My personal opinion is that ESF shouldn t be ambitious to do everything. I believe in quality above quantity, because when you try to get big in Europe, like the European Commission in Brussels, you get tied up in bureaucracy. The more projects that are running, the more staff you need, and after a while it takes all the president s time just to guide the staff. Therefore a few good projects are much more important than having a lot of weak ones. Therefore it s better to have just two or three running projects.
Polymer science is a good example.
In the late 1970s it was more or less a British activity. Then in 1980 the British chemists thought of bringing together a European workshop. ESF gave assistance, the researchers came together for seminars and so on, and after a while our member councils decided to establish and pay for an ESF program on surfaces and interfaces in polymers these very exciting polymolecular surfaces. Over the last seven years they ve also established a European Association of Polymer Scientists, a learned society. ESF helped them, they came together, they were friends after a while and then programs developed.