EUROCRIT takes as its point of departure a novel approach to the study of critical infrastructures, by reconstructing the long-term historical emergence and evolution of these. It looks at the expansion of infrastructures in Europe both through the interconnection across national borders and through interconnections of different kinds of infrastructures with one another. Those connections created new forms of interdependencies and shared vulnerabilities among nations in Europe. The project inquires how actors of different kinds have interpreted such interdependencies and vulnerabilities, and developed institutions for handling them.

This enables us to contribute novel ideas both to historical studies of infrastructures (adding the notion of vulnerability as well as a pan-European perspective) and to more policy- and practice-oriented research on critical infrastructures (adding the historical dimension).

EUROCRIT is a Collaborative Research Project (CRP) within the EUROCORES programme Inventing Europe, funded through the European Science Foundation (ESF). For more information see here or download the  EUROCORE brochure (1.52 MB).

Project description

Winter, 1921. An extraordinary drought in Northern Italy reduced hydro-electricity yields and threatened the industries in Italy’s economic heartland. Swiss and French power companies came to the rescue: Swiss hydroelectricity was exported to Italy, Switzerland interrupted its exports to France, and French coal power stations now supplied power to Zurich and Geneva. These emergency measures were only possible due to recent interconnections of the French, Swiss and Italian power systems. The League of Nations used this example to argue for further integration of electricity networks across national borders, in particular in Europe.

Autumn, 2003. A severe storm caused a tree to tip over a power line carrying Swiss electricity exports to Italy. The line break ignited a chain reaction of power overloads in the Swiss, French and Italian power systems. The French and Swiss cut their connections to Italy to reduce the risk of blackouts at home. While Switzerland suffered local power breaks, the entire Italian peninsula plunged into darkness in Italy's biggest blackout ever. The Swiss, French and Italian power authorities blamed each-other, but the international Union for the Coordination and Transmission of Electricity concluded that the problem transcended the national level and that it resulted from design choices made long ago, and which were out of touch with the current use of the network. The system was designed with occasional cross border emergency supply in mind, not the high level of power exchanges that characterize the current era of liberalization.

These two anecdotes reveal a historical process in which transnational infrastructures created new interdependencies between Europe’s nations, and thereby also a new type of – transnational – vulnerabilities. The anecdotes speak to current debates on ”critical infrastructures” in the EU and in the US, partly triggered by terrorist attacks demonstrating the vulnerability of infrastructures and society’s dependence on these. In a recent EU Green Paper “On a European Programme for Critical Infrastructure Protection” (November 2005) the concept is defined in the following way: “Critical infrastructures include those physical resources, services, and information technology facilities, networks, and infrastructure assets which, if disrupted or destroyed, would have a serious impact on the health, safety, security or economic well-being of citizens or the effective functioning of governments” (European Commission 2004). Much effort is currently devoted in Europe (and on the other side of the Atlantic) to finding ways and means to reduce the risks of such disruptions, both intended and unintended. We welcome this debate because it spotlights how infrastructures intertwine with political, social and economic life. However, historical perspectives in the current debate seem to be largely missing, and this, we argue, is a weakness.

The purpose of this project is to put the current discussion on critical infrastructures in Europe in a historical and transnational perspective. It takes as its point of departure the expansion of infrastructures in Europe both through the interconnection across national borders and through interconnections of different kinds of infrastructures with one another. We will refer to the former type of interconnection as “horizontal” integration and to the latter as “vertical” integration. The project will analyse how these two kinds of infrastructural interconnections (i.e. horizontal and vertical) have created new forms of interdependencies and shared vulnerabilities among nations in Europe. It will inquire how actors of different kinds have interpreted such interdependencies and vulnerabilities, and developed institutions for handling them.

More specifically, there are five major research questions in this CRP:

1. How have interconnections of infrastructures across national borders contributed to their growing intertwinement with economic and social activities of various kinds in Europe?

2. What kinds of mutual dependencies and shared vulnerabilities have arisen due to transnational interconnections of infrastructures, and how have these been interpreted and negotiated?

4. How have these processes and responses differed between regions and over time, and how does this reflect the unity and diversity of Europe?

