Dan Brändström was born in Ekträsk, northern Sweden, in 1941. Graduating with a PhD in Political Science from the University of Umeå in 1972, he served in various capacities, including Professor and Director of Studies at University of Umeå from 1967 to 1992. He has published widely in the fields of Political Science and Research and Higher Education, and maintains a membership in a wide range of academies and learned societies. In 1993 he assumed the role of Chief Executive Officer of the Bank of Sweden Tercentenary Fund, serving in that capacity until his retirement in 2006. Brändström has a truly remarkable record of administrative service within educational institutions throughout Nordic countries and on the European continent, and he continues to contribute to a number of European research foundations, including the European Research Council. He has received a number of awards and honours, including a Gold Medal from the University of Umeå (1992), His Majesty King Carl XVI Gustaf ‘King's Medal’ for outstanding contributions in Education and Research (2000), and an honorary doctorate from the Humboldt University in Berlin (2007). He accepted the Academia Europaea's Gold Medal on behalf of the Riksbankens Jubileumsfond at the Liverpool Conference of Academia Europaea in 2009.

Anne Buttimer: Today we welcome Dan Brändström, formerly Head of the Bank of Sweden's Tercentenary Fund, a generous donor of monies to Academia Europaea. Thank you, Dan, for coming today. I'd like to begin by asking you to tell about yourself, where you come from, how you became involved first with the Riksbankens Jubileumsfond, and then to ask you about your perspectives on Academia Europaea.

Dan Brändström: Thanks, Anne. I'm happy to be here. Like Stig Strömholm, I was born in the northern part of Sweden in Västerbotten, in a small village called Ekträsk. I went to primary school there and to secondary school in Umeå and then I went to Uppsala where I did my university studies and took an academic degree at the beginning of the 1960s. I stayed in Uppsala for three years to complete my studies. Then Sweden's fifth university was established in the north, in Umeå in 1965, and I was offered the position of Assistant to the Professor of Political Science there. I was actually the first person to be hired in the Department of Political Science at the University of Umeå.

AB: Then you must have known Erik Bylund?

DB: Yes indeed, I knew him very well. He was appointed Professor of Geography in the same year, in June 1965. He was a marvellous colleague, but unfortunately he is no longer with us.

AB: Erik Bylund was a very good friend of mine. And how come you got interested in political science? Had it something to do with the regional question?

DB: Yes, indeed! I collaborated with Erik and his colleagues a lot throughout the years. At the beginning of the 1980s I took the initiative in creating a cross-disciplinary Centre for Regional Studies at the University of Umeå (CERUM) with professors appointed both in various disciplines and also at the Centre. This is still a very active department. But, above all, I think that from my childhood I became very interested in political matters. My father was closely involved in the labour movement and he was also deeply involved in politics. I listened to everything the politicians had to say when they visited our home, and so from an early age the interest was there. It was therefore very natural for me to pursue university studies in this field when I came to Uppsala. I combined this with history and economics and other subjects, but this was my primary interest. My father had all the official duties one could think of in a small village like my home place. He took care of everything. He was also the official for a savings bank. He was not the one who sat there waiting for the customers to come. He went to the customers and brought back the single crowns from every citizen and delivered these crowns monthly to the savings bank. He was honoured for this later in his life. He was very much liked and respected. But it was from my mother that I got the ability to go on with my studies because she was eager that I should do so. I was the first one in my family who took the Student examen, actually the first person in my family to take up university studies.

AB: How fortunate you were to have a father who was a real innovator in terms of local politics, and a mother who was committed to the intellectual life: this must have been a really special background.

DB: That was very valuable indeed as personal background.

AB: And your university studies were in Uppsala. One doesn't associate Uppsala particularly with radical ideas.

DB: Of course not, but there was in fact no alternative for me anyhow! Most of the students from the north had by tradition chosen Uppsala as the place for an academic degree.

AB: And during those years in Uppsala, were there particular teachers who influenced you?

DB: I must say that one of my first teachers in political science was, in fact, Stig Strömholm. He had just come home from Munich in 1962 and he was my teacher in Common Law during my first period in Uppsala. I was deeply impressed by him as a very knowledgeable teacher. So I was, of course, happy and very fortunate also to be able to work with him at the end of his academic career as the Chairman of the Board of the Riksbankens Jubileumsfond. That was absolutely fantastic.

AB: I think he must have been very impressive Chairman.

DB: Absolutely.

AB: And he also provided the link with the Bank of Sweden Tercentenary Fund?

DB: In 1965, when I came to Umeå, the same year as the Riksbankens Jubileumsfond was established by a donation of 250,000,000 kronor from the Bank of Sweden. At the beginning of the 1960s, this was indeed a magnificent donation. This was done in order to celebrate the 300 years anniversary of the oldest bank in the world.

AB: Over 300 years ago?

