Science diplomacy: the limits of idealism

"Foreign science policy" aims to overcome borders worldwide and improve the coexistence of people and cultures in the context of research, development and innovation.

That's what Minister of State for Culture Bernd Neumann said in a speech to representatives of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation in 2011.

The occasion was a commemoration of the seventieth anniversary of the German invasion of the Soviet Union.

Now that the successor state of the Soviet Union has invaded the Ukraine, German research ministries and scientific organizations are again talking a lot about "foreign science policy".

But the optimism that unites peoples, which was once attached to the term, has sobered up in terms of realpolitik.

Confronted with national power politics, the "limits of idealism" have been reached - with these words Georg Schütte,

General Secretary of the Volkswagen Foundation, the mood to the point.

The framework was provided by a panel discussion at the "Hamburg Forum for Global Science and Policy", which focused on the relationship between the German science system and Russia and China.

In the course of the discussion, it became clear that it was probably not just German idealism paired with naivety that had reached its limits.

But also a scientific establishment whose professors sometimes valued the advantages of cooperation with Russian or Chinese institutions for their scientific goals or their research career as higher than political concerns.

This is quite legitimate from the point of view of academic freedom.

In view of the current conflicts between different centers of power and value systems, however, a policy that has declared such cooperation undesirable now prevails.

A "value-based" foreign science policy must now become the general "business basis", said Hamburg Senator for Science Katharina Fegebank, citing the treatment of the Chinese Confucius Institutes as an example.

As the Chinese government's ideological influence on them became ever more massive, the University of Hamburg and other universities terminated the cooperation.

But while there is still cooperation with China, German-Russian cooperation, at least at the institutional level, has ended for the time being.

Fegebank did not conceal the fact that the "value-based policy" towards Russia also causes high scientific and financial costs for Germany: At the German electron synchrotron (

) in Hamburg, for example, joint research with Russian institutions made up a significant part of all foreign cooperation.

Fegebank says it is still unclear how these gaps can be filled.

A long-term renunciation of Russian participation would seriously jeopardize many scientific and technical projects, an entrepreneur from the audience pointed out.

Jens Brandenburg, Parliamentary State Secretary in the Federal Ministry of Research, gave a clear answer: He could not imagine "that we will return to business as usual with Russia in the foreseeable future."

Torn threads of conversation

This foreign policy line was not questioned on the podium, but the fear that valuable threads of conversation could irretrievably tear was raised again and again.

Ursula Schröder from the Hamburg Institute for Peace Research and Security Policy warned that contacts were broken off quickly but were difficult to reestablish.

She relied on maintaining personal connections away from institutional channels and advocated encouraging the influx of Russian students.

Sabine Kunst, Chairwoman of the Joachim Herz Foundation and former President of Berlin's Humboldt University, also warned of lasting "corridor damage" and asked how links to the Chinese and Russian research landscape could be maintained without leaving the line of German foreign policy.

However, the personal level can also have its pitfalls, as became clear in the discussion: China successfully relies on the targeted recruitment of researchers bypassing the institutions.

Materials scientists emeritus who are now continuing their research careers in China were given as an example.

With regard to China, the political problem awareness of the German scientists is "still very different", said Brandenburg and criticized that existing China expertise is not used enough to assess cooperation projects.

Georg Schütte spoke out in favor of a "clearing office", which should be operated by the scientific institutions themselves and not be outsourced to politics.

By focusing the discussion on China and Russia, other questions remained unaddressed: What about the value-based foreign science policy compared to other undemocratic regimes, for example in the Islamic world?

And how does the call for a strengthening of Eastern European networks and student exchanges go together with the cuts in funding planned by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs for the DAAD, the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation and the Goethe Institutes?