionalised, that of the regional scale. The fact that regions in Europe have taken, and/or been given a more active role in economic, political and socio-cultural issues does not need to be elaborated upon at length here.16 It is sufficient to say that regional ‘renaissance’ can be conceptualised in two broad categories: ‘regional democracies’ and ‘regional economies’.17 ‘Regional democracies’ mainly refer to the subsidiary principle and the attempt to revitalise democracy and the civic condition on a regional scale.18 Regional economies address the imperative to create or increase economic growth through an institutional co-ordination of regional ‘assets’, such as innovation capacities, learning capabilities, new forms of governance, entrepreneurial approaches, regional human capital and so on.19 For several scholars, the contemporary regional economies embody neo-liberal ideological standpoints with regard to issues such as the relationship between economy and politics, the future of the nation state, the appropriateness of welfare equalisation and so on.20

15 Williams 1996.16 Murphy 1993, Anderson and Goodman 1995, Keating 1997, Jonas and Ward 2002, Ward and Jonas 2004.17 Jönsson el al 2000.18 Putnam 1994.19 Florida 1995, Storper 1997, Scott 1998, Amin 1999, Asheim and Isaksen 2002, Hudson 2002, Cumbers et al 2003, Dunford 2003, Smith 2004, Krätke 2004.20 Amin and Tomaney 1995, Brenner 2000, MacLeod 2001.

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The parallel processes of institutionalisation on both an EU scale and a regional scale are mutually reinforcing, since the two scale levels legitimise each other through different spatial policy and planning discourses, as well as through the establishment of network cooperation and organisations.21 This is particularly the case when it comes to cross-border regions. These kinds of regions incarnate the efforts towards an economically integrated European Union, with political boundaries that do not prevent the flow of economic transactions, goods and services.22 The Union has also encouraged peripheral regional areas to establish cross-border cooperation in order to reduce institutional barriers, prevent overlapping national borders, stimulate economic growth and increase competitiveness.23 Central EU regions have initiated cross-border cooperation for similar reasons, and are also rationalising other policies in an attempt to be recognised as a ‘world city’ or a leading European urban agglomeration.24

Three Virilio-inspired observations concerning the production of new spaces at EU level and the (cross-border) regional level are included and discussed in this paper: ‘the importance of speed and mobility’, ‘spatial policy and planning makers as 21 Loughlin 1997, Wolfe 2000.22 Perkman 2003, Knippenberg 2004, Kramsch & Hooper 2004.23 Hudson et al 1997, Kantor 2000. The economic way of thinking about the growth potential of cross-border regions is similar to that which forms the basis of the Cecchini Report (Cecchini 1988) and argues for a Single European Market. There, the removal of national barriers gives short-term profits due to reduced costs of production, and long-term profits due to increased competition and better productivity. This line of thinking has, however, been criticized for applying a microeconomic model in a macroeconomic framework (Wise and Gibb 1993).24 Flowerdew 2004.

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dromomaniacs’ and ‘from the democratic to the dromocratic EU citizen’. In conclusion, an exploratory discussion about the dromocratic condition in the European Union, based on the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben’s notion of the camp as a contemporary biopolitical paradigm, is put forward.

A Personal Note on Reading Virilio

Paul Virilio’s influence in the field of Humanities and the Social Sciences is been increasingly and emphatically asserted.25 As a discipline, Human Geography has, however, been quite indifferent to or even critical of Virilio’s work.26 One exception worth mentioning is Luke and O’Tuathail’s27 perception of Virilio’s ideas concerning the spatiality of war, speed and vision. They put forward a strong argument for the usefulness of Virilio’s writings in the intellectual project of thinking about contemporary geopolitics, even though they have objections to his style of writing and way of reasoning.28 Indeed, his 25 See, for instance, Der Derian 1995, Armitage (ed) 2000, Redhead 2004.26 Bartram 2004. For instance, in the 950 page long fourth edition of “The Dictionary of Human Geography” (Johnston et al 2000), Virilio is mentioned only once, under the heading ‘geographies of communication’. However, Hubbard and Lilley (2004: 277, original emphasis) have recently argued for a dromological conception of spatial politics, ‘that grasps how dromocrats (not technocrats) attempt to speed some things up by slowing others down…’.27 Luke and O’Tuathail 2000.28 For instance, that Virilio ‘can be a quipmeister, turning out sound-bite theory for sound-bite times’ (Luke and O’Tuathail 2000: 364) and that ‘his analysis is often as unrestrained as the tendencies he describes’ (Luke and

