The single European market currently under construction is not just
a device for creating extra jobs for Europe’s mobile middle class. It is
also an attempt to direct the evolution of modern industrial society towards
a new level of organisation, one that is sub-global rather than national.

Industry has been well ahead of Jacques Delors, the president of the
European Commission, in making the transition. It has realised that merely
to compete in high technology with companies based in the US and Japan it
needs a large domestic market as a power-base, and that a united Europe
is the answer.

It is equally clear – despite much wishful thinking to the contrary,
as well as the occasional human sacrifices of workers in declining industries
to propitiate the gods of the free market – that managing high-tech industry
requires a partnership that involves governments in quite intimate ways.

Japan’s Ministry of International Trade and Industry (MITI) uses what
it calls ‘entrusted research’ and ‘research cartels’ to boost the competitiveness
of its industry, both in terms of initial rates of innovation, and of post-innovative
performance. In the US, government spending on defence and the standardisation
of defence technology specifications act in a comparable role.

In contrast, we in Europe demonstrate our madness in two ways: quantitatively
and qualitatively. In an industrial economy whose future will be determined
by the outcome of a productivity race with Japan and the US in high technology,
we spend over half our common Community budget on agriculture; and most
of that goes towards buying and subsequently destroying low quality food.

It is surely insane that Community expenditure on research, development
and demonstration – currently less than £1 billion a year – as well
as on the necessary ancillary activities, such as training, remains an order
of magnitude smaller than the amount it spends on food mountains.

When France’s President Mitterrand suggested that Europe should develop
a coordinated response to the Strategic Defense Initiative, what did we
get? Eureka, a high-technology R&D programme that embraced almost everyone
who wanted to join, whether inside or outside the Community. It is totally
non-selective in its choice of research topics – these are left almost entirely
to the industrial participants – non-interventionist in the restrictions
that it places on the role of governments and government departments, and
has no funds of its own.

Unfortunately, many of these features characterise the European Commission’s
own technological research programmes. There is little selectivity of research
topics, concentration of resources or evaluation of research results in
the Framework programme. The problems are compounded by a refusal to choose
research priorities based on a clear identification of which technologies
society would like to develop.

The worst failing is the Commission’s stubborn refusal to get involved
in activities that are close to the market. At present, all attempts by
large companies to collaborate on near-market R&D are mutilated by the
Community’s anti-competition rules.

The few sizable European research collaborations that have succeeded
in getting off the ground remain at the ‘pre-competitive’ level of industrial
research. Not surprisingly, such collaboration has had virtually no impact
on the commercial fortunes of European companies, a lack which has perhaps
been most obvious in the field of electronics.

Civilian technology is not the only area to suffer. In the defence field,
the Treaty of Rome, which provides the legal framework for the Community’s
activities, exempts military industries from the logic of pushing for European-level
rationalisation. It has been tolerated for too long.

The overall effect of these restrictions has been to tie Europe’s research
arms behind its back. Remember that Japan’s postwar success in high technology
did not stem from the country’s basic research activities, but from its
involvement in research that was close to the market and, as such, feeding
directly into industrial innovation. Both Europe and the US are currently
congratulating themselves for apparently browbeating the Japanese into redirecting
their spending towards basic research. But two wrongs don’t make a right.

In the US, it is widely recognised that small and medium-sized companies
are the principal sources of innovation in the economy. In Japan, in contrast,
such companies are irrelevant. The Commission assumes that we should follow
the American model, yet there is little empirical evidence to justify its
choice.

Furthermore, while backing small business, we continue to waste money
on big science. We provide large helpings of precious resources to institutions
such as the Commission’s Joint Research Centre, with its main laboratory
at Ispra, whose achievements have been woeful and whose revitalisation is
always tomorrow. Instead, we should be seeking direct, serious, long-term
partnerships between academics and industry, facilitated by government.

Even at European level, however, we cannot afford to do everything.
We must make technological choices. Europe must not be afraid to take risks
in science and technology, or to modify our efforts based on the evaluation
of R&D results.

Europe faces a long and uncertain struggle to establish a position of
economic strength in the world. The key to future wealth and employment
lies in how well our high-technology industries succeed in rationalising
themselves in order to achieve this.

The motor for that success will be research, together with development
and demonstration. Science and technology are central to the future of the
European enterprise. For them to achieve the place they need and deserve,
politicians and scientists alike must carry out a triage that will permit
Europe to concentrate on essential activities – which include science and
technology – and then find the resources needed to ensure that these essential
activities are adequately carried out.

Glyn Ford is member for Greater Manchester East, and head of the European
Parliamentary Labour Party in the European Parliament. He was formerly a
researcher in science policy at the University of Manchester.

