Issues of friction in Europe's Star Wars
Saturday, 6 October 2007
Paul Betts
THE recent meeting between Nicolas Sarkozy, France's president, and Angela Merkel, the German Chancellor, was described as "difficult". In retrospect, that seems to have been a gross understatement. Relations between Paris and Berlin have rarely been worse, in spite of all the fine talk about the special relationship between the two countries.
There are countless issues of friction between the two traditional big European partners. But now the two countries have opened a new front of contention and are engaged in something like a new episode of Star Wars. Unless they can find a compromise, Galileo - one of the European Union's most ambitious projects, to build a satellite navigation programme to challenge America's GPS - risks getting lost in space.
Disputes among European countries - Spain has been particularly stubborn in its demands - and their respective industrial companies to secure juicy bits of the programme have blocked the project so far. The European Commission has now proposed to take the programme directly in hand to get it built by 2012-13 and then hand it over to the private sector.
The Germans worry that their companies will lose out, with consequences for the creation of jobs. Germany is the biggest contributor to the EU budget and understandably feels its share of Galileo should reflect this. Time is pressing. The Chinese are going ahead with their Beidou project. The US is upgrading its own system and plans to put the first of its new generation GPS III satellites into orbit in 2012. Unless Europe can resolve its internal problems to allow Galileo to become operational around then it risks finding itself too far behind its rivals to make the project worthwhile.
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FT Syndication Service
THE recent meeting between Nicolas Sarkozy, France's president, and Angela Merkel, the German Chancellor, was described as "difficult". In retrospect, that seems to have been a gross understatement. Relations between Paris and Berlin have rarely been worse, in spite of all the fine talk about the special relationship between the two countries.
There are countless issues of friction between the two traditional big European partners. But now the two countries have opened a new front of contention and are engaged in something like a new episode of Star Wars. Unless they can find a compromise, Galileo - one of the European Union's most ambitious projects, to build a satellite navigation programme to challenge America's GPS - risks getting lost in space.
Disputes among European countries - Spain has been particularly stubborn in its demands - and their respective industrial companies to secure juicy bits of the programme have blocked the project so far. The European Commission has now proposed to take the programme directly in hand to get it built by 2012-13 and then hand it over to the private sector.
The Germans worry that their companies will lose out, with consequences for the creation of jobs. Germany is the biggest contributor to the EU budget and understandably feels its share of Galileo should reflect this. Time is pressing. The Chinese are going ahead with their Beidou project. The US is upgrading its own system and plans to put the first of its new generation GPS III satellites into orbit in 2012. Unless Europe can resolve its internal problems to allow Galileo to become operational around then it risks finding itself too far behind its rivals to make the project worthwhile.
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FT Syndication Service