“Steel Rhine” railway for military mobility, in northern Europe the limits of EU defence

Brussels – From Antwerp to Aachen, via Eindhoven, Maastricht, and Mönchengladbach. This is the railway better known as the ‘Steel Rhine’, a route that connects Belgium, the Netherlands, and Germany, and which, due to new security requirements, is to be put back into operation. The governments of the three countries, notes the Belgian press, are in contact to bring back to life a railway line regarded as vital for military mobility, the new European political priority. 

There are many outstanding questions, demonstrating the divisions within the European Union. The railway line in question, which has been disused since 1991, could, in Belgium’s intentions, also be used for freight transport, so as to relieve traffic on other already congested lines. The Dutch government, however, fears that this would favour the river port of Antwerp, to the detriment of the port of Rotterdam. The future of a part of European military mobility, therefore, depends very much on the Dutch will and how much Europeans will be able to agree. 

The railway line known as the Steel Rhine [photo: Pechristener/Wikimedia Commons]

The project, in any case, exists. After all, the infrastructure is already there; it would just be a matter of modernising it. There has been talk of a restart for years, with the Flemish government returning to insist on it in March this year. Now the head of the Belgian federal government, Bart De Wever, is planning to convince the other two partners. While Germany would seem to have nothing against it and is even rather interested, the connection between the port of Antwerp and the Ruhr mining basin does not convince the Dutch. 

The protection of one’s own national economic interests therefore seems to prevail over common defence ones, since the reactivation of the “Steel Rhine” railway line would be in an anti-Russian function: it is precisely the concerns about a possible expansionism by Moscow that underlie a political project that is, it has to be said, on a dead end.