5. How can we better understand the characteristics and nature of “critical infrastructures”, and what concepts and perspectives are most fruitful for analysing them?  

State of the art 

This CRP addresses first and foremost two history of technology research agendas that are currently en vogue:

The first is to transcend the national framing of historiography and to engage in transnational (European) history. Transnational history has developed into an important corrective to nation-focused modern/contemporary history; its point is not to exclude national developments, but to inquire how the national and international are linked (Therr 2003; Iriye 2004; Clavin 2005). For the history of technology as a whole, this concern was adopted by the Tensions of Europe programme (Schot, Misa and Oldenziel 2005). Infrastructure history reflects this general development: until recently it overwhelmingly focused on national and subnational developments (occasionally making cross-country comparisons). Historians of technology (Van der Vleuten and Kaijser 2005, 2006; www.tie-project.nl) and economic historians (Merger, Carreras and Giuntini 1994; Dienel 2004) have started to inquire the development of transnational networks. This CRP pushes this approach further: it not only investigates the emergence of transnational European networks, but addresses above all a number of important issues that relate more specifically to the evolving relations between transnational infrastructures and the corresponding interdependencies and vulnerabilities between peoples and countries in Europe.

The second research agenda is to combine the customary focus of explaining the societal shaping of technological change with studies of the technological shaping of economies and societies. The argument that technology’s societal consequences can and should be investigated in non-technological-determinist ways was made over a decade ago (Nye 1990; Fischer 1992; Misa 1994), but only in recent years became broadly accepted as a research theme, and it is still evolving (e.g. Coutard et al. 2005). This CRP explicitly aims to make a novel step and inquire how the shaping of transnational network designs intertwined with the emergence of transnational societal and economic interdependencies and vulnerabilities, and inquires what kind of ‘Europe’ was shaped in these processes.

We also build upon an older agenda of Large Technical Systems (LTS) research. This tradition is rooted in the work of the American historian Thomas Hughes in the 1980s, but was developed conceptually and empirically since (for an extensive review and references, see Van der Vleuten & Kaijser 2006, chapter 11). LTS research takes infrastructural systems, not artefacts or machines, as its unit of historical inquiry (Hughes 1983). It focuses on the sociotechnical nature of systems and tries to explain the development of systems, and their functioning and implications for societal stability and change. Avoiding weaknesses in the original approach, current LTS research does not make a priori claims on (centralized) management, but inquires systems characterized by centralized as well as distributed control. Also, it does not regard system building as a harmonious enterprise, but as characterized by negotiation and conflict; system building is a multi-actor game (Coutard et al. 2005; Van der Vleuten and Kaijser 2006). In this CRP we will go beyond the study of single systems and focus on the vertical interconnection of infrastructural systems, a phenomenon that has also been called “internetworking” (Edwards 1998).

Our CRP also relates to sociological studies of risk in sociotechnical systems, a field in which Charles Perrow’s book Normal accidents (Perrow 1984, new edition 1999) was a pioneering work. Perrow argued that certain sociotechnical systems (like nuclear power plants) characterised by both a high degree of complexity and a tight coupling between their constituent parts are inherently risk prone. Even if the operators are very skilled they simply have no chance to perceive and prevent all potential disastrous events that can occur, and accidents thus become “normal” outcomes of these systems. Perrow has also warned that safety devices meant to reduce the risk of errors can increase overall complexity and coupling and thus result in systems that are more prone to error than previously (Perrow 1994) However, the “normal accident”-approach has been contested. Researchers, studying the same kind of systems as Perrow did, have found that they are in fact often performing very safe, and have tried to explain why (La Porte and Consolini 1991, Rochlin 1991). They have introduced the concept of High Reliability Organizations, HRO, and have tried to identify the characteristics of such organizations that successfully manage complex, tightly coupled systems. Constant training of operators, redundancy in daily operations, flexible organizations and many channels of direct communication are some of the salient features of HROs. Thus while the “normal accident theory” emphasizes structures the “high reliabaility” theory emphasizes processes (Summerton and Berner, 2003). What is common for researchers within both these approaches is that they study contemporary systems and do not inquire how such systems and their vulnerabilities are the outcome of long-term, historical processes.