In 2010, the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) and the Royal Society published a report entitled New Frontiers in Science Diplomacy.1 The report argued for a greater use of science in the conduct of international relations between different countries and led to a greater emphasis on science diplomacy in policy circles throughout the world.2 In turn, at the European level, the EU adopted science diplomacy as key practice in its own foreign policy.3 It is in this context that the European Commissioner for research, science and innovation Carlos Moedas wrote a paper in which he reflected on the growing role science diplomacy plays in the European Union, both within its borders and beyond.4 The paper, published in the online publication Science & Diplomacy, reads like a policy programme more than anything else. Additionally, it features a small section on the history of science diplomacy in Europe, which piqued my interest. According to Moedas, it all started with the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (also known as CERN) in the post-World War Two period. Located in Geneva, Switzerland, CERN is an international scientific organisation that currently hosts the largest particle accelerator in the world, the Large Hadron Collider.5 Moedas has this to say about CERN:
“In 1954, CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research was formed by twelve European countries, including Germany and Italy. These twelve nations signed on to promote the unifying power of science, both ideologically and pragmatically – bringing scientists together from countries that had been at war less than a decade previously, while sharing the increasing costs at the frontiers of nuclear physics research. Thus, modern science diplomacy among European nations was born out of both shared aspirations and practical necessity.”
As a historian of science working on the history of European scientific cooperation, with a specific focus on the history of CERN, I was immediately struck by two things as I read this quote. First, science diplomacy – that is the practice of conducting international relations through or for the purpose of science and scientific cooperation – is not a “modern” invention made by European nations in the early Cold War period. International scientific relations through cooperative projects have existed at least since the late 18th century. A prominent example is the coordinated efforts of a number of European nations and their scientists to observe the transits of Venus in 1769 and 1776.6 Second, Moedas portrays CERN as the origin of European science diplomacy with direct relevance for present-day EU science diplomacy, even though for most of its history, CERN was not officially affiliated in any sense with the EU. Interestingly, CERN also figures on the website of the diplomatic services of the EU with a picture showing the desk of the CERN representation to the United Nations. It seems like there is a sort of historical appropriation and assimilation going on here, with CERN being portrayed as being both the foundational myth and the figurehead of EU science diplomacy. In what follows, I would like to explore the early years of CERN’s history. This can help us understand why its image is being utilised in such a way.
Figure 1: The CERN desk at the UN assembly
Before we dive into this history, I briefly want to emphasise the fact that CERN and the EU are two distinct organisations. For the sake of clarity, when I speak of the EU, I refer to either the European Union as established by the Treaty of Maastricht in 1992, or its predecessors, the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC) established in 1952 and the European Economic Community (EEC) established in 1957. During most of its existence, CERN’s the membership differed significantly from that of the EU. In the 1950s, the ECSC and the EEC, had only six members (France, West-Germany, Italy, and the Benelux countries) while CERN sported a much larger, and more diverse member base. Though there was some overlap, CERN included among its 12 founding members also the UK, Switzerland, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, as well as Greece, and Yugoslavia (Luxembourg was not a member of CERN). Furthermore, there was no cooperation between the two organisations during the entire Cold War period. It is only in the 1990s and early 2000s that cooperation between them became formalised.7 Still to this day, though, they remain separate entities.
While I may not agree with Moedas from a historical standpoint that CERN constituted the beginning of European/EU science diplomacy, nor from a moral standpoint, that the image and history of CERN should be used in the promotion of EU policy, Moedas is right in portraying CERN as a particularly symbolic organisation, especially at the time of its inception. I would therefore like to spend the remainder of this article unpacking the factors that contributed to the creation of CERN’s image as an emblematic European scientific cooperation and science-diplomatic effort. There are four such factors: first, the political context of European integration into which it was born; second, the scientific-cultural-political context of nuclear physics after two atomic bombs had been dropped on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki; third, an ideal of scientific internationalism that was lived out in practice also beyond its member base; and lastly, an effective internal administration that has led to significant scientific results and a stable organisation over the years.
