My Neil Kinnock years (1994-1998)

My four-year work (1994–1998) as a member of EU Transport Commissioner Neil Kinnock’s (Lord Kinnock today) ‘wise men group’ coincided with a formative period in European maritime policy. It was a time when the European Union was beginning to articulate, in earnest, a coherent vision for its ports and shipping industries, long before such issues would acquire the urgency they command today. From this work emerged two landmark documents: the Strategy Document Towards a New Maritime Strategy and, shortly thereafter, the Green Paper on Ports and Maritime Infrastructure (1996–1998). The latter was the kindle wood for all my subsequent writings on port pricing.

 The stories I could recount here are endless, but I remember and always quote this one: One day, while the committee was having a sumptuous lunch in Brussels, Kinnock walks in the (private) room quite unexpectedly. “so, you decided to spend your time on port pricing?”, he said with a big smile, before he even said hello. “Well, I promise you one thing: you will continue struggling with the same subject until your retirement”. And with hindside he was right (two of my unpublished submissions to the Commission on the Green Paper appear in my forthcoming book; in the meantime they can be found in my Google Scholar and ResearchGate profiles).

The Strategy Document was unveiled in 1996 at a high-level conference of the Commission in Barcelona. Serving as rapporteur there, and well before the advent of the euro, I delivered a statement that at the time struck many as both audacious and unsettling in its clarity: «a monetary union is inconceivable without harmonization and fiscal discipline». The remark, preserved in the official proceedings of the Commission, and widely reported in the press, captured in a single sentence a structural weakness that Europe would only fully confront more than a decade later, in the aftermath of the global financial crisis of 2008–2009. In retrospect, what appeared provocative was, in fact, prescient.

The intellectual momentum of this period extended beyond policy documents into scholarly work. It found expression in my book Quality Shipping: Market Mechanisms for Safer Shipping and Cleaner Oceans, first presented in London by Lord Kinnock together with the then UK transport minister, Glenda Jackson (yes, the same shining star of ‘Women in Love’ (1970) and ‘A Touch of Class’ (1973), both Academy Awards). The book marked a decisive shift in the discourse on maritime safety and environmental performance. Rather than treating “quality” as a technical or regulatory matter confined to shipowners, it framed it as an economic phenomenon embedded in incentives and market behavior. In this view, responsibility for substandard shipping could not be isolated. It diffused across the entire maritime ecosystem: to the charterer who opts for the lowest-cost vessel irrespective of its condition, to the financial institution willing to underwrite its acquisition, to the insurer that assumes its risks, and to the classification society that certifies its seaworthiness. By extending accountability along this chain, the concept of “quality shipping” became both broader and more demanding, ultimately laying the intellectual foundations for a European campaign that would later be embraced by major maritime nations, with Japan among the first to respond.

Yet perhaps my most enduring contribution during this period lies in my insistence on the role of fiscal harmonization in infrastructure investments --particularly investments in transshipment capacity-- among economically interdependent and geographically proximate states such as those of the European Union. This was not an abstract proposition. It spoke directly to the functioning of ports as nodes within integrated transport and logistics systems, where national policies on taxation, depreciation and the public financing of ports can distort cross-border competition.

These concerns found their way into the Commission’s Green Paper and continued to shape the trajectory of European port policy in the years that followed. Indeed, they remain strikingly relevant. The questions raised then still define the contours of today’s debate: Are port investments, especially in capital-intensive container terminals, to be regarded as public goods, or as commercial ventures subject to market discipline? Should pricing policies aim at recovering the full cost of infrastructure, or at maximizing throughput and connectivity? To what extent do divergent national rules on depreciation and state support distort competition between ports that, in economic terms, share the same hinterland?

Equally contentious is the issue of financing capacity aimed at attracting transshipment traffic; i.e., cargo that, by definition, is footloose and internationally contestable. Should public funds, whether national or regional, be deployed to capture such traffic from neighboring ports within the same economic space? Ιf so, under what conditions? And how about the practice of cross-subsidization? that is, charging higher tariffs to captive domestic cargo in order to subsidize transshipment flows? Is competition law applicable to such discrimination?

What emerges from this body of work is not merely a set of policy propositions, but a coherent analytical framework; one that situates ports within the broader political economy of Europe. It is a framework that recognizes the tension between national sovereignty and economic integration, between public interest and commercial logic, and between competition and coordination. In this sense, the debates initiated in the 1990s were not resolved; they were, rather, the opening chapter of a conversation that continues to this day.

HH
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