A U.S. Response: Major Issues and Assessments 



U.S. Government S&T Relations with Europe 



Concern: The research environment in Western Europe 

 is changing rapidly in ways that may make it 

 necessary, or at the least propitious, to extend 

 United States-European cooperation in S&T, 

 formal and informal, to include the European 

 Community in a collective sense and the EC 

 Commission bilaterally. 



Issues: How should the U.S. government respond to 

 EC proposals for cooperative activities in 

 specified research fields? What level of 

 official cooperation would best serve the 

 interests of the U.S. research community? 

 Should the NSF pursue an agency-to-agency 

 level agreement with the EC 

 directorates-general for research and 

 technology development? How can NSF 

 utilize the newly-established US-EC Joint 

 Consultative Group on S&T in stimulating 

 more cooperative actvities among US and 

 European researchers? 



Assessment: US-European S&T Relations and Factors 

 Promoting Change 



The U.S. government has a variety of longstanding 

 bilateral and cooperative arrangements with European 

 Community member states — 1 13 at present, according 

 to the Department of State. They range from formal, 

 umbrella S&T agreements to informal arrangements 

 with specific government agencies in narrowly-defined 

 fields. Nearly two-thirds cover cooperation in nuclear 

 energy, nuclear safety, and space and aeronautics. By 

 contrast, the U.S. has fifteen multilateral agreements: 

 six with the EC, eight with the European Space Agency, 

 and one with EURATOM. NSF has two bilaterals, with 

 Italy under an umbrella S&T agreement, and an MOU 

 with the French CNRS. It has none with European 

 multilateral entities. Existing relationships are 

 characterized by freedom of personnel and information 

 exchange and openness in joint or cooperative research 

 endeavors. These ties are not directly related to either 

 the EC's 1992 Plan or the Community's FRAMEWORK 

 Programme and would not seem to be immediately 

 affected by them. 



However, a growing "European spirit" among young 

 researchers, abetted by a public mood strongly 



supportive of European integration, points to increasing 

 pressure on national research administrators for 

 incremental reallocations of research resources to, or in 

 parallel with. Community-wide undertakings: grants, 

 fellowships, equipment, travel costs, and other 

 "concertation," or infrastructure support activities. 

 Moreover, a steady rise in effectively-leveraged 

 Commission funding, at a time when most member 

 states' strained financial resources for S&T are directed 

 increasingly to technology applications, will provide 

 additional incentives for intra-EC laboratory 

 "twinnings," joint research projects, faculty exchanges, 

 and other cooperative activities. This situation will have 

 potential for a gradual lessening of commitment by some 

 member states in maintaining current levels of 

 sponsored S&T interaction with the U.S. research 

 community. 



If member state S&T policies emerge which give 

 preference, in some areas of research support, to 

 activities in which participation is restricted to 

 Community entities, it would certainly have a negative 

 effect on formal cooperation with the U.S. government, 

 as well as on opportunities for U.S. firms which do not 

 meet the requirements for an "integrated presence" in 

 Europe. Finally, an EC-led emphasis on organizational 

 aggregation — for strategic planning purposes — of 

 European research conceivably could also precipitate a 

 decline, or incorporation into the EC umbrella program, 

 of the variety of non-EC multilateral activities in which 

 U.S. researchers currently cooperate or participate. 

 While this last possible consequence is not likely in the 

 near future, it should not be ignored. 



Regarding formal U.S.-EC relations in S&T, 

 opposition within most parts of the EC Commission 

 appears to have evaporated in the past year. Moreover, 

 the Council of Ministers has exhibited a growing interest 

 in external S&T relations, as evinced by its recent 

 request for Commission discussion papers on relations 

 with Eastern Europe and with third (ie., non-EC) 

 countries generally. A stream of signals has been 

 emanating from senior levels in Brussels promoting 

 dialogue on US-EC S&T relations, leading ultimately to 

 a formal agreement, which seems to be the real aim of 

 Vice President Pandolfi's proposal for a joint US-EC 

 Joint Consultative Group on S&T. Even those member 

 states who are still resistant to a formal US-EC 

 agreement on S&T admit to the need for a single, 



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