As Moedas accurately relayed, CERN was founded in 1954 by twelve European countries. The inception of the laboratory took place at a time in which there was a strong desire for European unity, a sense that the only way to avoid the horrors of future world wars would be through collaboration in one form or another. The late 40s and early 50s thus saw a number of different attempts at integration, with some of the most prominent being the creation of the Council of Europe in 1949, and the inception of the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC) in 1952.8 The idea of CERN was to create an organisation for building and conducting research with the largest particle accelerator in the world, as well as facilitating scientific research by scientists from its member states in its own laboratory. CERN and its model of scientific cooperation was seen at the time as one possible arrangement through which European countries could unite peacefully – even previously warring countries like France and Germany – and help rebuild the destruction wrought by the war.
The role that science could play in the development of European unity was recognised as early as 1946, by Denis de Rougemont, who, as director of the Centre Européen de la Culture, was involved in some of the early preparatory work that eventually resulted in the creation of CERN.
“And since this conversation… I understood that one should absolutely link the ideas of a European union and of control of nuclear energy: two things that in this particular moment were as striking in their novelty as in their mutual utility”9
As the plans for a common European research laboratory began to crystallise in the early 1950s, nuclear physics indeed emerged as the scientific field of choice because of the strong symbolic dimension of the atom at the time. Despite the havoc wreaked by the dropping of two nuclear bombs, killing tens of thousands of people and injuring even more, the post-WW2 era was mostly one of nuclear optimism. What the atomic bomb had revealed in horrific fashion was the almost limitless power contained at the heart of the atom. This could be used for destruction, as was the case in Japan, but it could also be harnessed for the good of all in the form of energy production. The prospect of the boundless energy that could be gained from nuclear reactors, when they finally would become economically viable, conjured utopian visions of a bright future to the minds of scientists, politicians, and the public alike – de Rougemont, for example, had been acutely aware of this.
Many nations started nuclear reactor (as well as nuclear weapons) programmes at the time, contributing to physics becoming the dominant field of study in higher education during this period.10 Some countries even went as far as enlisting atomic energy with their very idea of nationhood.11 In Europe, nuclear programmes existed at the national level but the idea of developing nuclear research for peaceful uses also became part and parcel of wider integration processes. CERN was the first such instance. Another example was the European Atomic Energy Agency (Euratom) created in 1958 by the same countries that made up the EEC.12 The vision of the atom as the driver of political change is perhaps best captured by the glistening aluminium structure of the Atomium in Brussels built for the 1958 World’s Fair.
Figure 2: The Atomium under construction at the 1958 World Fair with hostesses in the foreground.13
CERN profited from the symbolic dimension of nuclear energy by being introduced at a time when there was plenty of support for it. However, CERN was never meant as a laboratory for research in this field. The scientists involved in the creation of the organisation were very aware that nuclear energy research had a lot of potential for military and industrial applications and was therefore much too sensitive from a political standpoint at the time. If governments were to agree to contribute to the construction of a shared laboratory, then military and industrial interests had to be avoided as much as possible. Instead, CERN would thus be tasked with building the largest particle accelerator in the world, a very costly undertaking with little to no direct use for military applications, and one that no European country was willing to individually finance. In doing so, CERN would allow European countries to conduct particle physics research at the forefront of science again – a position they had held before the ravages of WW2 and the enormous spending on physics by the US due to the Manhattan project.
