Horizon Europe crisis: fears of R&D ‘devastation’ amid EU and UK impasse

Political fighting triggers university leaders to suggest changing who controls infrastructure including European Research Council

The EU’s political relationships with key neighbours are now so fractured that some academic leaders want to shift control of research agencies away from the bloc’s politicians to stop further damage to R&D links.

Relationships between politicians in Brussels and the governments of the UK and Switzerland have deteriorated over recent years, and political impasses—coming to a head in the case of the UK—are looking entrenched. Researchers’ collaborations are now increasingly becoming collateral damage, and as a result some fear Europe is slipping even further behind the US and China as a research power.