In this chapter, I will review some of the potential barriers to scientific cooperation between Britain and France, drawing on my own experience as a British social psychologist who has worked in both countries, as well as in America and Germany. It is the ‘bottom-up’ view of a researcher currently working in the French university system, but who has also worked in business schools in the Grande École system in France. My focus will be on potential opportunities for and barriers to cooperation between British and French universities due to differences in organisation of education and research in the two countries. In my view, it will help the success of these partnerships if there is an understanding of the different institutional contexts on both sides. I will touch on the current reforms of the French system and their potential implications for Franco-British collaborations. I hope that these remarks will be helpful in depicting the institutional and cultural landscapes in which such European collaborations take place.

Before going further, it is important to distinguish between institutional and cultural differences. While the institutional differences are national – for example the Humboldtian view of a university in the UK, where research and teaching are integrated in a single institution, versus the bicephalous organisation of ‘research’ (CNRS, INSERM etc.) and ‘teaching’ (Grandes Écoles, universities) institutions in France – the ‘cultural’ differences are subtle and differ from discipline to discipline. At the cultural level I thus do not believe that sweeping generalisations about the ‘British’ or ‘French’ way of doing things can apply, as within each country there is often considerable sub-cultural variation between research communities in different disciplines. For example, my personal experience suggests that, on the whole, French Economics, Neuroscience and Artificial Intelligence are much more internationalised (and recognised abroad) than French Psychology. One implication of this is that it is much easier for the former disciplines to build international research networks, which can compete for funding in cross-national funding programmes (the ANR–ESRC Franco-British research programme, European Research Area, FP7, etc.). One of the objectives of this chapter is therefore to analyse why some disciplines are more internationalised than others, and to analyse the implications for policy making.