Geopolitics of failure and standardisation: the Budapest-Belgrade railway

This article investigates how standards materialise value judgments of infrastructural failure and success, shaping the legitimacy and political meaning of infrastructure projects. Focusing on the Budapest-Belgrade railway, a Chinese-financed project in Central Eastern and Southern Europe overlapping with EU infrastructure frameworks, the article examines the geopolitics of standard-setting, arguing that standards are instruments of power that define what counts as progress, success, or failure. Drawing on infrastructure studies and the political economy of failure, this study examines how competing technical, financial, and ESG standards produce hybrid regulatory environments with fragmented authority and diffused responsibility, where standards shape the<br/>conditions under which failure takes form. Failure is not causal outcome of standardisation, but competing standards organise infrastructures according to different logics and thresholds, making failure possible and intelligible. The analysis outlines how overlapping standards regimes became sites of geopolitical contestation, mobilised by EU, Chinese, Hungarian, and Serbian actors to advance competing agendas, with Hungary and Serbia selectively aligning<br/>with different frameworks to pursue national priorities. In this way, infrastructural failure is not simply a technical outcome but a political one,<br/>revealing how geopolitical competition, regulatory fragmentation, and uneven development are stabilised through evaluative practices that appear technical yet govern political futures.