European Union’s research funding has been mainly justified by numerous arguments of integration: added value for business and society, integration via transnational collaboration and mobility. Basic research for the sole purpose of scientific knowledge production found little political support. With the emergence of the European Research Council (ERC), an organisation funding basic research explicitly since 2007, the social institutions of EU research policy were in need for adaptation. But rather than expecting arguments for basic research serving science best to advancing knowledge, mostly semantics of economic utility and geopolitical boundary work were in operation.
Under a Knowledge Sociology perspective, I illustrate how new semantics, such as frontier research, were operational not only to bridge expectations of distinguishing types of scientific actions –– applied research (socioeconomic utility) versus basic research (knowledge) ––, but also to constitute a new fabric for the European Commission’s creeping competence into hitherto national domains. Also crucial for restructuring expectations was an opaque emphasis on novelty with frontier research signaling a different quality to existing funding modes in European states, as well as comparing the ERC with the U.S.’ National Science Foundation, and thereby calling for integration towards the United States of Europe. Similarly, the European Research Area (ERA) was semantically operational in that science would actually be a spatial system which takes place within the borderland of Europe, whilst overcoming the nation state and shielding Europe from outsiders. Linked to spatiality, the emergence of an ERC was borne by semantics of creating an internal market for research. With the familiar sound of the fuzzy Internal Market concept, science got narrowed as to a game of winners and losers, a so far unacceptable condition for EU collaborative research.
