The EUREKA Project. The Oscillation of the Politics of European Research and Technology between Cooperation and Competition (c1980-1992)

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Andreas Wirsching
• Subject Area: Modern and Contemporary History ; History of Science
• Term: from 2017 to 2023
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 316001474

'After the Boom' (Doering-Manteuffel/Raphael) and during the Economic Crisis that lasted from 1979 to the mid-1980s a prolonged sense of foreboding prevailed amongst the members of the European Community. Part of their perception of crisis arose from an acute feeling that they were falling technologically behind the traditional US-American predominance and the dynamic challenge coming from Japan. Key importance was given to the technological factor in discussions of intensified global competition. The American Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) announced in 1983 underlined the need for action. At heart, this was far more a political backing for research than it was a military-political instrument. In its wake, intendedly cooperative transnational structures were created and, after an overarching supporting programme was adopted in 1984, European research promotions obtained an institutional framework held in a tension between the opposite poles of cooperation and competition.With this as the background, the EUREKA Programme is the subject of this part of the project. Through newly accessible, declassified sources, research into it is here put onto a new basis. Its birth, its way of functioning and the effects it had are all investigated through exploration of the actors involved, their activities at several different levels woven together in the telling. Following discussion of the political actors in an international context, an enquiry is made into those involved in practical application: research institutes, commercial enterprises, and wherever possible individual scientists who competed in applications for funding and carried out new research within the remit of the Programme. The subproject investigates how certain cooperative and competitive structures became firmly established, and how these became the guiding models for the various actors in the EUREKA projects. With this investigation, the study makes a substantial contribution to the history of intergovernmental cooperation in Europe and also to the developments that have resulted in present-day European research politics. Concrete fields of enquiry are to be found in the Life Sciences, laser technology and the initial research on the self-propelled car. In this way, the phenomenon of European technological cooperation and its offshoot, the production of practical know-how, are analysed and put into historical context within the competitive political and economic power relations of the time.

• DFG Programme: Research Units
• Subproject of: FOR 2553: Cooperation and Competition in the Sciences