It is sometimes too easy to forget just how far Pan-EU research has come
At last week’s inaugural Arab-Euro Conference on Higher Education in Barcelona, several speakers made the same point: it is hard for countries in the Middle East and north Africa to begin to collaborate in research programmes with Europe when they don’t even collaborate with each other.
It is the same in other emerging, but fragmented, research areas all around the world. Visitors to Latin America and east Asia will frequently be struck by the lack of effective cross-border collaboration between near neighbours such as Brazil and Argentina, or Japan and South Korea.
The latter pair are old and mortal enemies, local observers will wearily explain. But there aren’t many enmities older than that between France and Germany.
What the EU has proven—and what is far too readily forgotten, in these challenging times—is that even traditionally fractious neighbouring states can organise their affairs on a collaborative basis; one in which free movement of people and ideas is the norm, and war becomes unthinkable.
Research programmes have been, at least until recently, a small component of the EU’s budget, but they make up a significant component of this new way of doing things. They have, among other things, built ties between different nations’ universities, giving their academics common purpose.
Though universities may only contain a relatively small proportion of a given country’s population, they still represent—at the very least—a significant chunk of its intellectual vitality, its way of thinking, and the manner in which the country perceives itself. That is perhaps even more the case in the developing world than it is in Europe.
Universities have played a prominent role in the undulating set of skirmishes and conflicts known, somewhat lazily, as the Arab Spring, and they will continue to play a major part in the development of freer and more democratic societies in that troubled region.
As speakers at the Barcelona conference pointed out, the nations of a stronger and more confident Arab world must place more emphasis on international research collaboration with each other. Sesame, the synchrotron light source due to come on stream in Jordan in 2015, is a good example of what can be achieved.
But much more small-scale collaboration between the region’s universities is needed. This need not preclude the involvement of Arab research in European programmes such as Horizon 2020. But the most important role of EU programmes outside the EU itself is to show what can be done, and indeed has to be done, to set regional research collaboration in train.
To judge from the rhetoric of government officials and university managers around the world, it sometimes seems as though every academic should be attempting to collaborate with Harvard or MIT. But in many cases, the partner that is really most useful to work with is far closer at hand. Over three decades, EU research programmes have evolved from a small catalyst for such partnerships into a major engine driving European research. Today, they provide a valuable example of what regional research cooperation can achieve.