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argumentation techniques do not follow the usual academic tradition, since he does not believe in explanations and episodes, but in suggestions and tendencies.29 He discusses social tendencies and (hints of) developmental trajectories, and suggests a possible societal direction by extrapolating the tendencies and trajectories brought forward. As a result, a literal reading of his texts is not consistent with the inward sense of his provocative course of reasoning.30 An impressionistic reading, however, seems to be compatible to Virilio’s style of argumentation and writing.31

Reading Virilio’s work impressionistically is probably easier said than done, since for me, it is contrary to the positivistic training I received as a university student. In addition, it is contrary to the post-positivistic training I acquired as a PhD-student. (For instance, instinctively reacting to essential and timeless statements like ‘speed is the essence of war’32, is to momentarily forget to read Virilio in an impressionistic way). Reading Virilio impressionistically works for me, though, when I am travelling and waiting for different forms of transport (at the railway station, the airport and so on). Virilio’s tendencies and extrapolations come alive when I, the reader, am physically embedded in the contemporary culture of speed and acceleration that Virilio writes about. I think that corporeal sensation of movement, and the impatient restlessness of

O’Tuathail 2000: 378).29 Virilio and Lotringer 1997: 44, 19-20.30 Ek 2000.31 For instance, that his analysis is often as unbound as the tendencies he discusses becomes less difficult to accept through an impressionistic reading.32 See also Luke and O’Tuathail 2000: 364.

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waiting (for further movement) helps to shed light on Virilio’s texts. In consequence, the observations made below are, based on a reading of Virilio’s text in motion - literally.

The Production of New European Union Spaces – Virilio-inspired Observations33

The Importance of Speed and Mobility

The variables of speed and mobility are deemed as being tremendously important in the spatial policy and planning discourses at EU-level as well on the regional scale. Jensen and Richardson argue that a vision of a monotopic EU has emerged and crystallised. Its advocates (politicians and the spatial policy and planning apparatus) imagine it as a future European Utopia.34 This Monotopia is a conceptualisation of the European Union as a trans-national territory that is organised and planned in order to obtain a frictionless mobility (no barriers to slow down or hinder different flows) and allows the highest possible speed.35

33 These observations are, to some degree, based on my PhD studies on the Öresund region (Ek 2003, in Swedish). The Öresund region is a transnational region that connects Scania, in southern Sweden and the region’s largest city of Malmö with Sjælland, the eastern part of Denmark and the urban agglomeration of Copenhagen. A bridge linking Copenhagen and Malmö was formally inaugurated in the year 2000.34 Jensen and Richardson 2004: 3.35 Hajer 1999 and 2000, Sidaway 2001, Jensen and Richardson 2004: 3. Virilio (1997: 79-80) has explicitly commented upon Europe’s contemporary infrastructural development, arguing that:

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However, even if Monotopia is expressed through such metaphors as ‘level playing field’, it is based on a very hierarchic geographical imagination.36 Different places and regions within and outside the EU are conceptualised, juxtaposed and related to each other and functionally restructured from an EU perspective in a new entirety with new centres and peripheries, ‘bottlenecks’ and ‘corridors’, ‘missing links’37 and central ‘nodes’ and so on. Monotopia therefore contains a hierarchy of speeds:38

In a larger perspective, a Europe in different speeds reveals itself – regions with growth and new technology, connected to the future, and regions with traditional and shrinking industries. Advocates of high-speed landscapes and low-

‘The whole point of all this development – the building of bridges and roadways, the digging of tunnels, the laying of railways and highways on expropriated land – is to make the territory more dynamic, in order to increase the transit speed of people and goods.

36 Jensen and Richardson 2004: 4. There are several definitions of ‘geographical imaginations’ (as a counterpart to C Wright Mills (1959) ‘sociological imagination’). Here, geographical imaginations (following Gregory 1994 and Sparke 2000) are hypotheses or presumptions of how space and relations in space start and shape different societal processes, tendencies and changes, and determine the shapes that these processes, tendencies and changes are expected to take. These geographical imaginations are abstractions, based on available but subjectively chosen expert knowledge, normative ideas, ideological convictions and taken-for-granted basic knowledge that is articulated and canalised through discourses.37 Deike 2003.38 Virilio 1994: 19 and 1991: 105.

