Let's get physical: the European Commission and cultivated spillover in completing the single market's transport infrastructure

The 1994 Essen European Council agreed to prioritize 14 trans-European networks (TENs) transport infrastructure projects, including five in high-speed rail. Within a decade Commission proposals emerged to integrate ports, airports, railways, motorways and satellites within the wider trans-European network (TEN-T). This article draws on revised readings of neofunctionalism to argue for cultivated spillover's role in mediating functional pressures to advance common transport infrastructures. It puts forward a typology for sorting and examining the opportunistic, entrepreneurial and persistent behaviour of the Commission, while recognizing how other supranational agents and epistemic communities have stimulated and created conditions conducive to policy integration. The case analysis distinguishes between task expansion and task consolidation at the stages of policy reformulation and implementation.