Austria presents two main transport projects, related to Vienna and its position in central Europe, concerning European scale: the main station and the Semmering base tunnel. Both build an important crossroads project by creating a real connection in central Europe. The issue for Vienna is to assume the connection role needed by the EU's space for its cohesion. At the present time, the plan of Vienna's stations shows the inheritance of the neutral zone spirit with a situation of dead end, mainly turned to west and south, cut down from the rest of its urban and railway nets. But, since the fall of the functional curtain between the two former European sides, these nets are back. From a world's end, Vienna increasingly refunds its crossroads place, commanding east and south-east Europe. This point is clear for an axis west-east, with the modernisation of the lines Salzburg-Vienna and Vienna-Budapest. Concerning the axis north-south, the first move was made with the modernisation of the line Vienna-Bratislava. There are the issues of the European choice. Reunification signified more new connections to Western Europe than a rearticulating process between the new members. From a polarisation to the east, these countries and their urban nets turned to west and particularly to Berlin, with its new main station built in a symbolic area, as the Vienna's one will be. It contains the whole problematic of the two Austrian projects: the opening on east and south by moving the main heart from west to south-east Vienna. This station goes on the axis of the state's refunding: Ring Opera-Karlsplatz-Belvedère castle, and the station. This is, nowadays, the end of the tramway line D. So the Semmering project gives sense to the urban spatial speech. On one hand, this alpine tunnel could only take pertinence included in a corridor running from Baltic sea to Adriatic sea, passing through Warsaw, Bratislava, Vienna and Graz. But, on the other hand, EU is helping Hungary and Slovenia to modernise the eastern way to the central Europe for Koper harbour, connected to Budapest. Europe faces up its reunification challenge: to succeed in articulating different scales in a coherent project. The issue for Vienna is to integrate definitely the new Europe by being included in this isthmus logic. On a regional scale, the issue is to refund the nodal articulation and, in the same time, to consider the inherited rivalries between cities like Vienna, Budapest or Berlin. On a long time run, the question is to conciliate inheritances of the imperial era, of the communist time, the return of the minorities' questions, with the real need to reflect at a new territorial coherence in Europe. These two projects are related to a same issue: to reinvent the articulation of the central Europe and Vienna's place in the whole continent. The arbiter is the EU as financial arm, so that this question is also revealing of the orientation of the European governance in this intervening territory in recombining.

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   |texte=   The Vienna Main station/Semmering base tunnel projects: European Union faces up its reunification
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