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speed landscapes will find each other across the old national borders …39

According to the promoters of Monotopia, in order to gain frictionless mobility and increase the speed of flows (of people, goods, services, capital, etc), a more developed infrastructure is necessary. Infrastructure therefore has a unique significance in the spatial policy and planning discourses concerning the EU, as well as in political and economic discourses of European integration in general. There are several reasons for this. The most crucial is that the notion of the necessity of a trans-national infrastructure network has become deeply embedded in European policy40 (at least since the early 1980’s) that it permeates - and even constitutes - the raison d’être of the European Union integration per se.

The same could be said when it comes to regions. As a monotopic vision, the Öresund region is based upon and rotates around the Öresund Bridge as the fixed link between its two main cities, Copenhagen and Malmö. Although the Öresund region is conceptually wider than the Öresund Bridge, it could not survive as a spatial policy and planning discourse without it. On the other hand, the decision taken in 1994 to build the bridge was, at least partly, the result of a collective understanding that regions and trans-national cooperation would be more common in the future.

39 From a political comment by Dagens Nyheter (the leading Swedish daily newspaper) 1/7/2000, the day the Öresund Bridge was formally inaugurated. The translation is mine.40 Jensen and Richardson 2004: 20-21.

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Öresund is not the only example of ’region-infrastructure link’ interplay. Recently, the geographical notion of megacorridors (sometimes called ‘eurocorridors’), defined as a combination of at least one important infrastructure axis with heavy flows of cross-border traffic and linking urban agglomerations together, has increased in importance within EU spatial policy and planning discourses, not least through strategic documents such as TEN-T.41 The megacorridor is not only regarded as a criss-cross infrastructure created by the European Union spatial policy and planning apparatus, but also as a development area in a wider sense. In the ESDP it is argued that:

The spatial concept of eurocorridors can establish connections between the sector policies of, say, transport, infrastructure, economic development, urbanisation and environment. The development perspective for eurocorridors, should clearly indicate the areas where the growth of activities can be clustered and the areas which are to be protected as open space.42

The corridor is defined in terms of traffic engineering (an infrastructure axis) as a relationship between opportunities for economic development and a major traffic axis (an economic

41 Priemus and Zonneveld 2003. Already ‘emerged’ (defined as existing entities by the EU spatial policy and planning apparatus) megacorridors include ‘Transmanche – London – Glasgow’, ‘Amsterdam – Brussels – Paris’, ‘Brussels – Cologne – Hanover – Berlin – Poznan – Warzaw’ and ‘Rotterdam – Ruhr – Rhine – Main – Stuttgart – Munich’. Those close to ‘realization’ and linked to existing ones include ‘Dublin – Manchester – London – Transmanche’ and ‘Rotterdam – Hanover – Berlin’ (Priemus and Zonneveld 2003: 170).42 CEC 1999: 36 in Priemus and Zonneveld 2003: 169-170.

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development axis), and the basis for the directions of future urbanisation (an urbanisation axis). The assumption is that infrastructure and traffic are not only derived from social and economic processes in general, but also determine these processes.43 Since it is about infrastructure, economic development and urban growth, it is in every major city’s or region’s interest to be a part of as many corridors as possible, or at least be a part of one major corridor in the European landscape of infrastructure.44 As the infrastructure map of Europe is in the process of being rewritten, an advantageous position in terms of European space is seen to be of the uttermost importance.

Since the stakes are deemed to be so high, ‘corridor thinking’ has come to be more than just a question of fast trains and highways. ‘Corridor thinking’ and ‘region thinking’ melt into each other as much of Europe becomes covered by ‘super regions’ based on infrastructure and urban clusters.45 For instance, the self-claimed ‘European Corridor’ infrastructure project (stretching from Stockholm to Berlin) argued:

The European corridor is not a railway project, and it’s not about how to get from A to B as quickly as possible. The corridor is a region where development and growth is

43 Priemus and Zonneveld 2003: 173.44 Chapman et al 2003.45 Herrschel and Newman 2002. For instance, INTERREG IIC super region cooperations in Europe include the Atlantic Arc Region (UK, Ireland, France, Spain, Portugal), Central South-East Europe Region (Germany, Italy, Denmark, Spain, UK) and the Baltic Region (Germany, Denmark, Sweden, Finland) (Priemus and Zonneveld 2003: 170).

