Is there a role for charities in the European Research Area?

4 CHAPTER 1 – INTRODUCTION The seeds of European cooperation in Research and Technological Development (RTD) are to be found in the construction of CERN (Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire) in 1952 and in the Euratom (European Atomic Energy Community) Treaty in 1957. By the 1960s, the optimism for the ‘endless frontier’ of science 1 gave way to preoccupations about the increasing technological gap between the USA and Europe. It was the beginning of the ‘national champions’ era, which lasted until the last years of the 1970s. However, the idea of European cooperation in science and technology was still present, as testified by the COST (Cooperation on Science and Technology) program in 1971 and by the creation of the European Space Agency (ESA) in 1973. In the first years of 1980s it became clear that national champions could not keep pace with the US on one side and Japan on the other in the RTD race. It was then that Etienne Davignon, the European Commissioner for Industry (1977-1985), called for a ‘round table’ of the top industries in the electronics field. The outcome was the European Strategic Programme for Information Technology, which started in 1983. Since then a number of communitarian programs in RTD were implemented, arriving to the ‘Framework Programmes’ (FPs), the first of which was launched in 1984. The FP was created with the intention of creating a European strategy in RTD policy, however the outcome has been the so-called ‘15+1’ scheme, meaning that there are 15 national programs plus the European FP, without too much coherence in the interaction between the two parts of the scheme. For this reason, the present situation of RTD in Europe is twofold: on the one hand, there are high-level and world-wide recognized capabilities in a number of scientific fields, on the other, European RTD as a whole is fragmented and falling behind Japan and the USA. In this light, the European Commission (EC) Communication “Towards a European Research Area (ERA)” 2 is intended to be the starting point of a re-organization of the science system at the European level. Moreover, the EC itself has pointed out that financing schemes should involve new actors, combining “funds of national and regional origin, from the European Investment Bank, the Structural Funds, from user companies and from private 1 Bush V., 1945. 2 European Commission, 2000a.