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In medieval Europe, the pursuit of knowledge was not a national endeavour.
Scholars wandered widely, Latin served as a common language of discourse
and universities drew their students from far and wide. This tradition has
never been completely lost. But the growth of the nation state, the funding
of teaching and research through national agencies and development of education
as a way of pursuing a country’s objectives, imposed national aims on
science which became clearest in the two world wars of this century. Since
then, in the industrialised world, commerce, trade and banking have become
cosmopolitan activities, but the pursuit of learning has obstinately remained
a national occupation.

There are, however, pressures that make national barriers increasingly
irrelevant. The internationalisation of scientific journals, the immediate
dissemination of preprints of research papers by electronic mail and fax,
and the plethora of international workshops and colloquiums, all bring together
scientists who live, work and are paid under separate national systems.
Researchers trying to achieve temperatures close to absolute zero know their
competitors well, no matter where in the world they work. They tend to publish
in the same journals, and are likely to be invited to the same conferences.
They may even draw funding from some of the same sources.

To young scientists, national frontiers are increasingly meaningless
as international travel grows easier, especially within Europe and from
Asia to Europe and America. Particularly when this movement is ‘a round
trip’ rather than one-way, science really does become the discourse of a
global village.

Many technologies developed to serve basic science in one field have
generated sharp changes in quite different areas. These spin-offs allow
science to hop over national as well as disciplinary frontiers. For example,
at the Helsinki University of Technology, physicists developed a machine
to measure minute magnetic fields. The device, it turned out, could detect
signals from the human brain. Within the physics department there is now
a flourishing team that exploits the new hardware to investigate mental
processes. It includes several researchers from foreign countries.

Above all, national funding agencies, even in the most financially
powerful and scientifically advanced countries can no longer buy the equipment
needed by their national teams. Shortage of money is forcing a loosening
of the ties between national funding agencies and the scientists they support.

However, the heads of research agencies know well that basic science
is a global activity. To scientists there is only one frontier that matters,
and that is the frontier of knowledge. Competition between researchers in
different countries is vigorous, but so too is cooperation.

Rich countries with small populations, such as Switzerland, are the
most eager internationalists. Populous, rich countries such as the US are
the slowest to learn the lesson, while poor countries with small populations
find it difficult to find any role. But every country now, no matter how
rich, has to face decisions which involve the abandonment of any claims
to comprehensive coverage of science within its borders.

This point was well illustrated by Allan Bromley, science adviser to
President Bush. Speaking in March to ministers of the wealthy OECD nations,
he said balancing spending on present research plans with investment for
future needs is a tough challenge, particularly when dealing with big science
projects. ‘The cost, data requirements and geographic dispersion make many
of these projects infeasible for one country to undertake on its own . .
. It follows that participation and support for these projects should be
international.’ If Bromley is right, that ‘megascience’ is too big for the
US to do alone, then it is also true for Germany, France and Britain. It
cannot be long before Bromley’s arguments are acknowledged, not only for
big science but also for medium-sized projects such as oceanographic research
and the building of new telescopes.

Switzerland, Sweden and the Netherlands all carry out excellent science
and have long histories of prosperous economies and buoyant tax revenues.
All of them are clear that international cooperation, international peer
review, a high degree of selectivity in what research is done at home and
some measure of international sharing of responsibilities and benefits,
are essential features of a sound science policy.

The bigger countries of Europe find this degree of internationalism
hard to accept. But in planning for the future, financial stringency will
ensure some increased element of pooling of resources. For telescopes, particle
accelerators, and fusion laboratories, international collaboration is already
practical politics in Europe. Below the level of the megaproject it is more
difficult to see evidence of cooperation. But it is on the agenda.

Relying on casual contacts

Up to now, international collaboration has been patchy. Some fields
have had structures for the international pursuit of research for several
decades, while in others the contact does not yet extend beyond loose exchanges
and occasional meetings at conferences. Cooperation tends to be more noticeable
where formal mechanisms have been developed. CERN, the European centre for
particle physics in Geneva, for example, has large experimental facilities,
a recognised international structure and occasionally generates convulsions
over funding levels. Less visible, but also effective, are innumerable informal
networks such as exchanges between scientists who may have met only at conferences
or through the printed word, movements of researchers between laboratories
of large multinational companies or exchanges of young researchers between
universities.

Over the next decade, it is likely that the informal route will turn
out to be the more important. If scientists are to gain enough confidence
in foreigners to share experience and plans, or to exchange students, it
will be not because their research councils have ordered them to do so,
or because their finance ministries have tightened the purse strings, but
because experience has taught them that, in the words of the car stickers,
‘doing it with foreigners is fun’.