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important for Sweden and other Nordic countries – and for Europe as a whole.46

Spatial Policy and Planning Makers as Dromomaniacs

A couple of planning theorists have pointed out that planners and policymakers in the EU are themselves constantly on the move, like ‘a roving band of planners’.47 As for other professionals ‘on the move’ (such as academics48), mobility is natural and at the same time regarded as a natural condition. The roving band of EU planners (as well as other spatial policy makers), seen as a ‘speed class’49 embedded in a professional culture of mobility, either do not seem to question mobility, or internal critical voices are silenced or marginalized by the spatial policy and planning apparatus in the EU and in the regions alike.

At risk of being regarded as rather drastic, I would nevertheless argue that, in a schematic comparison, spatial policy and planning makers behave like ‘dromomaniacs’. In psychiatry, the term dromomaniac refers to compulsive walkers. Virilio, however, discusses the term in relation to the mobilisation of the street as a political territory; where the dromomaniacs are the mob in motion.50 Luke and O’Tuathail instead use the word ‘dromointellectuals’, which advocates a freely floating interaction in space without any barriers, and for

46 Europakorridoren 2000: 13, (the translation from Swedish is my own).47 Faludi 1997, Jensen and Richardson 2004: 203.48 Lodge 1985.49 Virilio 1995: 79.50 Virilio 1986: 153, 4-5.

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actions and practices that result in a homogenisation of space so that the friction of distance is minimised. 51

In the case of the Öresund region, several of the spokespersons that set the tone in the 1990’s could easily be counted as dromomaniacs or dromointellectuals. To take one example, in the Danish futurologist Uffe Paludan’s visionary book, ‘The Possibilities of the Öresund Bridge’,52 ten snapshots of the future are presented.53 The book unfolds a future ‘landscape of events’.54 We can read stories about a sociology student attending seminars at the universities of Copenhagen and Lund on the same morning; a Danish pensioner that easily and conveniently travels from his house in Hvidovre (south of Copenhagen) to his summer house in Falsterbo (in the extreme south-eastern part of Scania); and a Danish youth who acts on an impulse while in a cafe in Copenhagen in the morning and goes skiing in Småland (a landscape to the north of Scania) that afternoon.55 In similar vein, the Danish and Swedish Ministers of Industry, Employment and Communications wrote in a joint newspaper article that:

A lot can be changed when an hour on the water [by ferry] becomes ten minutes across it [by the Öresund Bridge]. It should not take longer than that to take the train or the car

51 Luke and O’Tuathail 1998.52 Palludan 1994, in Danish.53 Actually the year 2004, 10 years before the book was published.54 For Virilio, as I interpret him, ‘landscape of events’ (2000: xi) is a trajectory of a myriad of incidents in time that makes the physical landscape into one of passage for the passers-by (refers to Virilio’s general conclusion that time shapes space rather than the other way around).55 Palludan 1994: 63-73.

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to work, to go to the cinema or restaurant, or to meet your boy or girlfriend. That’s what integration is all about.56

A Swedish ethnologist commented upon this belief in speed among regional dromomaniacs or dromointellectuals. In a newspaper interview, Fredrik Nilsson argued that:

There is a blind faith among the Establishment regarding these questions [about speed]; an almost frightening accord. They talk about what it will be like to take the train and how you can “whiz” over to Copenhagen. They are incredibly fixated with the time that you can save. Even if the bridge doesn’t really change the journey very much, travelling acquires a different political significance.57

In a sense, the regional dromomaniacs or dromointellectuals seems to have a geographical imagination, which is very similar to that of Italian Futurists like Marinetti: ‘Hoorah! No more contact with the vile earth’,58 and ‘this delirious joy of speed that transcends the infinity of dreams’.59 These chronopolitical statements also seem to be based on a geographical imagination that favours a relative conception of time-space, rather than an absolute conception of space and time.60

