Iron Silk Roads: the geopolitics of past and present initiatives for the revival of Eurasian trade through overland transport corridors

This article aims to historically contextualise the recent initiative of the Chinese government to promote its OBOR policy by discussing a number of similar initiatives for the establishment of overland transport corridors between Europe and Asia, pursued by a number of actors globally since the end of WW2. The PRC got involved in such projects initially in 1979, and this intensified in 1990s. The history of such projects reveals how regional and non-regional actors have promoted a variety of visions for the configuration of Europe-Asia overland freight transport corridors in two historical periods: the years of the Cold War, and the years of the post-Cold War. I argue that, here, such projects aimed at connecting countries and continents while also excluding others, and to show how various global actors have historically seen—and still do so today—the establishment of such corridors through a technocratic lens, namely not only to promote intercultural exchanges, but to consolidate political and economic alliances across countries and continents by bridging the peoples of different nation-states but also civilisations.