Riding out the storm

It has been a tumultuous year for Europe. The UK has cemented its plans to break away from the EU; the rest of the bloc has awkwardly begun trying to shape its future without really knowing how its budget will be affected by Brexit; and academic autonomy has come under attack in Turkey, Hungary, Romania and elsewhere.

But amid the chaos—which we look back at on page 3—it is important to appreciate that the EU’s research and innovation initiatives are actually performing rather well.

An evaluation of the first three years of Horizon 2020, published in May, reported widespread praise for the programme from its participants. Most notably, 83 per cent of funding recipients said that their work could not have been conducted without the programme’s support.