Patience, tact, good manners, and a fresh but not innocent eye, are all desirable characteristics for a field worker.¹

Place Rogier, or Rogierplein (depending on which of the two official Belgian languages one prefers) constitutes the southeastern corner of the smallest of Brussels’ municipalities, Saint-Josse-ten-Noode or Sint-Joost-ten-Node. It is an industrious place: Rue Neuve/Nieuwstraat, one of the city’s major commercial streets, terminates here; the Boulevard du Jardin Botanique/Kruidtuinlaan passes through it, as part of the inner ring road surrounding the city centre; underneath, metro lines 2 and 6 cross several tram lines, complemented by bus routes at ground level. People also flock in from the Gare du Nord/Noordstation, which is just one block to the north, surrounded by a large red-light district. The site’s most significant landmark for the past years (though allegedly temporarily) has been a hole in its centre, dug and maintained with the intention of modernizing the underground infrastructure. Several hotels, a large bank tower, restaurants and food chains, as well as two shopping plazas complete the setting.

Sitting uncomfortably at its edge is also a newly erected building complex called Covent Garden (no French or Flemish name available), which consists of two high-rise buildings and is part of the Northern Quarter (Quartier Nord/Nordwijk), Brussels’ informal business district with circa 40,000 employees. The European Research Council Executive Agency (ERCEA) has been lodged here since mid–2009. Entering the building through its revolving doors, a visitor to the agency is instantly lulled into an artificial quietude, which is even more striking after traversing the crowded and noisy square outside. The glazed atrium features trees several metres high, ‘comfort zones’ with white leather ottomans for chatting and relaxing, and (rather inconveniently) a cobblestone pavement.

Between 2010 and 2013, I have been a regular visitor to the ERCEA; according to my own accounts, I have spent about forty workdays a year there. I did so in my capacity as the scientific adviser to the President of the ERC. The President, Helga Nowotny, was also the chair of the ERC Scientific Council. If the ERCEA was the executive arm of the European Research Council, the Scientific Council was its strategy-devising head. Contrary to what one may think, however, there were hardly any formal links between these two entities. Nowotny had an office at the ERCEA premises, but her home base was a smallish research funding organization in Vienna, which was also my employer. Due to this arrangement, my way in at Covent Garden used to be barred by security gates. Following European Commission standard security protocol, I had to give my passport number, provide a contact name at the agency, and wait for this person to pick me up. It was a repeated annoyance not so much for me but for the particular person in the ERCEA Secretariat I phoned five minutes in advance to say that I would be arriving and to request that she or he come down.

After roughly the first half of my active involvement with the ERC, I was given a magnetic badge with which I could pass through the security gate and move freely through the entire premises – well, probably not the entire premises, but those parts I had to visit. The issue of a badge was decided by the ERCEA director, then (as now) Pablo Amor, a long-standing European Commission functionary, and it required – so I was told – the bending of a certain security protocol; I never learned which, nor what the bending consisted of. Amor must have come to the conclusion that I was sufficiently innocuous to be granted this extraordinary privilege. To me, the badge signified that, although nobody had a clue what my advisory role actually entailed, I had become sufficiently trustworthy. More generally, Amor’s decision was a symbol of the growing mutual confidence between the ERCEA management and the ERC Scientific Council leadership, and Helga Nowotny in particular. This was in early 2012, and it was around this time that I decided to write a book on the ERC.

The ERCEA is situated in the five top floors of Covent Garden’s tower B, the higher of the two high-rise buildings; its nerve centre is the 24th floor, which is also where I was usually heading when admitted downstairs. Most of the large meeting rooms for evaluation panel meetings are located here, as are the offices of the ERC leadership; both are equipped with floor-to-roof windows, providing a spectacular view over the sprawling city. The floor also hosts a huge Nespresso coffee machine, after many complaints about the allegedly appalling coffee served by a catering company contracted by the European Commission; it is an exclusive privilege in the entire building, accounted for by the relative autonomy of an Executive Agency and its Director (as was the approval of my badge). On the platform of the six elevator shafts on that floor hangs a sign with the ERC logo on top, oddly dated in Roman numerals (‘ERCEA MMXII D.C.’), and a quotation in capital letters:

The European Research Council Executive Agency is dedicated to selecting and funding the excellent ideas that have not happened yet and the scientists that are dreaming them up.

