The Vienna Agreement
The decision by the European Union to formulate legislation in terms of very general essential requirements - the "New Approach to technical harmonization and standards” (resolution of the Council of the European Union, 7 May 1985), and to require that the so-called "New Approach Directives" be supported by a portfolio of European voluntary standards, was an extremely significant event in the history of modern standardization
Through this decision, governments gave explicit recognition of the role that standards can fulfil in achieving a political objective (in this case, the creation of the single European market).
There were a number of virtually immediate consequences of this development, not least of which was the explosive growth of CEN (the European Committee for Standardization) and of its work programme. At the same time, on the negative side, the suspicion in some areas of the world that the single European market was intended to protect European industry from foreign incursions, what might be termed the "Fortress Europe syndrome".
Initially, in some respects, the concerns seemed to be justified. It was very difficult for non-Europeans to obtain information about European standardization activities and, at the same time, there were obvious defections of western European national standards bodies from the international standardization arena, particularly in some specific areas. It was therefore to be expected that non-Europeans would approach ISO with the request that something be done.
The immediate response to this request was the development of an agreement on the exchange of technical information between ISO and CEN (called the Lisbon Agreement, approved in 1989) which provided for full and mutual exchange of information between ISO and CEN on their respective activities.
However, there was a widespread perception among European as well as international stakeholders that the single European market needed to be integrated into the wider, global market and that this could best be achieved by ensuring that the standards used to regulate the single European market were also those which regulated the global market. With this in mind, it seemed that what was needed was a set of procedural mechanisms to try to ensure that, to the largest possible extent, International Standards and European Standards are compatible or, even better, identical.
And this is the perspective from which the Vienna Agreement (1991) was born. Of course, another major consideration was to make rational use of the resources available for standardization by avoiding duplication of work - this meaning that there had to be agreement on work allocation between ISO and CEN, as there were simply not sufficient expert resources available for ISO and CEN to conduct their standardization activities completely independently.
The agreement on technical cooperation between ISO and CEN was approved by ISO Council resolution 18/1990 and CEN General Assembly resolution 3/1990. This agreement (called the Vienna Agreement) was published in June 1991. It is accompanied by common ISO/CEN "Guidelines for the TC/SC Chairmen and Secretariats for implementation", approved in 1992 and revised in September 1998.
After a decade of experience, the Agreement was subsequently confirmed by ISO Council resolution 35/2001 and CEN Administrative Board resolution 2/2001.
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