D Budget Impasse Heads for EEC Summit

LONDON—The summit meeting of European Economic Community leaders in Brussels on June 29-30 appears to be the earliest chance to resolve the longstanding deadlock over a new, five-year European research budget. The EEC's Framework Research Program embraces several collaborative R&D projects. Britain stands alone now in its opposition to the $7.5 billion budget suggested by Belgium as a compromise between a much larger figure requested by the European Commission and a smaller one proposed earlier in the year by Britain, France and West Germany. British intransigence is founded partly upon the government's belief that the EEC should not increase R&D spending at a time of overall budgetary constraint—particularly when finances have been strained by an unforeseen rise in agricultural support prices resulting from the weakness of the U.S. dollar. But the Thatcher government also has strong reservations about the Framework program itself—despite its avowed purpose of ensuring that Europe stays even with the United States and Japan in the high-tech markets of the 1990s. Pick and Choose Geoffrey Pattie, minister for information technology, believes that the program is "unfocused," poorly monitored and insufficiently market-oriented, and that it duplicates individual national research efforts. More than four months after the next five-year budget was supposed to have been settled, Pattie says he is prepared to support a figure of no more than $4.8 billion. He also wants Britain and her 11 EEC partners to agree on individual projects rather than across-the-board budgets. Britain's criticisms of the program are widely rejected by industrialists, who worry that delays could make obsolete the products of collaboration. Race, a project devoted to the integration of voice, data, video and graphics through advanced broadband communications, is especially vulnerable. "It is impossible to lose many months of a major project of this sort without feeling the effects later on," said Mel Price, vice chairman of the General Electric Co., one of the participating companies. "If you delay a year, someone else will preempt you—and the window for this particular opportunity is not infinitely wide." The 30 companies and 500 scientists taking part in Race, which has almost exhausted its initial funding, are awaiting $640 million from the Framework budget under the Belgian compromise. A similar infusion would go to Esprit, the largest Framework project, which supports 3,000 scientists working on information technology throughout Europe. The deadlock jeopardizes work toward the merging of PABX telephone exchanges and computer network and involves the West German telecommunications group Telenorma, Jeumont Schneider in France and Plessey in Britain. Also facing imminent difficulties are a nuclear fusion project and smaller programs covering AIDS, cancer and technology for developing countries. With an estimated 400 U.K. companies and universities collaborating in the program, there has been intense lobbying in London by politicians of all parties. "Why is this stubborn Luddite government endangering hundreds of community-financed research projects in Britain?" Labour spokesman George Robertson asked Lynda Chalker, Foreign Office minister of state, in the House of Commons. Chalker replied that research funds should be aimed at improving the competitive position of particular EEC industries rather than being used for across-the-board increases on the scale requested by the Commission. "What this country and the EEC need is winners, not white elephants," she insisted. In a recent vote by the European parliament in Strasbourg, 43 of Britain's 49 Conservative members joined in a condemnation of their government's stand as "dominated by a narrowly national and budgetary approach." That motion, coupled with a call for the Framework program to be withdrawn if Britain did not drop its veto, was passed by 141 votes to 4. Amedee Turner, a Conservative and spokesman on research for the European parliament, has accused his government of "shirking its responsibilities." He has called on Prime Minister Thatcher to intervene in what he claims is really "a petty squabble in Whitehall about which department pays the bill." Over the past month, several solutions to the deadlock have been explored at the European Commission's headquarters in Brussels. Officials are mystified by Britain's opposition to the new budget, which would return $1.30 in research contracts for every $1 contributed. While some Commission officials still expect the Thatcher government to relax its tough stand—particularly if a general election is held next month—others are exploring the option of proceeding without Britain's approval. Such a step appears to be legally unsound, however, because the EEC Treaty requires unanimous agreement on decisions of this sort. The Commission and the other governments are also said to have considered asking Britain to withdraw voluntarily from the next five years' Framework program, allowing a scaled-down version to proceed. This would present the British government with the legally and morally difficult choice of whether to drop its veto or prevent its EEC partners from going ahead on their own. Dixon is European editor of The Scientist. EC Accepts Criticism of Joint Center BRUSSELS—The European Commission has conceded that EEC's Joint Research Center—consisting of four technical establishments with a total staff of 2,300 in Belgium, the Netherlands and Italy—is over-bureaucratic, inflexibly managed and out of touch with needs of industry. The admission came in the Commission's preliminary reply to a highly critical report by a panel chaired by Harry Becker, research director of Shell. Although the JRC was created 30 years ago, these criticisms appear to support those made by U.K. Minister for Information Technology Geoffrey Pattie about the Framework Program for joint research throughout the European Community. Pattie initiated the report on JRC when he chaired the EEC Research Council last year. The JRC's budget expires this year, and it has requested $750 million for the period through 1991. But that request is dependent on a resolution of the overall Framework budget.

D Budget Impasse Heads for EEC Summit

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