‘Selecting’ and ‘funding’ describe in a nutshell everything that a funding instrument like the ERC is tasked to fulfil. Yet, in stark contrast to the grandiose rhetoric of the quotation it carries, the sign is printed on a cheap looking woven fabric; I never found out whether this was an unconscious result of the cost-cutting mentality that drives a European Commission executive agency, or whether it was cleverly playing with this assumption. In any case, the palpable discrepancy nicely brings to the fore that, while they constitute two sides of the same overall purpose, here are two different principles that have to be brought together: applying scientific values to the selection of suitable proposals to be carried out, and ensuring the expedient (contractually legal) usage of public funds that are spent on this activity. In retrospect, whatever I was doing at the ERC, it all revolved, in one way or other, around one of those two sets of procedures – either working along their rules or attempting to improve them.

My time at the ERC was basically divided into four routines. The first routine was the annual submission of a ‘proposal’ to the ERCEA in order to secure funding for the office of the Scientific Council chair in Vienna and those of her deputies. It meant that I had to write up a ‘project’ outlining our role in supporting the Scientific Council leadership trio, attempting to come as close as possible to a pre-fixed amount of money. Once the proposal had been submitted and ‘evaluated’ by my colleagues in the ERC Executive Agency, I had to ‘negotiate’ with them. It was a necessarily awkward exercise, not only because the ‘project’ consisted of deliverables that were simply taken from the Scientific Council’s annual schedule of meetings (I believe no one ever really checked them anyway), but also in the way the formal process of negotiating the contract was detrimental to my daily interactions with the ERCEA staff, with whom I was discussing issues such as how to prepare a certain working group meeting of the Scientific Council, or how to pitch a public statement by the President about how great and well-functioning the ERC had become.² A conflict of interest? Certainly not!

The second routine was to help Nowotny put together the ERC panels in the area of social sciences and humanities, for which she was responsible. Usually, it started with my contacting confidants of Nowotny to ask them for names of potential panel members; that is, rising stars and ambitious newcomers in one of the numerous fields that were covered by this subject area, ranging from economics to philology, and from psychology to art history. Next, I searched for the CVs of those people (and others that I found similarly qualified for the position), then I prepared short profiles of each of them to be studied by Nowotny. It was her duty to judge potential panelists’ reputations and their intellectual capacity; once she had approved a set of profiles, my colleagues at the ERCEA’s Scientific Department and I could actually put together the panels. In doing so, we were concerned with additional practical things: all panelists should have a good command of English; furthermore, one panel should consist of evaluators as diverse as possible in terms of disciplinary expertise, gender, nationality, and possibly also age. Putting together panels was an on-going exercise, not only because the ERC funding machinery was expanding so quickly,³ but also because the panels required constant refinement and replacement of panellists, who either dropped out or were dismissed because of a lack of commitment. Although this was time-consuming work, I enjoyed it considerably, as it gave me a first-hand overview of the newest trends in different fields – areas in which I had had little experience previously (linguistics! geography! philology!), their current state of affairs and recent ground-breaking publications.

The third routine was to spend time at Covent Garden. That may sound strange, but talking, listening, observing, making notes about all sorts of encounters, from panel meetings to informal meetings for coffee, were part of my mission to have an ear to the ground in the Executive Agency, to know about any difficulties with staff members, and to distribute informally new developments in the Scientific Council and its leadership. While I cannot estimate to what degree my efforts contributed to the overall goal, the reason for this routine was to build and maintain what I have later called the ‘socio-organizational fabric’ between the two entities in the ERC compound.⁴

The fourth routine was probably the most traditional that one may expect if one thinks of someone being an ‘adviser’. It was to prepare Scientific Council meetings and to draft letters for the President. If I say ‘to prepare’, I basically mean to read, for, if I remember correctly, I was not really ever being asked to draft any of the documents used by the Scientific Council. I took some pride in occasionally pointing out a few potential flaws to Nowotny. Only when doing research on this book did I learn that, by the time I began this work for the Scientific Council, this was a left-over from earlier times, when those documents potentially contained grave misunderstandings between the two bodies, the ERCEA and the Scientific Council – misunderstandings on a scale I do not recall from the time I was with the ERC. I wrote draft letters and presentations for real, however, and it may have been from this subset of the routine that I got my first ideas about reflecting on the status of research funding more generally.