56 Sydsvenska Dagbladet [Swedish newspaper] 12/08/1998. The translation is mine.57 Dagens Nyheter 07/03/2000. The translation is mine.58 Virilio 1986: 50.59 Virilio 1991a: 94.60 Time being the fourth dimension, ‘space’ and ‘time’ are often conceptualized as a unity. Space and time can however be regarded as one unit in absolute or relative terms. Time-space in absolute terms implies the notion of space equal to physical distance and the notion of time equal to clock time, as in, for instance, Hägerstrand’s time-geography. Time-space

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Repeatedly, the vision of an integrated Öresund region has been represented as a compressed area, with a shape that is not based on physical geography or geology but on changes of travelling time. This particular chronopolitical representation has usually been visualised through maps used for the purpose of specific cartographic practice and knowledge developed in the spatial policy and planning apparatus (aided by scholars in human geography) in the 1990’s and early 21st Century.61 Almost like colonial powers, regional dromomaniacs or dromointellectuals have been cutting Europe up into pieces/regions since the early 1980’s. Matthew Sparke regards this mapping practice as something: ‘akin to the kinds of military cartography that once filled European war rooms’62 or bunkers.

The Öresund region has its own bunker in the shape of Öresund House in Copenhagen, and in which a large number of the organisations that work for the integration and marketing of

in relative terms is based on the notion of relative space. Relative space is a dimension or measure of absolute space:

Absolute space, in its own nature, without relation to anything external, remains always similar and immovable. Relative space is some movable dimension or measure of the absolute space; which our senses determine by its position to bodies; and which is commonly taken for immovable space (Newton 1934: Scholium § 2 in Curry 1996: 92).

The notion of space and time as relative qualities is found for instance in Harvey’s (1990) discussion about ‘time-space compression’ and in Castell’s (1996) reasoning of how time is perceived in the ‘space of flows’.61 Jensen and Richardson 2003, Dühr 2004.62 Sparke 1998: 76.

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the Öresund Region are housed.63 Situated in the centre of Copenhagen, this site of ‘dromoorganisations’ such as the Öresund Committee and Copenhagen Capacity functions like a camera obscura, in that it is ‘designed to light up the outside while leaving the inside in semi-darkness’64 (about the lack of organisational transparency, see below) and:

Invisible in its sunken depths, the camera obscura also became deaf and blind, its relations with the rest of the country now depending entirely on the logistics of perception, with its technology of subterranean, aerial and electrical communication.65

When they are not travelling on foot, or ‘in fear of being swept away’,66 the dromomaniacs or dromointellectuals of the Öresund region are to be found here - united by the institutional machinations of myths, organisational fields and processes that lead to increased organisational isomorphism (when it comes to identity, world view and so on),67 and a belief in the necessity of a world economy represented and apprehended as a borderless maelstrom of economic activities and transactions.68

63 Øresundshuset, on Gammel Kongevej 1 in central Copenhagen accommodate the following organisations: The Öresund Committee, Øresund Identity Network, Medicon Valley Academy, Øresund Science Region, Øresund Environment Academy, Øresund Food Network and Øresund IT Academy.64 Virilio 1989: 49.65 Virilio 1989: 50.66 Virilio 1994: 29.67 Meyer and Rowan 1977, DiMaggio and Powell 1983, Scott 1995.68 Ohmae 1995, see Yeung 1998, O’Tuathail 2000 for critical accounts.

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From the Democratic to the Dromocratic EU Citizen

Manuel Castells has labelled the EU as the first ‘network state’, where power and decision capacity circulates in political networks rather than being tied to a distinct centre.69 The conduct of governance is distinguished by negotiations taking place among different actors, at different scales and by increasingly large sectors. EU spatial policy making and planning are carried out at meso-governance level, as ‘second-order governance’, i.e. committees, commissions, directorates etc.70 The way of working is characterised by an informal network approach and:

…because of its managerial, functional and technocratic bias, [it] operates outside parliamentary channels, outside party politics…its processes typically lack transparency and may have low procedural and legal guarantees…In general, the classic instruments of control and public accountability are ill-suited..71

In striving for an efficient and pragmatic decision-making process, some actors may even prefer informality and opaqueness; making European space in ‘obscure policy spaces, away from the public gaze’.72 Again, the (cross-border) region could be a telling example. In the EU rhetoric, cross-border cooperation is often argued to be a step towards a higher degree of subsidiarity, and a solution to the ‘democratic deficit’. 69 Castells 1998.70 Weiler 1999.71 Weiler 1999: 284-285.72 Jensen and Richardson 2004: 5.

