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Colloque : La circulation internationale des idées : producteurs, vecteurs, modalités

2.04 - Networks as drivers of innovation and Euroepan scientific integration: the role of the Ford Foundation in the Sixties”

Auteur(s) : Giuliana GEMELLI

In the framework of the Ford foundation¹s policies in Europe in the softer phase of the Cold war the creation of research networks was considered a crucial complement to the narrow and formalistic training that dominated educational patterns in European universities and a basic framework to enhance the circulation of new talents in the European continent. The aim was to produce fresh research and increase not only the link between European and American scholars but also among European scholars as well as the creation of effective links between intellectuals, administrators and political representatives in the European countries. Between 1957 and the 1965 a relevant number of grants were devoted to the creation as well as the consolidation of research institutes in social and economic sciences, such as the Maison des sciences de l¹homme and the Institute de sciences économiques appliquées in Paris, the SVIMEZ and the Bilateral Committee in social and political sciences, in Italy, the Nufflied college and the London school of economics in Great Britain the Free Universitat in Berlin. To this list one should add the Salzburg Seminar that shaped the framework to increase inter-knowledge and collaboration among European scholars. One of the most reputed consultant of the Ford Foundation, James Killian, who had been the president of the MIT, as well as, during the crucial years of the Soviet Sputnik challenge, scientific advisor to President Eseinhover, noted that what was lacking in Europe was the capacity to develop interdisciplinary research and to promote collaboration among scholars. Most of the Paradoxically, other initiatives that were deliberately devoted to reinforce European integration had, according to the Ford Foundation officers, an impact, which was less relevant in comparison with the expectation of the Foundation when the grant was made. This is particularly the case for the European Community Institute for University Studies (ECIUS) which was created in Brussels in 1957 and received from the FF a grant for a total amount of $ 800.000. The main activity of the institute was to foster European studies in European Universities to promote interdisciplinary approach in order to ' aid European universities to overcome parochial interests ' and last but certainly not least to contribute to the ' strengthening of European-Atlantic alliance '. His director was Max Kohnstamm a leading personality in European policies and a good collaborator of Jean Monnet, who was a member of the board of trustees of the ECIUS, along with other founding father of the European community like Hallstein, Marjoilin, Hirtsh, Armand) while Kohnstamm was the vice president of the Action committee for the United States of Europe, whose president was Jean Monnet. In 1976 a final report stating the global evaluation of the ECIUS (which had expired its activity inmid-1970) activity in the previous decades was sent to the trustees of the Ford foundation. It stated that ³ECIUS was viewed as a means to stimulate sophisticated scholarship on European integration problems; to link together eminent ŒEuropeanists¹ throughout European institutions; to catalyse thinking about such projects as a Œ European University ¹; to help to modernise social science through exposure to American research techniques and especially research for public policies and to act as an intellectual backward against communism ³. The author of the report observed that In its original plans ECIUS was somewhat schizophrenic about whether to develop a visible, physical structure with library and documentation centre or whether to become a Œclearinghouse¹ and Œcreate channel¹s. [Š] ECIUS never became much more than a tunnel for the FF founds and dispersed its income annually for such things as chairs and centres of European studies at several European universitiesŠ its attempts to co-ordinate and stimulate some comparative, cross-national research on European problemsŠ met limited success […] The ECIUS never established a clear identity with an accumulation of visible academic accomplishment; there was continuing vacillation over goals which it had stated: achievements of political objectives, small and large (usually those of Monnet 's Action Committee ') stimulation of research, assistance to universities, exchanges . This critical judgement, which was not the only negative appraisal from the FF officers, should be contextualised. The crisis of Khonstamm Institute occurred in the late Sixties when Shepard Stone¹s Atlantic design for United Europe was abandoned and the new president of the Ford Foundation, McGeorge Bundy launched a series of new programs in which European policies did not represent any more an autonomous concern. In a memorandum of May 1968 referring about a discussion with Kohnstamm, Robert Schmid, an officer of the Ford Foundation, reported that ' after describing the new foundation¹s administrative structure I said that basic policy on European work had changed and that we no longer had as a program objective the advancement of European integration as such '. It is a matter of fact that in the same period other programs such as the support made by the Ford Foundation to the Congress for Cultural Freedom entered in a phase of ' restructuring ' and finally of decline, not only for strictly political reason, such the public revelation that CIA had a relevant role in supporting the CCF. Actually most of the programs launched in the period of largest expansion of the Ford foundation¹s research programs in Europe were instrumental to the new catalyst of the foundation¹s policies: the international expansion of social sciences and particularly of their interdisciplinary applications, in crucial fields such as system analysis and