The EU's Military-Industrial Complex?
Apr. 27th, 2006 05:17 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
a_cubedThere was an interesting report I saw online today at:
http://www.tni.org/reports/militarism/bigbrother.htm
which claims the EU's Framework 7 "Security Research" agenda is an attempt by big EU military firms to create a military-industrial complex to compete with the US one. It does an interesting job of looking at the creation of the new research theme in FP7 (that's Framework Programme 7 to the non-academics among you).
The interesting thing for me about this is that I've been, well while not "on the inside" of this process, at least seen some of the internal workings of it. One of my funded research grants at the moment is part of the Preparatory Action for Security Research programme, which is a 45 million euro programme run under FP6 rules (but not part of FP6) principally developed in response to September 11th. I've also been involved in three other failed proposals and am involved in another four to the final call of PASR next month. In particular I also attended the Security Research Conference run by the European Commission and the Austrian Presidency in February.
Ben Hayes, author of "Arming Big Brother" is claiming that PASR and the forthcoming FP7 Security Research agenda is all about applying military technology to surveilling civilian populations. Well, while there might be some of that in PASR/FP7SR, the discussions I've seen have been very clear that this is not to develop dual-use technologies, nor is it to take military technology no longer needed in the post Cold War world and apply it to civilian security applications. In analysing the members of the Group of Personalities that came up with the PASR and set the scene for FP7SR, he conveniently misses out any analysis of the FRS representation (albeit only one of 20+ members) who are a spin-off of a French University specialising in international politics and other security-related research. His description of TNO, a Dutch national research lab certainly does not fit my experience of collaborating with them. He describes them as basically a bunch of pro-military pro-industry types whereas I've found them to be highly academic in their approaches.
Given that my participation in so many proposals is based on the fact that the Commission has been very clear that it expects all research funded by the EU on security matters to pay close attention to the social, legal and ethical implications of technological and procedural proposals, I find the report very biased and uninformed.
However, it does give me a positive thing in one respect. At the SRC '06 conference in Vienna one of the proposals from the floor was that the commission consider setting up a virtual EU institute for the study of social, legal and ethical aspects of security. This was reported by a representative of SAGEM, with his personal support, but shot down almost immediately by the Commission representative there. Maybe this sort of report will re-invigorate that idea, which I found to be an interesting one.
http://www.tni.org/reports/militarism/bigbrother.htm
which claims the EU's Framework 7 "Security Research" agenda is an attempt by big EU military firms to create a military-industrial complex to compete with the US one. It does an interesting job of looking at the creation of the new research theme in FP7 (that's Framework Programme 7 to the non-academics among you).
The interesting thing for me about this is that I've been, well while not "on the inside" of this process, at least seen some of the internal workings of it. One of my funded research grants at the moment is part of the Preparatory Action for Security Research programme, which is a 45 million euro programme run under FP6 rules (but not part of FP6) principally developed in response to September 11th. I've also been involved in three other failed proposals and am involved in another four to the final call of PASR next month. In particular I also attended the Security Research Conference run by the European Commission and the Austrian Presidency in February.
Ben Hayes, author of "Arming Big Brother" is claiming that PASR and the forthcoming FP7 Security Research agenda is all about applying military technology to surveilling civilian populations. Well, while there might be some of that in PASR/FP7SR, the discussions I've seen have been very clear that this is not to develop dual-use technologies, nor is it to take military technology no longer needed in the post Cold War world and apply it to civilian security applications. In analysing the members of the Group of Personalities that came up with the PASR and set the scene for FP7SR, he conveniently misses out any analysis of the FRS representation (albeit only one of 20+ members) who are a spin-off of a French University specialising in international politics and other security-related research. His description of TNO, a Dutch national research lab certainly does not fit my experience of collaborating with them. He describes them as basically a bunch of pro-military pro-industry types whereas I've found them to be highly academic in their approaches.
Given that my participation in so many proposals is based on the fact that the Commission has been very clear that it expects all research funded by the EU on security matters to pay close attention to the social, legal and ethical implications of technological and procedural proposals, I find the report very biased and uninformed.
However, it does give me a positive thing in one respect. At the SRC '06 conference in Vienna one of the proposals from the floor was that the commission consider setting up a virtual EU institute for the study of social, legal and ethical aspects of security. This was reported by a representative of SAGEM, with his personal support, but shot down almost immediately by the Commission representative there. Maybe this sort of report will re-invigorate that idea, which I found to be an interesting one.
