EUROPEAN COMMUNITY S&T: PROGRAMS, 

 POLICIES, CAPABILITIES, INTERNAL RELATIONS 



AND FOREIGN AFFAIRS 



European Community S&T Programs, Policies and Capabilities 



Movement toward multinational scientific and 

 technological (S&T) cooperation in Europe has 

 proceeded independently of the rapidly evolving 

 economic and financial integration which is the aim of 

 the EC's 1992 Single Market Plan. However, the 

 progressively strengthened role of the Commission of 

 the European Communities ("the Commission") is 

 providing an umbrella for strategic planning and 

 coordination of resources devoted to that cooperation. 

 The Commission's applied technology programs such as 

 ESPRIT (information technologies) and RACE 

 (telecommunications infrastructure development) have 

 demonstrated, according to many qualified European 

 observers and research administrators, that significant 

 shared benefits can be produced through multinational 

 collaboration. Consequently, the Commission's stock as 

 an efficient manager of R&D is rising correspondingly 

 in both the political arena and the public eye. 



Until very recently, the Commission's programs have 

 been directed almost exclusively toward 

 "precompetitive" research, designed to enhance the 

 capabilities of European researchers to further develop it 

 for commercial applications in support of economic 

 competitiveness. The first of these programs was 

 ESPRIT, the European Strategic Program in Information 

 Technology, launched in early 1984. It was designed 

 with the dual purposes of building cooperative research 

 alliances in the information technologies industry in 

 order to boost overall European competitiveness, while 

 also serving as a dynamic model of new approaches to 

 overcoming or dismantling traditional barriers to 

 transnational R&D cooperation within Europe. It 

 remains by far the largest and most costly of the EC 

 research programs, and it has served as model for 

 subsequent cooperative programs in other research fields 

 such as telecommunications, biotechnology, industrial 

 modernization, new materials, and predictive medicine 

 and health care. 



Such basic research as occurred under these programs 

 was incidental to the pursuit of technology applications. 

 However, with the adoption in 1990 of the third in its 

 rolling series of S&T umbrella research structures. 



known generically as FRAMEWORK, the Commission 

 is now broadening its attention to encompass basic 

 science, a category heretofore reserved largely to the EC 

 member states through their nationally funded programs. 

 The Commission has gained approval from the EC 

 Council of Ministers for a major effort over the next five 

 years to promote close cooperation in fundamental 

 research among researchers throughout the EC. In large 

 part this is due to the success of the applied technology 

 programs as models of cooperation and to the increase 

 by each EC member state of both domestic support for 

 applied technology and involvement in EC-wide 

 cooperative activities. 



The scale of R&D funding of all types by the 

 Community is still minuscule by comparison with that of 

 member state national S&T programs, even limited to 

 non-defense S&T. The EC's in-house R&D capability 

 consists only of four Commission-run research facilities 

 (The Joint Research Center) employing a total of 

 perhaps 500-600 active researchers. Its FRAMEWORK 

 Programme for strategic management and coordination 

 of Community-funded R&D is a program of contracts 

 and grants to universities, national laboratories and 

 private sector companies, with 50/50 cost sharing from 

 the latter two categories. The actual research and 

 development activities are performed overwhelmingly at 

 member state facilities, employing member state 

 researchers and support staff, using member state 

 equipment. Among the four largest EC countries, public 

 sector civilian R&D spending ranges from eight to 

 seventeen times the total of EC Commission funding for 

 R&D. 



The strength of Commission programs lies instead in 

 its objectives and methods for stimulating the 

 collaboration of research entities in a matrix that few 

 national government agencies or multilateral S&T 

 organizations had seriously attempted before 

 FRAMEWORK: transnational, public/private, and 

 industrial/academic. Such successes as these programs 

 have demonstrated, while uneven and not yet 

 sufficiently evaluated, appear to stem from the following 

 characteristics: 



