The 2nd euro crisis is coming to a lab near you

For the past few months, newspaper headlines about the euro crisis have been getting more and more alarming. But there’s a quieter, slow-motion crisis going on, as well – and it will directly affect the way research, development and innovation happen in Europe.

The issue goes by a name only a bureaucrat could love, the European Research Area.  For the past decade, the Commission has been pushing to create a single market for research – in essence, to knock down trade barriers between EU members that have fragmented the market for ideas. The barriers are well documented:

• A patent system that ratchets up cost and delay by forcing people to translate their patents into multiple languages, and then provides no simple way to settle a patent dispute.
• Pension rules and grant conditions that make it difficult, if not financially ruinous, for a researcher in one country to move to a lab in another – or to move from academia to industry inside the same country. 
• A visa system that undercuts Europe’s efforts to reverse ‘brain drain’ by hampering a non-European scientist, once working at a lab in the EU, from moving to a job in another lab in the EU.
•  An uncoordinated funding system that has the Commission and the national bodies in the 27 member-states duplicating grants in many fields, or working to cross-purposes with one other.
• A financial system that makes it too expensive for any but the biggest fund managers to work in multiple EU countries at once, making it harder to start new technology companies.

And the list goes on. None of this is new; but that hasn’t stopped the Commission from raising the issue again. On Tuesday ( September 13) it opened a ‘consultation’ on the problem – inviting the growing phalanx of research lobbyists in Brussels to file more paperwork to document the problems. And the European Council last year set a deadline for doing something about it: 2014.

“Nothing concentrates the mind like a deadline,” said Máire Geoghegan-Quinn, the EU Commissioner for Research, Innovation and Science, in a speech  to a ‘stakeholders’ meeting on the topic in the Commission headquarters. (Science|Business was present.) 

A club of nations for the good times?

But the same issues that have tied up the euro-zone have also been stalling progress in this field. At base, it comes down to a simple point: Does Europe want to be club of nations that hang together in good times and go their own ways in bad, or is it a permanent union?

The bad times are forcing the question, as in the euro crisis. Tight budgets have compelled the national funding councils – who together comprise 95 per cent of public research funding in the EU, to the Commission’s 5 per cent - to guard their turf jealously, even setting up a lobbying office in Brussels to argue their case.  A conflict is worsening between high-class universities that say they should get money because they’re excellent, and developing-region universities that say they should get it because they need it. (This closely mirrors the euro dispute, with Germany, Finland, the Netherlands and other ‘haves’ arguing with ‘have-nots’ in Greece, Portugal, Poland and Spain.) The central EU budget is in play, with a Commission request for a 46 per cent increase in its seven-year ‘Framework’ research budget raising temperatures in the finance ministries.

Of course, nobody’s going bankrupt – so there the euro-zone analogy breaks down. That means the pressure for action is correspondingly less, and the likelihood of solution lower still. But a few things could help move the ball forward:

• Agree on a reason why money should be spent on research at the EU level, as opposed to nationally. At present, the grounds of debate keep shifting as one or another argument is offered for an EU role. Is the purpose like that of the Common Agricultural Policy, to ensure an adequate supply (in that case, of food; in this case, research) in every part of the EU? Is the purpose to make Europe more competitive, by focusing on world-class researchers who will win Nobels or create new industries? Is it to equalise disparities between East and West, North and South? Is it to harness brainpower to solve climate change or other Grand Challenges?  Is it industrial policy, to prevent the disappearance of important jobs and industries in a particular region? Is it some kind of pan-European dating agency, to help Greek biologists meet British bioinformaticians and make beautiful science together? A lot of time-wasting arguments would end if these goals could be narrowed or – and this may be the only practical solution – kept in separate budget boxes so each programme serves only one goal at a time, and can thus be evaluated separately.

• Break the system into smaller pieces. The whole concept of a single, seven-year, €80 billion research and innovation plan is just too juicy a political target. Yes, it succeeds in raising the heat so Prime Ministers pay attention once in a while – but it also makes it harder to agree on anything. And worst of all, it turns the Commission into a mammoth ATM – with one-size-fits-all rules for withdrawing money that get ever-more complex despite constant pledges to improve. Better to have a range of smaller agencies operating on different budget cycles, with seven- or ten-year ‘sunset’ clauses that say they must close down unless specifically granted a new mandate.

• Show more people why they should care. Scientists and engineers are not disadvantaged minorities; they’re not sports or pop stars; and their field is something most citizens are glad to forget the instant they walk out the school doors. Good luck fashioning a political campaign on behalf of research.  Instead, the appeal for a European Research Area has to focus on the practical benefits of science and technology: saving lives, controlling food and energy prices, preserving the environment. With the 1992 Single Market programme, people ‘got’ what it would mean if a car stopped costing 50 per cent more in their country than next door. With the euro-zone, at least some people ‘got’ (for a while, anyway) what it would mean if they didn’t have to change money at the border. But with ERA, what’s the real-world benefit? The Commission needs to make that case.

Of course, it would also help to change the name. European Research Area is not a phrase calculated to quicken the pulse. The Commission already asked for suggestions to rename its Framework Programme (the winner was Horizon 2020). Why not do the same with ERA?