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As the EU encourages a consensual and negotiated procedure in these matters, ‘border policy continues to be relatively undemocratic, with consequences for both the EU as a transnational policy’73 and for EU spatial policy as a whole, since ‘transnational activity plays a crucial role in the Europeanisation of spatial policy’.74 Since the cross-border regional elite seems to consist of a number of social agents, the new transnational spatial policy in the making has so far excluded participants from civil society, NGO’s and other actors that may question the democratic authorisation of the discourse of EU monotopia.75

This lack of democratic legitimacy threatens the very discourse of EU monotopia, since ‘…the imagined community of monotopic Europe needs cohesion as its vehicle for the idea of a level and coherent playing field in order to carry forward the message of ‘one Europe’’.76 As there are no a European ‘demos’ (no European people that can constitute a democratically elected body)77, the EU has to legitimise itself as a political and economic project through the creation of an embryo of a European identity.78 The ‘EUropean citizen’ has therefore to either be created or reconstructed.

This forming of a legitimate EU identity - in order to extend and rationalise the EU apparatus’s domination versus the citizens in

73 O’Dowd 2001: 96.74 Jensen and Richardson 2004: 183.75 O’Dowd 2001: 104, Jensen and Richardson 2004: 209.76 Jensen and Richardson 2004: 226.77 Weiler 1999.78 Shore 2000.

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Europe79 through different ‘agents of European consciousness’80

- can here be regarded as a political technology based on a certain governmentality.81 There is, however, an in-built tension (not necessarily an antagonistic or contradictory one) within this European Union identity building, as it is based on a logic of ‘space of places’ as well as a logic of ‘space of flows’. For Castells, the ‘space of places’ is the juxtaposition of places: ‘…whose form, function and meaning are self-contained within the boundaries of physical contiguity’.82 This particular logic of space is the foundation of the idea of territory. The ‘space of flows’, on the other hand: ‘…is the material organization of time-sharing social practices that work through flows83 as the

79 Castells 1997: 8.80 ‘Agents of European consciousness’ are defined by Shore (2000: 26) as “those actors, actions, artefacts, bodies, institutions, policies and representations which, singularly or collectively, help to engender awareness and promote acceptance of the ‘European idea’”.81 Shore 2000: 83. For Foucault (1991: 102) governmentality is:

The ensemble formed by the institutions, procedures, analyses and reflections, the calculations and tactics that allow the exercise of this very specific albeit complex form of power, which has as its target population, as its principal form of knowledge political economy, and as its essential technical means apparatuses of security (Foucault 1991: 102).

Like other forms of biopower, governmentality is therefore at a general level a rationality of social control based in the mutual constitution of power and knowledge. As an object of knowledge, the social body, is constructed through different discursive practices, which render the object at least to some degree susceptible to rational management (Hannah 2000: 24-25).82 Castells 1996: 423, original emphasis.83 Castells 1996: 412, original emphasis.

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circuit of electronic impulses, nodes and hubs and the spatial organisation of managerial elite groups. In an ontological sense, this particular logic of space challenges the territorial imagination, creating a dialectical struggle between two dichotomous spatial logics (one territorial, the other not).

The attempt to create a territorial, ‘banal’84 imagined EU identity/community seems to be conducted through the creation of a ‘space of flows’ and a culture of mobility in the EU. Even if the ‘space of places’ and the ‘space of flows’ are a dichotomy, that does not mean that it is not possible, through different discourses, to create an imagined community based on them both, since history (and geography) is created through the interface between places and flows.85 Through the political consequences of the discourses of Monotopia and the ‘Europe of flows’,86 the ‘space of flows’ spatial logic dominates the place – flow nexus much more than before.

