The European Space Agency and the European Union

Introduction The development of a sound relationship between the EU and the European Space Agency (ESA) has been the subject of much academic and political debate in recent years. This chapter reviews the debate and considers its origins and potential development trajectories. Although the process of European economic integration has enjoyed spectacular success since the 1950s (Camps 1964; Moravcsik 1998; Hörber 2006a), cooperation in the fields of space navigation, satellites, research and exploration has lagged well behind and was late to develop, although space fitted perfectly with Jean Monnet’s definition of an ideal area for the advancement of European integration – that is, it was too big for individual nation states (Gaubert and Lebeau 2009: 41, 44), but was also a new field of politics, comparable with nuclear research under Euratom, which he strongly favoured (Hahn 1958: 1002; Gerbet 1999: 173). After many false starts, ten European states2 eventually agreed to the creation of the ESA in 1975, with the aim of cooperating in the field of space. The membership has since expanded to 19 European states, plus Canada (see Chapters 1 and 11).3 There are, of course, significant differences between the EU and the ESA because the latter embraces non-EU states, such as Switzerland, and even extra-European states, such as Canada. There are also fundamental differences in the rules and procedures that make up the institutional soul of each organisation. The ESA is an archetypal old-style intergovernmental organisation of the conventional kind, with features such as a national veto in many areas, exclusively national funding and the controversial, but inevitable, concept of juste retour, whereby most national funding contributions effectively flow back to space companies in the same country (Gaubert and Lebeau 2009: 43). There is no element of supranational procedure, such as direct democratic legitimisation through an elected parliament, the EU’s ‘own resources’ or qualified majority voting in the governing Council, although there is a simple or two-thirds majority voting in the ESA Council in some instances (see, for example, the ESA Convention, Article XI.5, available from the ESA website). The ESA was founded as an independent institution entirely separate from the European Communities, so the fact that there is now close cooperation with the EU is clearly significant and worthy of investigation. The German Minister for Research and Education, Edelgard Bulmahn, described developments in institutional collaboration and coordination (until 2005) as ‘. . . dovetailing the ESA into EU policy. . .’ (FRG Ministry for Research and Education 2001) This seems to foreshadow, for the twenty-first century, the development of a common European space policy.

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