The European Commission normally insists that each funding application
must bring together scientists from several countries. And, for its Framework
programme, its scientific committee, CODEST, oversees an embryonic peer
review system on a European scale. These are controversial but valuable
contributions. The European Science Foundation also plays a role, as path
breaker and catalyst. The ESF funds ‘networks’ of scientists from different
countries who work in similar areas, coordinates international research
and organises ‘research conferences’, which are informal discussions among
invited delegates to set research agendas for the next two to three years.

Formal collaboration has been pressed furthest in the physics-based
sciences, especially where there is a strong engineering content and the
need for large, expensive experimental equipment. Telescopes, for example,
are expensive and used by relatively few scientists. The mountain tops of
Gran Canaria, Chile, Hawaii and Australia are bristling with evidence for
the possibilities of international cooperation. Similarly, investigation
of the structure of matter requires large machines capable of generating
very high voltages and magnetic fields. The best known examples are at CERN,
but there are others throughout Europe that range from those which operate
under fully international agreements, to national facilities which are made
available to visiting scientists from other countries.

The potential of nuclear fusion as an energy source is the subject of
a major international programme focused on large and expensive equipment.
The Joint European Torus at Culham in Oxfordshire is sponsored by the Community,
Sweden and Switzerland. JET’s successor, the International Thermonuclear
Experimental Reactor looks set to be a worldwide collaboration.

Research programmes such as the Community’s information technology programme,
ESPRIT, represent a second category of formally organised international
research. Although the present doctrine is that Community supported science
must be ‘pre-competitive’, there is little disguise for the basic motivation
that Europe should compete more effectively with the US and Japan for the
enormous markets based on hi-tech developments. Research into information
technology is expected to eat up some 1.352 billion Ecus (more than £1
billion) over the four years of the Community’s present Framework programme.
Communications technologies have been allocated 869 million Ecus, and industrial
and materials technologies 888 million Ecus.

There are also a few examples of formal international collaboration
which are exceptions to this concentration on physics and engineering. The
European Molecular Biology Organisation based in Heidelberg emerged largely
through the conviction of a small number of people that molecular biology
needed to be developed at a European level to achieve its maximum potential.
Likewise, work in geoscience, oceanography and on the polar regions and
ice-field studies, has been developing in truly international ways, particularly
over the past decade.

If collaboration in these fields has been successful, why have others
remained national territory? Perhaps the needs for expensive equipment
are not so pressing. Perhaps there was a window of opportunity a decade
or two ago when the political and economic climate was more favourable to
international scientific endeavour. In the present economic circumstances,
it is difficult to imagine the creation of any new international laboratory
with all the associated costs.

Apart from convincing national governments to part with a portion of
their national funds to conduct collaborative research, one of the greatest
difficulties that faces any attempt to internationalise science is deciding
who divides the spoils. Who will perform the peer review, and keep an eye
on quality and direction of research? Who would choose the referees? Would
every project have one British, one German, one Nordic and one Latin referee?
What about the language problem?

Some experienced scientists working for national research councils level
these questions at the Commission’s attempts to run a peer review system,
and at its efforts in the Framework programme to offer thinly spread encouragement
to international cooperation over a large swathe of basic science. The Commission’s
more precisely focused effort, in fusion, electronics and materials science,
attracts less criticism. Altogether, however, the Commission spends not
much more than 5 per cent of the total expenditure of all national research
councils on basic science, though the proportion may grow. The Commission’s
detractors are not convinced that such growth would be wise.

But there is a larger question here. Will the internationalisation of
science in Europe proceed at such a pace that national research agencies
will need to pool all their resources in one single funding body? The US
example suggests not. America’s research council, the National Science Foundation,
though large and influential, is only one of a number of federal funding
bodies. There are also powerful and wealthy private foundations, and many
university departments attract their own funding. Moreover, the sheer size
that would be necessary for a comprehensive European research council rules
it out of practical consideration.

In the foreseeable future, one option is for national research agencies
to earmark a portion of their funding, initially 3 or 4 per cent, for joint
projects. Such a ‘collective agency’, which complements rather than replaces
the existing agencies, should make the scale and difficulty of the idea
far more manageable, and less threatening to the fabric of peer review.
Moreover, the scheme would take time to grow and so develop in a sensible
way. All this can be couched in the fashionable language of subsidiarity
and so help to fend off claims that national sovereignty is being eroded.

Looking forward to a period of great stringency in public expenditure,
it is extremely likely that any substantial increase in Community spending
on research, if there is any at all, will be financed out of the pockets
of national research councils. But it is also highly probable that an increase
in ‘European’ spending on science will come to be seen as a worthwhile means
of financing large-scale projects, pooling workforces and avoiding duplication.
Should this happen, the next question is whether the research councils begin
to adopt a European approach themselves, or whether it is left to the Commission
to manage the expansion of its research role.

Michael Posner, an economist, is secretary-general of the European Science
Foundation. He has worked for the British government in the Treasury, and
as chairman of the Social Science Research Council, now known as the Economic
and Social Research Council.