DB: The Bank of Sweden was established in 1668. Sixteen years before the Bank of England, you know. The Bank of Sweden Tercentenary Foundation has a very interesting story. It was established in 1965 with grants in the fields of social sciences, humanities as well as other scientific fields such as medicine and so on. During the first years the Foundation could deliver a large amount of money outside those provided by the State Research Council. These sources were important assets for the research community. At that time, Swedish universities had only five professors of political science. They came together and became united on a common research programme concerning communal changes in Sweden.

AB: You mean on the rationalisation of the communes in Sweden?

DB: Yes. I had then started my studies for the Licentiate-degree with another topic but I said to my professor in Umeå that even if we had started only this Autumn, we should join, even if we are small, we should avail of this chance to be with the others, because this is a chance to build up our department. This programme was one of the first applications – number 4 in fact – to this Riksbankens Jubileumsfond. My name was involved in that first application which then was awarded money from the Riksbankens Jubileumsfond. So I got my salary and travel costs paid from 1965 and two years onward to complete my Licentiate degree with a paper on the nominations of candidates within the political parties at the communal level in Sweden. This was my first connection with the Riksbankens Jubileumsfond. And then later to become the Director of that Foundation was for me a fantastic thing.

AB: Could I stop you there for a minute. Your father's work in nurturing and keeping alive the social life in small communes, wasn't this Riksbankens-funded project in some ways threatening to that idea?

DB: In a way, yes. You're absolutely right in that respect. A lot of small communes disappeared, as well as the ways that people within the communes took care of these functions. Most of these functions were in a way abolished. Hired people came instead into bigger units and it became a business between the electorate and the citizens about how communes should be run.

AB: My friend Torsten Hägerstrand, was very much involved in that project and in later years he used to reflect on it with some misgivings. Anyway, we're talking about Riksbankens Jubileumsfond and how it continues to support the Academia Europaea. Even before you took charge, there was Nils-Eric Svensson, a person who was keenly aware of human creativity and feelings of identity with commune and place.

DB: Yes, I knew Nils-Eric Svensson quite well, met him many times. I even worked with him during three months. I met him when he was working in the Swedish Chancellor's office from 1969. And then he recruited me in a group of people who were involved in the research communities of the early 1970s – a long time ago. Sweden is a small country and I was a person he noticed. When, in the late 1980s, he was approaching retirement, we met (possibly in 1988) and he said ‘You know, I have the best job in the world’. Then I immediately replied and said to him: ‘I'd very much like to have that job after you!’.

AB: Really? You asked for it?

DB: Of course it was like a joke but, at the same time, with a certain seriousness. But then, as he was about to leave, he sent me a letter indicating ‘I am about to leave now, and you have a chance to apply’. It was already announced and I think there were more than 30 applicants for that position. So I applied and I got the job. I don't think he played any important role in the selection process – that's not something an outgoing chief usually does – but I became extremely happy that he and Kjell Härnquist, the Chairman at the time and member of the AE, telephoned me at 6:00 in the evening after the Board Meeting on the 12 December 1991 to tell me ‘you have got the job’.

AB: That was a happy Christmas for you! And over the years since your appointment as Head of Riksbankens Jubileumsfond, you have contributed to several projects, including those of the Academia Europaea…

DB: Nils-Eric Svensson was a very enthusiastic person and he was very interested in European affairs. He was also interested in building up good capacity in Eastern Europe. He was very much involved in the building up of the Collegium Budapest (of which I am now Chair). In the late 1980s he was an active member of the Hague Club, a club of Foundation directors, established around 1970, a key organisation for the building up of a research community in Europe after the Second World War. A lot of people came from the United States, offering us lessons on how to create conditions for the setting up of research foundations like those in the US. It was not easy to set up such an environment for foundations in Europe as it is in the United States. Anyway, through a series of meetings in London, in Germany and elsewhere in Europe, a plan was made by the biggest European foundations to meet and to establish a club. Nils-Eric was the one who, after the initial stage, represented Sweden in those meetings, and for many years the only Scandinavian member of that club. He remained involved in everything European during his period, beginning with the Hague Club. The symbol of the Club is the Stork, the symbol for the City of The Hague. European scientific issues have, from early on, been well taken care of by Foundations like the Wellcome Trust, Volkswagen-Stiftung, foundations in the Netherlands, Agnelli Foundation, Gulbenkian Foundation in Portugal and some other big foundations in Europe. All in Europe became very intrigued by the happenings following the fall of the Berlin Wall on 9 November 1989. At about the same time the Academia Europaea (AE) was established. From the start, David Magnusson was a very prominent member of the Board of the AE as well as of the Board of the Riksbankens Jubileumsfond and he also worked closely with Nils-Eric, Torsten Husén, Torsten Hägerstrand and other prominent Swedish scholars at the time. I had a lot of conversations with Nils-Eric, so I was very happy to take over this established network of fantastic scholars. So I know that he supported the Academia from the beginning. He was very much European in his way of funding and he tried to get good connections with the German funding agencies. And I have tried to maintain this good connection with Germany. In a way, therefore, I took over his network and got even more pushed in that direction. But, you know, in a way, most of the big foundations in every country were very and still are ‘national’ in their focus.

