Beginnings of European research cooperation
In 1949, the Council of Europe (CoE) included among its founding objectives ‘the encouragement of cooperation in scientific affairs’, but it only played a marginal role in science and technology. The true origins of European cooperation in research lie in the 1950s, when the first intergovernmental organisations focused on research and technology development were created. The European Atomic Energy Community (EURATOM), the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC) and the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN) are the most significant organisations that emerged out of that context.
In 1970, a permanent committee called European Cooperation in Science and Technology (COST) was established as an intergovernmental organisation including non-EEC member states, and launched its first seven actions a year after.
In 1973, the European Commissioner for Research, Ralf Dahrendorf, proposed the first integrated work programme covering activities from education to research in all sectors. His programme led to four Council resolutions on 14 January 1974, setting up the European Science Foundation (ESF), the Scientific and Technical Research Committee (CREST), the predecessor for the current European Research Area and Innovation Committee (ERAC), and for the first time an integrated research programme.
Towards European Framework Programmes
In 1984, the first Framework Programme for Research and Technological Development (FP1) was finally adopted (with a 4 year duration ending in 1987). The thematic scope and budgets and duration of the subsequent framework programmes have steadily grown, and the policy aims have shifted from a purely competitiveness driven logic of research support to one that combines competitiveness with both curiosity driven research and research tackling societal challenges.
The last Framework Programme for Research and Innovation, Horizon 2020 was funded with €77 billion from 2014 to 2020. Moreover, the European Framework Programmes have attracted international interest outside the EU. Horizon 2020 thus encompassed also associated states like Norway, Turkey, Israel and Switzerland. While the Directorate-General for Research and Innovation (DG RTD) is responsible for the overall coordination, design, monitoring and evaluation of Horizon Europe, the implementation lies with specialised agencies, among them the Research Executive Agency (REA) and the ERC Executive Agency (ERCEA).
The current Framework Programme, Horizon Europe was officially launched in the spring of 2021 and will run from 2021-2027, with an increased budget of €95.5 billion. Like its predecessor, it is open to international cooperation.
European Research Area (ERA)
As a complement to the supranational cooperation implemented through the R&I Framework Programmes, a parallel effort to reinforce coordination of national, international and supranational efforts was relaunched in 2000. The notion of the European Research Area (ERA) was conceived in terms of a ‘single market’ for research and researchers across Europe, and was completely based on the Open Method of Coordination (OMC). Research and innovation became a central element of the Lisbon-strategy aimed at making the EU the world’s most competitive economy by 2010.
In 2005, the former Dutch Prime Minister Wim Kok, in his mid-term evaluation of the Lisbon-strategy, judged that the OMC was not working and that the ‘coordination approach’ had failed. Based on this conclusion, the first and only truly communitarian research funding instrument – i.e. the ERC- was set up in 2007. Moreover, the introduction of article 182(5) in the Treaty on the Functioning of the EU (TFEU) authorised the EC to take “the measures necessary for the implementation of the ERA” and thus de jure made research a shared competence between the EU and its member states. The former CREST was renamed European Research Area and Innovation Committee (ERAC), the ‘single market for research’ became the ‘Fifth Freedom of the Movement of Knowledge’.
In 2009 the Ljubljana Process was launched, directed towards fully realising the ERA by 2014. There are still many remaining barriers and the ERA is still far from being realised despite efforts and progress over last years.
Efforts of reviving the ERA were started by the new Commission under Ursula von der Leyen in 2020 with a plan for a new ERA. The EU member states will agree, in the course of 2022, on which of the 20 proposed actions to implement in the reconstituted ERA policy agenda 2022-2024.
Beginnings of European innovation policy
European innovation policy is strongly rooted in the industrial policy of the European Union (EU) as well as policy on Information and Communication Technology (ICT). Already at the beginning of the 1980s, Europe experienced a growing gap in innovation vis-à-vis the United States of America and Japan, which led to the creation of the European network for market oriented industrial research (EUREKA) as an intergovernmental initiative in 1985 with a strong focus on ICT research. The European Community (the predecessor of the EU) and eighteen additional countries, including Switzerland, were the founding members.
The Lisbon Strategy marked another important step in European innovation policy, as innovation was recognized as the motor for economic growth. The Strategy intended to deal with the low productivity and stagnation of economic growth in the EU through the formulation of various policy initiatives to be taken by all member states. A translation of the Lisbon Strategy into concrete measures fed into the next framework programme, FP7, and the creation of European Technology Platforms (ETP) and Joint Technology Initiatives (JTI). These were to serve as an impetus to achieving the target of spending at least 3% of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) for research and technological development.
In 2006, the EC published its communication ‘Putting knowledge into practice: A broad innovation strategy for the EU’. It put greater emphasis on demand-driven innovation, whereas the previous EC communication ‘More Research and Innovation’ (2005) addressed supply-driven innovation in a more traditional way.
