A better use for cohesion funding: pan-European projects

Let’s talk about cohesion funds. No, don’t close your eyes. Please try to stay awake: Cohesion funding is a European Union funding tool to support development activities in member states, most notably infrastructure construction. Yawn!

Sex, drugs and Rockn’Roll.

Was that better? Can I continue? Good.

So, let’s talk about cohesion funds. These are several humongous funding pots to help member states, in particular the less well off ones, spruce up their infrastructure and get it up to whatever is the commonly accepted European standard. The Cohesion Fund, which is part of cohesion funding (clear?) applies to member states whose GDP is less than 90 per cent of the EU average.

There’s 347 billion euros in the cohesion and structural funding pot between 2007 and 2013 – that’s about the annual GDP of Austria!

You can imagine, this does not always go too well. Cohesion funding is cast wide. You can use it for anything from roads, airports and bridges to refurbishing historic buildings, construction science laboratories or museums or sprucing up the mayor’s office. And there is some contempt from richer member states. Why should Germany pay for a swimming pool in Bulgaria?

But in the past months there have been political shifts to redirect cohesion funding to more pan-European initiatives. The latest suggestion is using cohesion money for the creation of a Trans-European Transport Network (Trans-Trans-Net?), which would  oversee Europe’s 62,000 kilometres of motorway and 250,000 kilometres of railway lines. The goal of the network is to open the use of roads and railway lines up to European traffic and help prevent “bottlenecks”, in this case traffic jams and overcrowding on European roads.

From here to there to everywhere

The Trans-Trans-Net (I love that phrase) was conceived in 2000 and has become an important part of the Lisbon Treaty. However, the financial crisis has slowed progress down, as member states are struggling to maintain their own roads, let alone worry about those in far away countries.

So transport ministers have suggested using cohesion funding to prop up the ailing initiative. The advantage of that would be that money is already there (in the funding pot) and is relatively easy to access. And there is a lot of it.

The idea is great. The transport network would be a benefit for every country, but especially those whose trade and tourism is suffering because their links to other countries are less developed. But richer member states would also be happy, because they will be getting something out of it, rather than just pumping money in.

Using cohesion funding for large-scale projects like this is ideal. Of course, monitoring of spending must be stringent and projects must be strictly evaluated. But here is a way to use EU money for the good of not just a few, but for everyone. That’s what Europe should be all about.