To sum up, there are tendencies that, in the spatial policy and planning discourses, EU citizens of today or the near future are or will be represented and regarded as a dromocratic rather than a democratic being. The EU citizen’s function is not primarily to take an active part in the decision-making processes about how society should be planned and changed, or have an insight into organisations responsible for the spatial policy and planning in the EU. The citizen’s function in the EU spatial policy and planning discourses (and in European integration discourses in general) is rather to be as

84 Billig 1995.85 Castells 1999: 302.86 Hajer 2000.

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geographically mobile as possible and legitimate the monotopia discourses in the European Union (and implicitly, the social actors behind the discourses). A very instrumental view of the citizen stands out in the discourses: that an unrestrained mobility and a distinct European identity is what it takes to secure the democratic condition. For instance, in the Öresund region, the explicit aim of a multitude of (INTERREG financed) projects has been to create the Öresund citizen - especially focusing on the identities of children and younger people in the region.87

Towards the Dromocratic Camp?88

According to the Italian philosopher, Giorgio Agamben, the logic of the camp is about to be generalized throughout the entire Western society.89 From the beginning, the camp was an excluded space, surrounded and supervised by a set of security apparatuses. Camp life was stripped of form and value. ‘Bare life’ and constant mobility were the results of this ‘state of exception’:

The camp is also a space of control organized according to a science of flows, manifesting a biopolitical paradigm à la Foucault. Control does not demand the delimitation of movement but rather abstraction and speed…In the camp,

87 Ek 2003.88 This conclusion is based on a reading of Diken and Laustsen (2002) and Diken (2004).89 Agamben 1998, 2000, 2005.

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there was no space for rest, reflection, and comfort: work, finding something to eat, and survival were parts of a daily battle, which meant that the prisoners were in permanent movement. What interrupted their controlled flow was terror.90

Emerging as an exceptional space in the Nazi period, the production of bare life today extends beyond the time and the walls of the concentration camp. The logic of the camp is not only reproduced in refugee camps and accommodation centres, but also in ‘benevolent’ camps, such as gated communities.91 Just lately, and especially since different politics of security have redefined what it means to be a political subject in the aftermath of September 11, another step towards the establishment of the camp as the biopolitical paradigm has been taken (as all kinds of politics are redefined as politics of security).92 Finally, the current state of (exceptional) affairs in the West raises the following question:

…the true problem is not the fragile status of those excluded, but, rather, the fact that , at the most elementary level, we are all ‘excluded’ in the sense that our most elementary, ‘zero’, position is that of an object of biopolitics

90 Diken and Laustsen 2002: 294.91 Diken 2004: 96, 83, 97. For Diken, (following Graham and Marvin 2001) the appearance of solipsistic enclaves in the city indicates the transformation of the city, from polis to camp, and the emergence of an urban jungle of indistinction where ‘terror reigns and the homo sacer engages in a struggle for survival’ (Diken 2004: 98). Virilio has repeatedly arrived at the same dystopic conclusion, for instance in Virilio 1999. 92 Diken 2004: 90, 101 (after Žižek 1999).

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and that eventual political and citizenship rights are given to us as a secondary status?93

Virilio has also used the camp as a metaphor for the contemporary dromopolitical condition, and, for instance, described the national territory as a vast camp.94 At the end of the twentieth century, urban space:

…loses its geopolitical reality to the exclusive benefit of systems of instantaneous deportation whose technological intensity ceaselessly upsets all of our social structures.95

To conclude this paper, the dromocratic condition in the European Union could be described as a contemporary societal condition constituted by different forms of mobility.96 Firstly, through different governmentality technologies, the citizen of the EU is disciplined to have a dromocratic rather than a democratic function. For instance, in the Öresund region, people are encouraged to seek employment on the other side of the Sound, and different initiatives are made in order to functionally integrate the labour markets of Scania and Sjælland. Secondly, ‘power itself goes nomadic today’,97 and ‘disappears’ in the space of flows. In the (dromocratic) camp, power escapes or bypasses the agora that is ‘stuck’ in the space

93 Žižek 2002: 95.94 Virilio 1986: 30. Virilio also comments on the Palestinian case in similar vein (Virilio 1990: 55).95 Virilio 1991b: 16.96 As well as different forms of inertia, but I will not go into that issue here.97 Diken and Laustsen 2002: 297.

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of places because traditional forms of (liberal) democracy and citizenship are based on the notion of territory.98

The dromocratic citizen is pushed towards bare life by trajectories towards two biopolitical conditions: the ultra-political condition of an encompassing politics of security and the post-political condition of disempowering the agora.99 This is a bleak characterization, I know, but as Virilio puts it: ‘I paint a dark picture because few are willing to do it.’100

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