As a follow-up to the Europe 2020 strategy, the EC published the communication ‘Europe 2020 Flagship Initiative Innovation Union’ on 6 October 2010. The communication set out 34 action points, which would form the EU innovation policy agenda for the next decade and hence also the policy framework for the European Framework Programme for Research and Innovation from 2014 to 2020 (Horizon 2020). The communication saw innovation as a crosscutting policy with a high priority. In the 2014-2019 EC, no fewer than sixteen portfolios touch directly or indirectly upon innovation. EC services covering innovation range from research, ICT, energy, health, environment, education, employment, Small and Medium Enterprise (SME) policy, competitiveness and internal market. A major change pertained to the main responsibility for innovation policy, which moved from the Directorate-General for Enterprise and Industry (DG ENTR) to the Directorate-General for Research and Innovation (DG RTD). However, DG ENTR remained responsible for ‘industrial innovation policy’ as well as for ‘SME policy’. This policy area included the Enterprise Europe Network (EEN), the only part of the Competitiveness and Innovation Programme (CIP) in which Switzerland participated from 2007 to 2013.
Innovation gets integrated into Horizon 2020
Innovation was fully embedded throughout two of the three pillars of Horizon 2020: ‘Industrial Leadership’ and ‘Tackling Societal Challenges’. The European Institute of Innovation and Technology (EIT), created in 2008, was also included as part of Horizon 2020. Furthermore, demonstration and market replication programmes were carried out in a new dedicated SME instrument, implemented under Horizon 2020.
In Horizon Europe, the main innovation-focused programmes are brought together in one of the three pillars «Innovative Europe», which includes the newly-created European Innovation Council (EIC), the EIT, and a new initiative promoting European Innovation Ecosystems.
COSME
EEN was funded under the European Programme for the Competitiveness of Enterprises and Small and Medium-sized Enterprises (COSME) from 2014 to 2020, and now has been integrated into the Single Market Programme (SMP) for the period 2021-2027, supporting SMEs through both advisory and financial support. There is no overlap but complementarity with the financial instruments of Horizon Europe. Financial instruments of Horizon Europe are exclusively used for financing research and innovation projects, whereas financial instruments in the SMP cover a broader range of entrepreneurial activities. Switzerland is not associated to COSME, but has stayed part of EEN.
The Origins of European Education Policy
The Council of Europe thus has been addressing human rights, education, democratic citizenship, intercultural dialogue and multilingualism since 1949. As education is the responsibility of national member states, general education experienced little attention and funding from a European level. Even today, article 165 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union (TFEU) only grants the European Union (EU) a complementary competence, allowing the EU to gather and exchange information and share good policy practices in the framework of the so-called Open Method of Coordination (OMC).
Developments in Vocational Education and Training (VET)
It was Vocational Education and Training (VET) that gained a prominent place already in the Treaty of Rome (1957), since Europe had to educate and train its qualified workforce to boost the economy. European cooperation in VET was always in the centre of active European employment and broader economic policies and backed in legislative and institutional terms with an Advisory Council for VET (ACVET) (1963), ten directives on the development of a common VET-policy (1963), the European Centre for the Development of Vocational Training (CEDEFOP) in Thessaloniki (1975), directives on professional qualifications (1988) and the European Training Foundation (ETF) in Torino (1990). Today, article 166 of the TFEU grants the EU an active VET-policy responsibility, and the EU actively implements initiatives and instruments in European VET via the so-called Copenhagen Process (since 2003). These initiatives and instruments concern issues like quality assurance, recognition of qualifications and more mobility in VET. Since 2010, the benefits of dual VET systems in equipping students with relevant skills for the labour market has been widely recognised by the EC and in general throughout Europe, leading to a series of debates and European initiatives on VET.
Developments in higher education and start of European programmes
Transnational learning and teaching mobility was and is seen as the major means providing the competences for European workers needed on the international labour market. The EU launched the Erasmus Programme for Higher Education (1987), followed by the Leonardo da Vinci Programme for VET and the Comenius Programme for Primary and Secondary Education (1995) and the Grundtvig programme for Adult Education (2000). General education for the first time entered the European treaties in the Treaty of Maastricht (1993) also leading towards the establishment of the Directorate-General for Education and Culture (EAC) within the EC in 1994. Concerns about the position of European higher education in the world, and the mistrust vis-à-vis the EC amongst national ministers of higher education led to the launch of the inter-ministerial Bologna-process (1999) directed towards realising a European Higher Education Area (EHEA) by 2010. By that year, 47 European countries from Russia to Iceland had signed to this process reforming European higher education along e.g. a three-degree system (bachelor, master and PhD) or the European Credit Transfer System (ECTS). Funding instruments, like Erasmus, Leonardo da Vinci, Comenius and Grundtvig were all grouped under the Lifelong Learning Programme (LLP) from 2007 to 2013. As of 1 January 2014, the LLP was replaced by the European Programme for Education, Training, Youth and Sport (Erasmus+).
Education at heart of European policy
In 2000: the EU launched the Lisbon strategy for growth and jobs, making education an important piece of competitiveness policies. The overall policy goals were lifelong learning, including adult education and non-formal and informal learning, increased transparency, as well as upgrading the qualification level of the sitting European workforce in order to cope both with the technological revolution and with the democratic changes. Also in 2000, the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) published the first results of the Programme for the International Student Assessment (PISA) on the qualifications of 15-year old pupils. PISA not only dismantled seemingly good reputations of national education systems, but initiated indicator alignment, data collection, monitoring of progress and setting benchmarks e.g. through the Education and Training 2020 (ET 2020) cooperation framework.
The Lisbon strategy was in 2010 replaced by the Europe 2020 strategy for smart, sustainable and inclusive growth, this time even more placing education at the heart of the EU’s competitiveness agenda.