Figure 3: The Inauguration ceremony of the Intersecting Storage Rings in 1971. The flags of the member countries are hanging to each side of the podium.14
In bringing together different countries around the common goal of conducting scientific research for peaceful purposes, CERN – or the people involved in its creation – harnessed the old ideal of scientific internationalism. Put very simply, scientific internationalism is the idea that science leads to universal knowledge independent of context and that it therefore best be conducted jointly and peaceful by people of all nations, creeds, and races.15 CERN embodied this ideal to great symbolic effect: here was an organisation that really could unite nations, despite great political differences. Not only did it bring together Allied Powers (France, the UK) and Axis Powers (Germany, Italy), its membership also straddled the two-bloc, East and West geopolitical division of the Cold War, with the inclusion of Yugoslavia.16 This ethos of scientific internationalism for peaceful purposes was not solely lived out within its own membership. CERN also engaged in cooperation and scientific exchanges with a host of other nation states from an early stage, among them many Eastern European countries and the Soviet Union.
The last aspect, which in my eyes contributes to CERN’s image as a symbolic organisation, was its effective internal administration. This allowed CERN to successfully achieve the goal it had set itself: to help rebuild the physics community in Europe, thereby allowing European nations to compete with the US on a scientific basis. It did so especially by being considerate of the widely disparate scientific and financial means of its member countries and by actively seeking to level out some of these disparities. For example, in the late 50s and early 60s, differences were particularly pronounced as some of the larger members, had access to their own accelerator facilities to train their scientists in the type of work done at CERN. Other countries, however, failed to put together even a single university group devoted to the broader scientific field of nuclear physics. Similarly, some countries could devote large financial means to supporting physics at the national level, while others like Greece or Yugoslavia could barely afford to spend on science and technology at home.
Starting in the early 60s, CERN both encouraged and supported the development of high-energy physics groups within its member base. It did so through a number of different means, such as offering trainings both at CERN and in the respective country, or by lending instruments necessary for performing CERN-related work to national laboratories. This support acted as a win-win situation. On the one hand, the country in question could build up its scientific capacity to better match the type of work being done at CERN, thereby benefitting more from its membership in the organisation. On the other hand, CERN now profited from a wider network that could participate in its research. In doing so, CERN actively pursued and supported the construction of a European-wide physics landscape, in which it and the specific work its machines enabled stood central, all the while serving the interests of its members. This model makes CERN an example of what a stable and successful arrangement for cooperation between European countries looked like in the past, and still looks like today.
Figure 4: Map showing the connections between CERN and national laboratories for bubble chamber research.17
Over time, the centrality of CERN within both the European and global physics communities has only increased. CERN’s membership has gone up to 24 and has truly become European, as opposed to just Western European as in its early days. At the same time, its network of scientific cooperation extends to dozens of countries around the globe.18 Not only has CERN proven to be a remarkably durable institutional arrangement, it has also lived up to its own ambition of putting Europe back on the scientific map after the end of WW2. Most famously, CERN physicists Carlo Rubbia and Simon van der Meer were awarded the Nobel Prize in 1984 for their work on the W and Z particles, and more recently CERN has managed to provide the experimental evidence for the existence of the Higgs Boson. Throughout its existence, CERN has constituted a unique organisation for scientific cooperation with a very strong symbolic dimension. One may therefore forgive Moedas for portraying it as the foundational myth of a truly European science project – there are in fact plenty of reasons to do so.
