Internationalization (1970s Onwards): Infrastructural Disappointments and the New International Division of Labor

Abstract

International collaboration was always key to Max Planck leadership; in the first postwar decade, astrophysicists and cosmochemists were frequent guests within much larger projects based in Allied countries. During the post-Sputnik boom, one of the objectives of the vast expansion was to be able to mobilize national strengths to obtain a stronger voice in international collaborations. The chapter takes up this process of internationalization as it matures, from the 1970s on, and becomes the main mode of research in the Max Planck Society, which it still is to this day. Unexpectedly, this was thanks not so much to German-owned large infrastructures but, rather, to the weight of longstanding scientific and technical traditions which brought to the global table the Germans' theoretical insights, innovative experimentation, and superior instrument-making capacities. German reunification and the end of the Cold War further accelerated the Max Planck Society's transition toward this 21stcentury mode of scientific production. Reform in the 1990s coincided with the geopolitical shifts, as well as with the retirement of many of those leading Max Planck Institute directors who had led the wavelength expansion in the previous 30 years. Their successors de-emphasized the construction and ownership of observatories, focusing instead on scientific research within large collaborations, secure in the knowledge that their institutes' instrumental expertise would provide political leverage and a comparative advantage over their partners. Political pressures to relocate institutes to the former East Germany, or even to close them down, were successfully turned into opportunities for expansion, and ultimately, even the one most seriously under threat from these reforms, Biermann's original (theoretical) Institute for Astrophysics, found a reinvigorated mission within the cluster of Max Planck Institutes dedicated to cosmic research, as well as in the, by then, global powerhouse of Garching.