AB: Of course, they are supported mainly by tax-based funds.

DB: Yes, and they are subject to tax-based rules. So on every occasion, there was a fight to send Foundation money to another country.

AB: I do understand.

DB: So in a way it was a daring thing to do. We have had no problems with the Tax Authorities because I always said that it would be of benefit for Swedish science that we are open-minded and ready for collaboration with every scientist in Europe. I came into the position as the CEO of the Foundation at the same time as David Magnusson came to me and asked for money for supporting the Uppsala meeting of the AE.

AB: That was in 1993?

DB: Yes, 1993. I was already very new in my position but I had Nils-Eric Svensson's voice in my ears. I knew, of course, that David Magnusson was a man of trust, already on board with the Academia Europaea and thought that it would be a great thing for the Riksbankens Jubileumsfond to be part of. I was invited to this meeting where I met Sir Arnold Burgen, who was then President of the Academia Europaea. I found the Uppsala meeting to be very interesting, and from that meeting on, I have always followed what was happening in the Academia Europaea. I've had a very good collaboration with both Professor Stig Strömhölm and Professor Jurgen Mittelstrass. I have had the opportunity to meet Professor Mittelstrass at several occasions both in Sweden and in Germany. We have had many fruitful conversations over the years.

AB: Do you maintain the same links with the current Norwegian President of the AE?

DB: Yes, I met him in Liverpool when he was elected President. He is a very nice person, an excellent President of the Academia Europaea. I became myself also very happy in Liverpool to receive an Honorary Membership of the Academia. I became extremely proud of this award.

AB: Now Dan, you've had a lot of experience with these foundations, private, national, ESF and others. How now do you see the prospects for the Academia Europaea?

DB: It is very important that we are building up a scientific community in Europe. But it is also very important that basic research will be a strong component in this endeavour. I've been involved in discussions on research policy at a European level and was Secretary of the group that put forward the suggestion for a European Research Council.

AB: Yes, I'd like it if you could speak a little about this.

DB: The reason I was so much involved in getting a Research Council in Europe was my firm conviction that, in the long run, if we in Europe have to compete with other parts of the world, we have to strengthen our own capacity for basic research, and that should be done, more and more, on a European level.

AB: You mean that nationally-based research projects should somehow reach out for collaboration with European colleagues?

DB: Yes, and if you can get strong support for that at a European level, then we also must have, at a European level, an academic body that is independent of all national and other politically-involved organisations. There must be an independent academy for science in Europe that can exercise strong advocacy for the general European interest against the European Union and even against the individual voices from national sources. For me, that's essential. That's why I've been trying for many years to support the infrastructure of the Academia Europaea so that it could play that role. And I really hope that some other independent foundations in Europe could also offer support. I know that it is easier for foundations to support specific projects than to offer sustained support for this long-term programme. It is always difficult to procure long-term basic support if you don't have a strong membership contribution.

AB: But the European Research Council: does it not play this role of advocacy for general European interests, at least to some extent?

DB: I had hoped so. I had hoped also that members of the Scientific Council of the European Research Council should see the Academia Europaea as very important also for the European Research Council. So, if I had been a member of the European Science Council, I should have been pleading for even an annual grant, but anyhow a rather big grant for the Academia Europaea, so that it could fulfil its role within Europe.

AB: The European Research Council is itself multinational. It is also interdisciplinary, and it does have an independent voice. So does this maybe imply that the Academia Europaea is neither relevant nor necessary?

DB: Absolutely not. It is always essential for a body like the European Research Council to have what you might call friendly critical support somewhere.

AB: A counter-voice?

DB: Counter-voice. Certainly.

AB: You have mentioned now, a few times, and certainly in our previous conversations, the attitude of the so-called ‘pure scientists’ toward the EU and the Framework Programmes.

DB: The reason why I concentrated my efforts on getting a Research Council in place was because I knew that all these framework programmes were looked upon with a lot of scepticism by researchers. I can understand that, because the framework programmes are very bureaucratic and in a way they have a special focus. EU Framework Programmes have, in a sense, other aims than curiosity-driven scientific work: excellence in research has not been a priority. The focus has been on a lot of side effects, and not on research excellence. There were other things as well that made these programmes a little too bureaucratic. You had to find partners from Greece, Italy and other Southern or Eastern European countries in order to get the research funded. But I think that somewhere in Europe you must have a place, where the only thing that should be important about a research application is excellence.