The ERC years were a great opportunity for me to learn something about European politics and the intricacies of the European integration project in general, and they also enhanced my practical knowledge of the relationship between science and policy in one of their most fruitful yet fragile areas of contact: money. The first real motivation to write a book on the ERC was when I realized that many of the anecdotes about the early days of the ERC that I had been told by Scientific Council members didn’t quite add up. To be sure, the quips were different in content and style – some were told as bon mots, some as crucial, decisive moments; some anecdotes were belligerent, relating to a triumph, a victory, albeit occasionally a pyrrhic or tragic one; others spoke of an achievement, an extraordinary result through negotiations, or even a miracle; others again claimed an effect, a change of behaviour or an altered trajectory. What irritated me was that, when trying to put them together, there were inconsistencies in timing and in arguments. My initial idea was to clarify those inconsistencies and to sum up gently the history of the ERC in an easy-going mode. Nothing too academic, yet with some interesting twists.

With my ambition to tell the real story (and to tell it as a great story), the first real step towards writing this book seriously took off during the last few months of my time with the ERC, when I started to conduct interviews and to gather material. Now I realized two problems: one was that the pre-history of the ERC, that is, until the formal legal adoption of this instrument in late 2006, was much more intricate than I had expected. The other was that my first outlines for the book read like a clumsy advertisement for my study object, not like an illuminating analysis. I was too deeply entangled in the ERC’s own perspective on things. To make sense of what had been going on and to distance myself would be crucial for the book’s becoming an honest and serious attempt to narrate the ERC history. This distancing exercise went through several steps, not all of which were always purposefully achieved but rather happened to me (or so it seems in retrospect).

As contextual information it may be useful, therefore, for the reader to know how this book developed from a working relationship to a more scholarly interest. I had secured some funding for the time after the ERC, Helga Nowotny had helped me to broker a contract with a prominent British publisher, and I had gained a Fulbright scholarship for a five-month stay across the Atlantic to work at Harvard University. The result was a rough, 120-page manuscript about the pre-history of the ERC. This was a good exercise in sensemaking, as it helped me to clarify where this creature had come from, what its ideational roots had been, who its advocates had been. Most importantly, it helped me to sort through the ERC anecdotes and get a good understanding of what happened when, where and why. I sent the manuscript to several of the people that I had interviewed before, and they replied with critical remarks but, in general, agreed that my account was fair and balanced.

Yet, after Harvard, and upon returning to Vienna, there was a serious hiatus in my writing. For one, I was taking over a new job that was also in science management but entirely different. But then, I didn’t know how to move on with the book project either. I realized somehow that the ERC history would be incomplete if I were only to write on events pre-dating its formal inception; yet how to write its history since then was something that I could not frame. Maybe more to distract myself than intentionally, I started to look at the conceptual roots of exactly those aspects of the ERC that I had been concerned with when working there: the principle of distributing funds for research, the unsettled issue of autonomous governance, the quest to prove impact.

Again, my initial approach was naive: I thought that, if I could understand those concepts theoretically, I could also explain how great the ERC was. Only by reading studies investigating the historical traits of each of those issues did I realize that the ERC, as any other research-funding instrument, rests on a series of assumptions that have been developed over a long period of time and become locked in the collective consciousness of researchers today. Yet what seems to be embedded and fixed is actually continuously negotiated and fine-tuned. The most difficult step for me was to bring those concepts into a relation to the ERC operations, not only because I was working through the entire documentation of ERC Scientific Council sources, but also because I was still often not very sure where this journey would lead. Only very gradually did the book emerge as it stands now: a study of the conditions and constraints under which the distribution of public funding for academic research is to be organized successfully.

My publisher asked me, somewhat ambitiously, to write the complete history of the ERC. The expectation is understandable: I have been immersed in the ERC for almost four years, and I have spent another two years since primarily making sense of this instrument. Unfortunately, I still cannot claim to present the complete picture here: parts of the story that I examine remain incomplete, due to restricted access to sources – particularly, while I had by default the documents belonging to the realm of the Scientific Council at my disposal, I had very limited access to the Commission and the ERCEA side.⁵ True, I talked at length with leading Commission representatives and, to a much lesser degree, also with people from national ministries involved in the early phase of setting up the ERC. I also had quite a lot of informal exchange with the colleagues at the ERC Executive Agency with whom I was involved during my time at the ERC. But where I can really claim full coverage of sources is only on the ERC’s Scientific Council. So, while there will be things in this book that may be corrected in later academic work, I believe that this is the most comprehensive analysis on the ERC history that has been written so far.

