Charles Getchell, Secretary of Sabre Foundation, Inc., and Chairman of Sabre Europe, Association Internationale, reported on meetings he and Lee Auspitz had had in Brussels the preceding week with Sabre Europe's pro bono lawyers, Cleary, Gottlieb, Steen & Hamilton, and with representatives of the European Union's PHARE and TACIS programs, the French Community of the Belgian government, and the European Foundation Center.

Sabre Europe was organized in 1993 to serve (a) as a convenient forum in which Sabre's European affiliates and partners could work more closely together, thus facilitating the "institution building" that is one of Sabre's purposes; (b) as a qualifying Western European partnership entity for programs and grants from the European Union and European foundations; and (c) as a potential recipient/distributor of book donations from Western European publishers.

The founding institutional members of Sabre Europe are: Sabre-Hungary Alapitvány, Fundacja Sabre, Sabre-Svitlo, Sabre Zagreb, Sabre Foundation, Inc., Sabre Trust, UK, Slovak Academic Information Agency, Center for Democracy and Free Enterprise, and Center for the Study of Democracy. The association's charter allows for additional members, so long as the total does not exceed fifty. During its first year, Sabre Europe applied for a PHARE Democracy Program grant and for a TEMPUS Complementary Measures grant, which were not approved. But members of Sabre Europe's General Assembly did undertake an adaption of the scientific journals program projected in the TEMPUS application. Sabre's Reduced-Cost Journals Program is an outgrowth of this work. Otherwise, Sabre Europe has been inactive.

The recent meetings in Brussels, however, indicated that the objectives behind the establishment of Sabre Europe were still valid. In particular, Sabre Europe may be well placed in some cases to serve as a European Union partner for administration/coordination/accounting functions under TACIS and PHARE grants. (PHARE applies to Central and Eastern European countries, including the Baltic nations, and TACIS to states of the former Soviet Union.) TACIS and PHARE encompass over a dozen programs, which vary widely as to subject matter, duration, monetary size, and partner requirements. All the programs, though, emphasize exchanges and strengthen links between institutions of the European Union and those of eastern countries. Grant application forms and guidelines ‹ samples of which were shown to the participants ‹ are available from the offices of EU missions in capitals abroad.