- The Royal Society and American Association for the Advancement of Science, “New Frontiers in Science Diplomacy – Navigating the Changing Balance of Power” (London: The Royal Society, 2010), https://royalsociety.org/news-resources/publications/2010/new-frontiers-science-diplomacy/. ↩︎
- This in turned spurred on a lot of academic attention in the history of science with many interesting publications. For example: Simone Turchetti, “The (Science Diplomacy) Origins of the Cold War,” Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences 50 (2020): 411–32, https://doi.org/10.1525/hsns.2020.50.4.411; Matthew Adamson and Roberto Lalli, “Global Perspectives on Science Diplomacy: Exploring the Diplomacy‐knowledge Nexus in Contemporary Histories of Science,” Centaurus 63, no. 1 (February 2021): 1–16, https://doi.org/10.1111/1600-0498.12369; Sam Robinson et al., “The Globalization of Science Diplomacy in the Early 1970s: A Historical Exploration,” Science and Public Policy 50, no. 4 (August 1, 2023): 749–58, https://doi.org/10.1093/scipol/scad026. ↩︎
- As can be gleaned from the website of its diplomatic services: https://www.eeas.europa.eu/eeas/science-diplomacy_en. ↩︎
- Carlos Moedas, “Science Diplomacy in the European Union,” Science & Diplomacy 5, no. 1 (2016): 1–9. ↩︎
- In 2012, CERN made headlines for providing the experimental proof of the existence of the Higgs Boson, the elemantary particle that is responsible for giving all other particles their mass. The existence of the Higgs Boson had been conjectured but not yet experimentally verified for over 40 years and had been a long-standing problem in particle physics. ↩︎
- Lorraine Daston, Rivals How Scientists Learned to Cooperate. (La Vergne: Columbia Global Reports, 2023). The Cold War can rightly be considered the period in which the pursuit of foreign policy through science and scientific cooperation became firmly established as common practice, reflecting the growing role given to science and technology in modern state fare. The notion of science diplomacy actually originated, or at least gained more wide-spread usage, during this time. Turchetti, “The (Science Diplomacy) Origins of the Cold War.” ↩︎
- See https://international-relations.web.cern.ch/stakeholder-relations/states/european-union. ↩︎
- Other examples include the failed European Defence Community in the early 1950s, the Organisation for European Economic Cooperation (OEEC) created in 1948 to distribute and administer the funds allocated by the Marshall Plan, as well as the Centre Européen de la Culture (CEC) created in 1950. The Eurovision Song Contest, which saw its inception in 1956, could also be considered as an attempt at integration in the cultural sphere, albeit a less formal one. ↩︎
- The quote is from a small booklet published in 1975 by the Centre Européen de la Culture under the name of Deux initiatives du CEC: documents sur les origines du C.E.R.N et de la Fondation Européenne de la Culture, Archives de l’Académie des Sciences, Fonds Pierre Auger, Box 10, Folder 32. My translation. ↩︎
- David Kaiser, “Cold War Requisitions, Scientific Manpower, and the Production of American Physicists after World War II,” Historical Studies in the Physical & Biological Sciences 33, no. 1 (2002): 131–59. ↩︎
- For an example of the utopian dimension of nuclear power, see Sheila Jasanoff and Sang-Hyun Kim, “Containing the Atom: Sociotechnical Imaginaries and Nuclear Power in the United States and South Korea,” Minerva 47, no. 2 (June 2009): 119–46, https://doi.org/10.1007/s11024-009-9124-4. Gabrielle Hecht, The Radiance of France: Nuclear Power and National Identity after World War II, Inside Technology (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2009). ↩︎
- Euratom was set up at the same time and by the same six countries that signed the Treaty of Rome and created the EEC. ↩︎
- Source: Wikimedia Commons, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:1_-2018-www_atomium_be-sofam-belgium.jpg. ↩︎
- Source: CERN, https://cds.cern.ch/record/1792082. ↩︎
- Historians of science have written a lot about the mismatch between the ideal of scientific internationalism and the practice of it. See for example, Paul Forman, “Scientific Internationalism and the Weimar Physicists: The Ideology and Its Manipulation in Germany after World War I,” Isis 64, no. 2 (1973): 151–80. ↩︎
- It has to be pointed out that Yugoslavia held a somewhat ambivalent position in this East-West division at the time of the inception of CERN. Even though the regime was clearly Communist, the Yugoslavian President Tito fell out with Stalin’s Soviet Union in the early 50s and sought closer ties with the West. Yugoslavia’s CERN membership has to be understood in this context, as it is the only Communist country to become member before the end of the Cold War. Relations with the Soviet Union became friendlier again after Stalin’s death in 1953. ↩︎
- Source: CERN, https://cds.cern.ch/record/917128?ln=en. ↩︎
- For an overview of CERN’s members, associate members, observers and other states with cooperation agreements, see https://home.cern/about/who-we-are/our-governance/member-states. ↩︎