ABSTRACT
A new form of scientific cooperation has been put in place in Europe in the second half of this century. It is a form in which the governments of several countries — often as many as a dozen — agree to finance an organization dedicated to collaborative research. Such agreements are both formal and binding in that they are enshrined in a ‘convention,’ a kind of international treaty which has to be ratified by national parliaments and wherein the ‘member states’ of the organization, in consultation with their national scientific commu nities lay down its basic aims, structure and functioning. What we have here is both more and other than simply the post-war alliance of science and the state. It is the emergence of a new structure and a potent source of funding and of legiti mation for expensive fields of scientific research and technical development. It is the development of a lucrative strategy in which scientists and their allies have mobilized political support in peacetime for essentially nonmilitary research, bypassing and supplementing their national research programs and budgets, and the related decision-making and priority-setting mechanisms.
