Introduction

Abstract

On 29 March 1996, the Heads of State and Government of the Fifteen Member States of the European Union (EU), assembled in an Extraordinary European Council, opened in Turin (Italy) yet another Intergovernmental Conference (IGC). They did so with all the customary ceremonial pomp, this time ‘enlivened’ by the vicissitudes of the socalled mad-cow disease (more formally, bovine spongiform encephalopathy) and its potential causal links with the lethal Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease for humans, as ineptly hinted at by key U.K. policy makers. The ensuing political furor over this in Europe seemed incomprehensible to all too many nonscience observers like myself The all-around bungling of the affair, at least from the political and public-relations points of view, may yet set loose a particular set of prions to infect in due course the EU’s integration process. The decision of the British Prime Minister, Mr. John Major, on 21 May 1996 to enact a policy of noncooperation, including invoking the veto on all EU matters that require consensus and obstructing deliberations otherwise, until the EU’s ban on exports of British beef and its byproducts is lifted may signal arrival of the first wave of this onslaught. Though the policy was abandoned a month later, the outcome of the posturing induced by electoral calculations, is as yet unknown (Peel, Peston, and Southey 1996).