Unlike other historical accounts focusing on a single research funding organization and its establishment, this book is not a ‘court history’⁶ (in the sense of an apologetic account) – not only because, in the case of the ERC, there is no court, but also because I attempt to look at the ERC from a critical perspective. To be critical does not mean that I have a revisionist agenda to debunk the alleged achievements of the ERC (or, more accurately, those speaking for the ERC). It does mean, however, that, unlike other insiders who have been publishing their account of the ERC history, I claim – both conceptually and methodologically – to be more rigorous than they in their rather anecdotal accounts.⁷

In order to do so, I treat my study-object consequently as something from the past, even though some of the evidence is still very recent. I am looking at the entire period, from the time when the ERC debate took off in the early 2000s to the time when the actual instrument concluded its first programme cycle in 2013. I try as much as I can to found every explanation of an event, and every relation between events, on written sources (that is, contemporary documents composed at the time of the event). And I make use of the plenitude of anecdotal stories that surround the various steps of the ERC’s history (and its earliest phase in particular) only very carefully: I take them as evidence for the necessity to explain something, but I generally doubt their capacity to do so satisfactorily unless other (written) material proves them right.

The most fruitful and satisfying work in writing this book was the puzzle of putting together different events and arriving at a new understanding of their relation. Still, as much as I have tried to rest my account of the ERC history on rigorous assessment of written evidence, I cannot escape the potential criticism that this narrative, too, is an imaginary account of real events. I am aware of this inescapable trap; I cannot resolve it but can only ask the reader to judge, based on the evidence, the credibility of my remarks. To that end, I find solace in a quote by Hayden White: ‘How else can any “past”, which is by definition comprised of events, processes, structures and so forth that are considered to be no longer perceivable, be represented in either consciousness or discourse except in an “imaginary” way?’⁸

An important feature of the exercise to distance myself from the ERC thinking was also to avoid the typical Brussels lingo. Even where I could not entirely do away with abbreviations and shortcuts, I resorted to what I think is a more accurate form of speech. I speak of the ‘Framework Programme format’ (or ‘FP format’) when I refer to the EU ‘Framework Programme for Research and Technological Development’, in order to emphasize that it is a political instrument dedicated to covering EU spending for supporting scientific research and the development of new technologies. This format is to be distinguished from its actual multi-annual editions; what is commonly known as ‘FP7’, for example, I here call more accurately ‘the seventh edition of the Framework Programme’.

A common figure of speech among policy-makers and scientists is to speak of ‘frontier’, or ‘basic’, or ‘fundamental’ research. While I respect the fact that those are broadly used terms, I have come to the conclusion that they serve primarily a political purpose, but carry little analytical value otherwise. The most accurate term for me seems to be academic research (vs. applied research), which simply refers to the fact that this is research conducted at academic institutions, such as universities and public research facilities.

The ERC, too, has created its own lingo: the ‘Starting Grant’ and ‘Advanced Grant’ are specific funding calls, the ‘Scientific Council’ is the independent body steering the ERC compound, the ‘Dedicated Implementation Structure’ (DIS) is the legal term for what would later become the ‘ERC Executive Agency’ (ERCEA), and so on. I have tried to explain each of them when introducing it for the first time, and also to use neutral expressions whenever possible.

I try to express as clearly and accurately as possible the names of European institutions and their organizational subdivisions, such as the European Commission, and its Directorate General (DG) for Research, or the European Court of Auditors; in the former case, I also use the shorter notion of ‘the Commission’ when it is clear what I mean by that; in the latter case I resort to the official abbreviation (ECA). ‘Competitiveness Council’ refers to the sub-group within the ‘European Council’, that is, the regular gathering of ministers responsible for trade, economy, industry, research and innovation, and space from all EU member states.

The political realm in which the ERC is located, and on which this book is focused, is innovation policy; in my understanding, it describes fairly accurately what political scientists call a ‘macro-policy objective’ of the EU.⁹ Science policy, by which I mean exclusively, for the rest of this book, ‘policy for science’,¹⁰ is part of innovation policy; and so is research and development (or R&D, in the language of insiders), which deals with the issue of how to stimulate private investments and distribute public funds to scientific research.

The field of innovation policy is not only full of abbreviations, but also of declarations, undisputed assumptions, metaphors. If I have made use of linguistic expressions typical of the social groups that this book is dealing with, I have done so only by putting them in quotation marks and, except in very few (and self-explanatory) cases, also referring to the source from where this is actually quoted. I have applied a similar approach to the chapter titles: to highlight that, ultimately, my narrative of the ERC story is as close as possible to the historical sources, they consist exclusively of quotes that have been used somewhere in the respective chapter.