The European Union leads a true guerrilla campaign to build a single railway transport market, especially in the freight sector, or to maintain the current status-quo. The long-standing tradition of approaching the networks as independent-national structures with unique valences and with role in protecting local business has a say in market mobility. As we speak, the ministers and MEPs are besieged with divergent messages from lobby groups who want them to change the meaning of the proposed Fourth Railway Package by introducing exemptions and derogations that would permit, in the end, the preservation of a closed market, hostile to real liberalization. Although we are talking about a long-term vision which seeks to transfer a significant share of the cargo transport from roads to railways, the institutional and administrative barriers they want to preserve in Member States will perpetuate the market fragmentation by disrupting this desideratum.
Meanwhile, we are looking to the east, where the large geographical areas tend to join again to create an attractive framework for the forwarders on the routes linking the Far East to Europe. Russia has carried out its railway restructuring plans, conveying the sector into a real business platform where both local magnates and multinational groups activate. Repositioning RZD in a company dealing mainly with infrastructure and investments and the outsourcing combined with the privatization of transport activities permit the concentration of public financial resources to the development of infrastructure and to the participation to large international projects, together with a dynamics of transport investors which seems to outrun by far the activities of the European companies. The international stock exchange listing has become a trend which permits the attraction of capital, but also a certain business visibility and credibility. In this context, it is not surprising the perseverance of Russia, together with Kazakhstan and Belarus, in carrying on the “Eurasia” project, by setting up a railway joint-venture that would facilitate freight transport in the common space. Based on a joint technical and institutional tradition, interoperability is easy to ensure thus enabling the construction of attractive commercial offers for large intercontinental transport.
A similar vision can also be noticed in the central area of the Eurasian bloc. Among diplomatic crises and local ambitions, Turkey continues, with Georgia and Azerbaijan, the Baku-Tbilisi-Kars project (while still not permitting Armenia to join the project), while the joint project of Turkmenistan with Afghanistan and Tajikistan draws the attention of neighbours (China, Iran and Kyrgyzstan) to identifying faster and cheaper routes to the Indian Ocean. In this puzzle, it will be interesting to watch the future position of Iran which can get out of “isolation” over the next period and which, just like Armenia, seeks to ensure a north-south axis to link the Persian Gulf to Northern Russia.
by Ştefan Roşeanu
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