THIS book warns of the consequences of using the world’s oceans as a
bottomless dustbin. The contents match the style and tenor of the title,
Poisoners of the Seas. The author, K. A. Gourlay, has a clear epistemology:
scientists are nothing more or less than creatures of the establishment,
engaged, knowingly or unknowingly, in an elaborate series of cover-ups to
prevent the general public from learning how natural resources are being
pillaged and the Earth poisoned in the interests of profit.

ÐÓ°ÉÔ­´´s are not objective, says Gourlay. ‘Government scientists have
dual loyalties; to science and to their government. Fortunately for them,
the two rarely conflict; their entire training and education leads them
to adopt an establishment world view which can accommodate national interests
and scientific ‘objectivity’ . . .’

‘Perceptiveness on the reader’s part is necessary to recognise that
this view (the scientist’s) is no more valid than his or her own . . . The
perceptive reader quickly comes to recognise whether the source is ‘for
us’ or ‘against us’.’ Polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) it can be concluded
‘are chlorine based compounds with different structures. Chlorine, we know,
is unpleasant.’

These quotes from the book seem to indicate that the author’s position
lies somewhere between the naive ‘science is social relations’ school and
the more irrational of the campaigners against fluoridation, a position
that is simultaneously untenable and unhelpful. Many scientists recognise
that the idea that science is objective and neutral is a myth. Science,
like all other forms of knowledge, is moulded by society. Simultaneously,
there is an ideology of science and an ideology in science. So analysts
have to recognise the subtle interactions between science and society that
multifaceted reality requires. This is a world apart from the simplistic
conspiracy theory of Gourlay. At the same time, this conspiratorial approach
is mentally crippling; rational argument dies on the cross of pure power.
The framework within which Poisoners of the Seas is set is a sadly distorted
one.

Nevertheless, there is much worth quarrying among the fragments that
are drawn together to buttress the arguments. The catalogue of man-made
disasters in the seas is fearsome. From the oil pouring from the wrecked
Torrey Canyon to the sinking of the Mont Louis via Bantry Bay; from the
disabling effects of mercury poisoning, known as Minamata disease, to sewage-induced
typhoid in the Mediterranean and leukaemia around Sellafield. There are
new revelations almost monthly. Gourlay, among others, argues with regard
to some of these causal links that, ‘common sense dictates that there should
be a connection, but common sense is not science’. Yet, more often than
not, contemporary history tells us that common sense is the vanguard of
scientific explanation.

In Poisoners of the Seas, Gourlay provides a quick rundown of the main
sources of pollution: oil and sewage, heavy metals and radioactivity. All
of these illustrate the practice of management by disaster. Each new major
accident triggers agreement on some draft convention that has previously
gathered dust, left for years on the table at international gatherings.
As Stanley Clinton Davies (until the beginning of January the European Commissioner
responsible for the Environment) writes in the foreword: ‘The pollution
of the seas is not principally a scientific or an economic problem. It is
a political problem.’

Environmental pollution will continue to mount unless governments get
to grips with the problem. There is little evidence that some even recognise
that there is a problem. For example, in Britain the government’s strategy,
to delay controlling the emissions of chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) into the
atmosphere to prevent damage to the ozone layer, is ‘barely distinguishable
from that of Britain’s biggest producer, Imperial Chemical Industries’.
Dumping is delayed discharge, yet the British government still wishes to
dispose of high-level radioactive waste at sea. The only possible acceptable
option is storage beneath the sea in containers that can be monitored and
recovered.

Looking at European Community legislation, it is clear that Britain
is ignoring the spirit and the letter of the law. Responding to the 1976
Directive on Bathing Waters, Britain initially designated less bathing beaches
than land-locked Luxembourg. Blackpool, the country’s most famous beach,
was not even on the list. Now, following the Shellfish Directive on pollution
levels in shellfish beds, the government has decided that the only beds
to be designated are those that already reach the laid-down standard. From
a global perspective, Britain also acts as a brake on progress. Lobbying
from right-wing pressure groups in the US, concerned to protect the rights
of private enterprises to exploit the Antartctic and the Moon, stopped Britain
signing the Law of the Sea Treaty, making Britain and the US the sole ideological
opponents of the idea of the oceans as the common heritage of humanity.

What is to be done? The first move must be to follow the Japanese in
protecting offshore areas. Since the recognition of 200-mile Exclusive Economic
Zones adjacent to all coasts, the Japanese have argued that this ‘garden’
to their homeland must be ‘cultivated’. This image for the North Sea and
the Mediterranean might help to transform them from the cesspits they are
in danger of becoming. In the short term, the best hope lies with regional
cooperation of the countries around such seas. After 1992, the European
Community might act as a catalyst for action. In the longer term, action
has to be at a global level. The study of plate tectonics has provided a
treasure map of the ocean resources of the world that can be raped or managed.
It is in all our interests that they be managed. Poisoners of the Seas provides
much of the ammunition but little of the battle plan.

Glyn Ford is a member of the European Parliament.