AB: And European interest?

DB: European interest, yes, of course, but you could also have collaboration with excellent researchers in other parts of the world, Chinese, Japanese and others – maintaining a European perspective.

AB: For you, then, the primary goals for the Academia Europaea would be research excellence. It is hard to disagree with you on some questionable aspects of EU Framework programmes. My own experience with them leaves me with the impression that there is an attempt to adopt some of the techniques, and previously rehearsed exercises, of other European scientific bodies. Like the establishment of networks: this was not an EU invention, rather it was an adoption by the EU of an idea that had worked previously with the ESF and in early discussions about the AE. So maybe the Commission is trying to learn from the experiences of other bodies? My other impression – when I read the Framework Programme announcements – is that the EU Commission seems like a combined harvester, absorbing the main results from successive framework initiatives and feeding these into policies and directives of various kinds. Am I in any way justified in this perception?

DB: I think, in a way, that they were on the wrong track in the European Union from the beginning, They seemed to think that the best way for Europe to play its role was just to open up access to the research councils of the various member states. But that's the way to gain collaboration within basic science. When we started the process of setting up the European Research Council, the idea was that these national research councils could give a small amount of money to create the European Scientific Foundation – something in the order of €20 million or so – to encourage collaboration among some researchers in Europe. That is, of course, peanuts compared with the sums that they had intended to give to Framework programmes.

AB: Peanuts?

DB: In a way, I felt that the EU approach was a way of marginalising basic research. And I said: ‘This is not the way to go’. It must be within the ‘own’ programmes. So my feeling is that, in a way, you must in the long run, 50 years from now, there must be much more money for basic research in the European Union. The European Research Council should be much bigger. You should decrease the money for Framework programmes – they could even be phased out more or less. I think that there are some big things that must be done at a European scale, things that cannot be done at a national scale, like building big research centres of the scale of CERN and so on, which one could not do within a national scale. Otherwise, I think that when it comes to the things that are now being done in EU Framework programmes, I do think that these will be taken care of by member countries in the future. Because these issues are very close to the interests of the people at the national and local level. These are questions which engage people in their own areas. They are interested that these industries could have possibilities to grow and so on. So all these types of research on issues that are very connected to the local society should be at the discretion of various member states.

AB: You have now broached on a very ‘touchy’ issue. You keep hammering on about ‘basic research’. But basic research is done primarily within particular scientific fields on an international scale. But for cross-disciplinary collaboration – one of the founding ideas of Academia and EU – what is often the best trigger for this would be the problem orientation, societal relevance and policy implications. So what is your feeling about what that Academia should be about: should it concentrate on the so-called ‘basics’ or should it be promoting the applied aspects, or find some way to combine these objectives?

DB: As it is now, if there should be a focus on relevance and policy, you'd have to change the entire composition of Academia Europaea. Today, if you look at the membership of the AE, they are all coming from the basic sciences.

AB: And humanities.

DB: When I speak of ‘science’, I do not refer to the narrowly-defined physical sciences. Of course, it is also important that you find agreement for discussions across the borders of disciplines. And it is also possible to have projects within the basic sciences, like you see in the areas that are supported by the European Research Council, which could be cross-disciplinary. I'm very much in favour of that. The Bank of Sweden Tercentenary Foundation is also very supportive. I'm not against that. I think that support should be given to collaboration among individuals who are very good in their respective fields.

AB: And you, Dan, coming from Sweden, a country that has invested so much, right down the centuries, in scholarship and training, do you feel that Sweden has a special message for other countries, not just other Scandinavian countries but to Europe as a whole?

DB: I think that Sweden is, by tradition, a strong scientific country. We are at the top when it comes to the statistical evidence on support for science. And we have quite substantial support on the political level for good academic research. So I think we have, like our neighbour countries, a rather proud history to tell. And also the way we are working together with science and society: we are taking a rather leading role in that area too. That's why I think that we have something to contribute to the European arena. I say many times that we should not be so shy when we go to Brussels. We have something we can also be proud about, something perhaps to ‘sell’.

AB: Absolutely. Speaking on the origins of the Riksbanken, who was the founder in 1668 – Oxenstierna perhaps?

DB: He was not actually alive at that time. But in a way the very idea was his, with the establishment of the precursor to the Bank of Sweden – the Palmstruch Bank was founded in 1656, two years after the death of Axel Oxenstierna. So it was very much in his spirit. He was a fantastic leader at the time, and he had a view about how to organise a country with a big power – as Sweden had at the time – he had a very special mission. And it was in the context of that mission that the Bank of Sweden was established.

AB: Well I think, Dan, that you and the Bank have already given so much already to European collaboration in science, not just in monetary terms, but also in conceptual terms, drawing from the long Swedish experience in forging the links between science and society. So thank you very much for coming today.

DB: Thank you, Anne.