The Politics of European Collaboration in Big Science

Intergovernmental collaboration in Big Science has been an important resource for European science since the 1950s, as a means to compete on global level. But interestingly, collaboration in (basic) science has traditionally been left outside of the political integration work of the European Community/Union, which has resulted in a cluttered policy field and a situation where European Big Science collaborations are built on ad hoc solutions rather than a coherent political framework and common regulatory standards. Despite this formal detachment, however, the genesis and development of collaborations, and their political realities once launched, often draw upon and reflect the ordinary (geo)political dynamics of Europe. This chapter reports on four historical and two contemporary cases of European collaboration in Big Science, from CERN in the 1950s to the currently planned European Spallation Source (ESS), all well-documented by previous studies, showing that while scientific and technical preconditions doubtlessly impact the fate of these Big Science installations, the logic and cycles of high-level politics in Europe always plays a role and can, in some cases, be said to have been decisive for the realization of a collaborative effort. Always balancing between national interest and the common good, European collaboration in Big Science is thus no different from the process of EC/EU integration, despite being formally detached therefrom. Using a historical perspective to make justice to the rather small collection of cases to study, the chapter covers a distinct instance of where science and technology is directly affected by international politics

Introduction:How European Players Captured the Computer and Created Scenes

Playfulness was at the heart of how European players appropriated microcomputers in the last quarter of the twentieth century. Although gaming has been important for computer development, that is not the subject of Hacking Europe. Our book’s main focus is the playfulness of hacker culture. The essays argue that no matter how detailed or unfinished the design projecting the use of computers, users playfully assigned their own meanings to the machines in unexpected ways. Chopping games in Warsaw, hacking software in Athens, creating chaos in Hamburg, producing demos in Turku, or partying with computing in Zagreb and Amsterdam—wherever computers came with specific meanings that designers had attached to them—local communities throughout Europe found them technically fascinating, culturally inspiring, and politically motivating machines. They began tinkering with the new technology with boundless enthusiasm and helped revolutionize the use and meaning of computers by incorporating them into people’s daily lives. As tinkerers, hackers appropriated the machine and created a new culture around it. Perhaps best known and most visible were the hacker cultures that toyed with the meaning of ownership in the domain of information technology. In several parts of Europe, hackers created a counterculture akin to the squatter movement that challenged individual ownership, demanded equal access, and celebrated shared use of the new technological potential. The German Chaos Computer Club best embodied the European version of the political fusion of the counterculture movement and the love of technology. Linguistically, in Dutch, the slang word kraken, the term used for both hacking and squatting, pointedly expressed such creative fusion that is the subject of this book