Research and Technology Policy

Abstract

Before the 1980s, EU activities designed to promote research and technological development (RTD)¹ were pretty small beer. By the mid-1990s, funding for research was the third largest item of policy expenditure in the EU’s budget. Moreover, the Union had become the most important source of policy affecting a range of high-growth, technology-intensive European industries. It had entered the highly politicised realm of broadcasting and ‘audio-visual policy’, where common interests were illusive even as technological advance made national borders increasingly meaningless. The EU became the horse that Europe rode in the race to create the vaguely explicated ‘information society’.