Europe’s political climate of nationalism and retrenchment makes it a difficult time for a large research collaboration to be born, says Olof Hallonsten.
Big Science projects in Europe have always relied on intergovernmental collaborations independent of the EU and European Commission; they have been based on ad hoc solutions, not established political frameworks. This has shielded them from bureaucracy and it has nurtured scientific and organisational efficiency, but it has also led to a cluttered policy field and a high degree of uncertainty during a project’s preparatory phase.
Geopolitical cycles have heavily influenced negotiations, with each facility marked by the time of its birth. As Europe’s nations seem to increasingly prioritise national interests over unification, it’s no surprise that Big Science projects of recent years have struggled to take flight.
In contrast, the European particle physics laboratory Cern was born at a time of post-war desire for integration, strongly influenced by the United States and the UN. The honeymoon lasted until the early 1970s, when economic and political strains caused several member countries to demand that parts of the lab be moved to within their borders so they could reap indirect benefits from their investment. A project of the same era, the European Southern Observatory, was spared such territorial bickering by being sited in the southern hemisphere, but political strains between the UK and France in the 1960s delayed it by a decade.
The same tensions led the UK to cancel its planned contribution to the neutron research facility Institut Laue-Langevin in Grenoble; by the time the institute opened in 1967, it was an entirely Franco-German affair. The creation of the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility, which opened in Grenoble in 1994, was also driven by Franco-German cooperation. The origins of this collaboration can be traced back to the Elysée Treaty of 1963, which launched several decades of alliance between the countries. It also led to the Maastricht Treaty in 1992 and the monetary union in 1999.
A country’s participation in Big Science is not separate from its ordinary priorities; it is a means of pursuing them. Governments know that collaborations can attain goals beyond the reach of any one of them, but each guards its own interests closely. Before entering into legally binding commitments, nations weigh the economic, political, diplomatic and reputational costs and benefits, and try to ensure maximum gains.
In three cases—the ESRF, the European X-ray Free-Electron Laser being built in Hamburg and the European Spallation Source planned for Lund in Sweden—the host nation has borne a large part of the cost. Negotiations with other countries have been about scraping together enough funding to pay for construction. Each member state’s use of those labs is supposed to reflect its contribution, but the principle of granting access on the basis of scientific merit often causes imbalances.
France and West Germany agreed on a site for the ESRF by 1984 and jointly pledged to cover more than half of the construction costs. In the ensuing negotiations, some countries such as the UK and the Nordic nations managed to reduce their commitments to such an extent that others, Italy for one, were lured into paying more to compensate.
Lessons from this negotiation were not forgotten. Twenty years later, after Germany and Russia pledged to cover almost 80 per cent of the construction costs for the XFEL, other countries competed to contribute as little as possible, relying on their scientific pre-eminence to gain access.
And since the decision in 2009 to locate the ESS in Lund, four years of negotiations have yielded nothing more than commitments by Sweden, Denmark and Norway to jointly cover half of the construction costs. It may be that the ESS, like the XFEL, is suffering from prospective members’ attempts to strike bargain deals.
The long-term consequences of such brinkmanship are difficult to judge. The risk is that, by pursuing their own interests too vigorously, countries will actually harm those interests by undermining collaboration and losing competitive advantage to North America and Asia. The outcome of the ESS negotiations will tell us something about the climate for Big Science in Europe, but future collaborations will still exhibit their own peculiarities.
History shows that a collaboration’s fate depends above all on the broader political context. The agreement between Germany and Russia to fund the XFEL, for example, is widely thought to have stemmed from the need for a diplomatic success at a time of strained relations. Perhaps the ESS should also be looking for a political rationale—by selling itself, for example, as a much-needed symbol of unity in Europe.
Olof Hallonsten is a sociologist of science at the University of Gothenburg and the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm.
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