Michel Carpentier on a strategy for European community electronics

The European Community was born at the start of the micro-electronic age. The first transistor radio appeared in 1954, the Treaty of Rome was signed in 1957 and the first silicon chip made its debut in 1959. Now the electronics sector, broadly defined, is scheduled to be the biggest business in the world by the end of the century. At a time when Community leaders still thrash out the details of agricultural cooperation, as at their last Summit in Brussels in February, this article outlines the issues and strategies that underlie the mobilisation of the European information technology and telecommunications sectors to meet the international challenge of electronics in the 1990s.