environmental studies. Concerning the crisis of the Congress for Cultural Freedom after 1967, Pierre Gremion states that Trends towards the social sciences as a means of reform led to changes in the Congress for Cultural freedom¹s internal intellectual balanceŠ the influence of the prominent anti-totalitarian European writers decreasedŠ Furthermore the social sciences, imported as a remedy to Europe¹s murderous ideologies, simultaneously set aside both the classical culture and the humanities. From then on, a more action ¬oriented and more utilitarian kind of knowledge was to prevail Significantly it was during the mid and late Sixties that the Ford Foundation launched its international programs on management education and environmental policies and supported international institutions that should improve co-operation with Eastern European countries, including URSS as well as with underdeveloped countries and Latin America. In the late Sixties the Ford Foundation entered a phase of increasing concerns on ' global problems ' of industrialised societies and supported the expansion of a vision of science as an universalistic pattern of co-operation and human understanding, by cooperating with international agencies such as the OECD. The era of a system of relations based on informal links between the Ford Foundation¹s officers and a highly selected community of ' men with a vision ', left the place to the emergence of new social patterns of action. They were based on the emergence of ' epistemic communities ', who were able to create structured links with bureaucracies, industrial firms and governments and to develop large-scale policies, besides the constraints of ideologies and under the protection of a universalistic image of science. Despite the shift of the mid-Sixties one can observe, however, that the real change in the Ford Foundation organisational policies and rationales occurred only in the mid-Seventies, when as stated by Volker Berghahn suddenly The end of ideology looked as being ideological itself. and the political and generation passions of the late Sixties were overwhelmed by increasing cultural pessimism of European intellectuals - particularly in Italy, France and Germany, - as well as by the critic economic realities of the 1970s with oil shocks, stagflation, currency crises and finally by political crisis both in the US with the Watergate and in the European countries . The Seventies marked from different points of view the end of a long period of almost unconditional faith on rational and reformist managerialism, which characterized the golden era of American foundations policies in Europe. They marked also the crisis of the first attempt to strengthening the role of European foundations in shaping science policies. From the Mid-Fifties to the Mid-Sixties there was, in several European countries, an increasing expectation of role of the few existing or newly created European foundations in shaping the development of industrial democracy, based on the integration of networks of experts, including university professors, industrialists and bureaucrats. The role of foundations was particularly relevant in developing management training and education. Practically in all the European countries with the exception of Eastern Europe, Foundations acted as framework of negotiation and cooperation among different social élite. They also intervened in containing and even contrasting the expansion of American institutions in Europe, by opposing to the project of creation a European Harvard as well as of a European MIT the creation of networks of European institutions, eventually supported by American foundations and American experts. This pattern of resistance against. internationalization of educational institutions based on the American models, is recurrent behaviour among the actors who established cooperation programs with the Ford Foundation in the late Sixties and early Seventies. An interesting case study is the creation of the European Consortium for Political Research whose creation was supported by a $272,500 five-year grant of the Ford Foundation. In the document which state the ratification of the grant American officers declared that

Even though a number of individual European scholars are internationally knownŠ the great majority of scholars have remained isolated and have not participated in the intellectual developments in the field. .. There have been some efforts in the past to encourage cross-national cooperation but their impact on national research and teaching has turned out to be negligibleŠ periodically some ŒEuropeanization has.. come about through American initiatives that have not only exported techniques and skills to Western European countries but have also on a number of occasion brought students and senior scholars closer together and helped to link them in joint projectsŠ Organizationally, it has become increasingly obvious to European scholars that fragmentation and national barriers have prevented the growth of institutions with a sufficient critical mass to communicate with American political sciences centers as equal partners

This document is interesting since it reveals that, in the process of strengthening transatlantic scientific cooperation on the basis of an equal partnership, American Foundations had the support of an emerging group of European research entrepreneurs. They used European networking as a tool to bypass the limits imposed by national political and organizational patterns and introduce changes at national level , playing the role of catalyst of a European elite of scientific and academic entrepreneurs who can be identified as elite of change in scientific and academic policies.

The ain of my paper is to analyse two case studies which are relevant to the analytical framework presented in the abstract : the creation of the European Inter-University consortium for Political Research and the creation of the laboratory of Experimental Psychology at the E.P.H.E. in Paris

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