Brussels faced a revolt over its scientific alliances
Source - Daily telegraph 28/02/23
Vladimir Putin is the Godfather of the Windsor Framework. Full-scale war in Europe for the first time since 1945 is what has made it possible to detoxify the Northern Ireland Protocol.
Few people are aware that the UK extended its world-class cyberwarfare deterrent to the whole of Eastern and Central Europe at the outset of the conflict, raising the stakes for the Kremlin if it tried to take down their critical infrastructure with cyber attacks.
Nor are they aware that the UK extended a solidarity guarantee to Sweden and Finland very early and at a critical juncture, offering de facto Article 5 protection even though they were not in NATO. But the significance of this was not lost on the governments of these countries, and they have a voice in EU affairs through multiple channels.
Commission pettifogging over the trade of seed potatoes and sausages from one part of the UK to another had become surreal. “Only Putin will be happy,” said Polish premier Mateusz Morawiecki last year, calling for an end to the distraction.
Events vindicated the British view that Putin could be checked and that Ukraine should be backed to the hilt. That put us in tight alignment with front line states, the Nordics, and Holland. The divide was not between the UK and the EU: the line of cleavage is and was within the EU.
Much wishful thinking in Paris, Brussels, and the Monnet nexus of integrationist think-tanks has been ruthlessly exposed. The war has dashed hopes of a European defence and foreign policy “superpower” emerging now that the EU is no longer held back by Britain, acting in eternal character as de Gaulle’s Trojan Horse for the Americans.
Little has come of Emmanuel Macron’s “European sovereignty” or his defence condominium with the Germans. As soon as matters became serious, Berlin turned to Washington. Olaf Scholz is buying new F-18 fighter jets from the US, undermining the Franco-German FCAS joint fighter project. The Italians are working on a new combat aircraft with the UK and Japan.
“Of the momentum that Brexit was expected to give EU security and defence policy, not a peep can be heard,” said Le Monde Diplomatique.
Mr Macron has drawn the inevitable conclusion and buried the hatchet over Brexit, something easier for him to do with the calm and amenable Rishi Sunak. The Entente is back. The French and the British are destined to be comrades, as they have since the 1850s in the great questions of diplomacy.
Personally, I am stunned by Mr Sunak’s deal on the Protocol. As Lord Mandelson said, it is “as good as it gets”. David Davis on the other side of the Brexit bench called it a “spectacular negotiating success”. Indeed it is.
It settles a bone of contention with the Biden White House. It should unlock pent-up business investment by foreign firms, although the Government could unlock a great deal more if it abandoned the coming rise in corporation tax to 25pc and acceded to the CBI’s plea for full expensing.
Yes, the European Court remains in the shadows, but governing a reduced sliver of the Acquis, with no “reach-back” into British economic policy through state aid rules. The larger political point is that Brussels no longer wishes to use the Protocol to demonstrate hegemonic power. That episode is over.
Britain's Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, right, hold a press conference
Ursula von der Leyen, the European Commission president, said she hoped the deal would maintain a ‘stronger EU-UK relationship’ CREDIT: Dan Kitwood/Pool via AP
The deal clears the way for Britain to rejoin Horizon Europe for science and research, and the nuclear Euratom programme.
Or, put differently, it allows the EU to extricate itself from a destructive policy that was doing serious harm to European science and was leading to a generalised revolt by research institutions and universities against the Commission itself. Brussels discovered that in sanctioning the UK, it was sanctioning Europe.
Let us be clear what happened. Horizon is a genuinely pan-European scheme. British participation is written into the original Brexit text. Until yesterday, the EU was refusing to fulfil its legal commitment.
It has been holding science hostage, using it as a political pressure tool. It has done the same to Switzerland, kicking the Swiss out of EU science in order to punish them for other sins – a move described as “absurd” and “almost spiteful” by one leading figure in European research.
Was it Moscow-educated Maroš Šefčovič, the Commission’s Brexit enforcer, who chose to weaponise science? Whoever it was, he or she did not understand the nature of cross-border cooperation in research, or the pivotal role of British and Swiss institutions in Europe’s scientific ecosystem.
“It’s a punishment for all of us, a punishment for Europe, a sadomasochistic decision,” said Professor Antoine Petit, head of the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) and a member of the Stick to Science campaign that includes ten Nobel laureates from across Europe.
He says CNRS alone was involved in over 1,000 projects with UK or Swiss researchers under the last round of the Horizon scheme. “Every domain will be impacted by this decision,” he said.
Grants have been blocked. Projects are in limbo. Suddenly, scientists on the Continent find themselves on the wrong side of a political barrier when dealing with the European Bioinformatics Institute in Cambridge or the Torus fusion labs in Culham.
The European University Association said EU research policy had become "arbitrary and obscure: the Commission can no longer claim to be the adult in the room”. The universal cry from European science has been to stop this folly immediately.
Britain is not a poor relation in this domain. It has the highest ranking universities in Europe by far. It has big beasts of funding research such as the Wellcome Trust and Cancer Research UK. Without British (and Swiss) participation, Europe risks being relegated to a second-tier backwater in global science.
Michelle Donelan, the UK’s Science and Technology Secretary, upped the ante earlier this month, letting it be known that this country was preparing (reluctantly) to activate its “Plan B” and switch to new scientific alliances.
“We are more than ready to go it alone, working with science powerhouses like the US, Switzerland and Japan. I will not sit idly by while our researchers are sidelined,” she wrote.
Horizon is an excellent programme – the sort of Europe that the British always wanted – but it is excellent for a reason. European scientists were so disenchanted with the Commission’s research directorate – top-down, bureaucratic, glacially slow, and run by ideologues who micromanaged the use of funds – that they drifted away in the early 2000s and formed their own cross-border network. It became the European Research Council.
The Commission learned a hard lesson. It changed its fundamental approach to science and brought the dissidents back into the EU family. The ERC and Horizon have together evolved into a European success story precisely they are sui generis.
It is entirely desirable that Britain should retake its place in this structure. This is not because it needs hand-outs from Brussels. The Government has pledged to match the pre-Brexit levels of research grants whatever happens. Horizon is valuable because it is the glue that holds everything together in European science collaboration.
The moral of the Horizon saga is that the EU needs the UK more than Brussels supposed in the first flush of post-Brexit triumphalism, just as it needs the UK more than it ever imagined to prevent Putin reconstituting the Russian tsarist empire.
Mr Sunak had the personality and good judgement to seize the moment, and so did Ursula von der Leyen. Hats off to both of them.
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