Chapter 1: Introduction

Post-WWII peace-building and the promotion of security assurance on the European continent became the main impetus to the emergence of the European Union (EU) and its development, with the collapse of the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia in 1991 adding fuel to that aspiration (Dedman, 2009). The signing of the Maastricht Treaty in 1992 and its ratification in 1993 formally established the EU, with an initial membership of 12 countries, and commenced a new stage in the development of a so-called European project, the territorial reach and meaning of which have evolved over time (EU, 2024). While the borders of the EU have been a matter of political agreements, the European project has been developing as a space of meaning, that increasingly transcends the borders of the EU and aims to unite Europe as a region the geography of which spans beyond EU's borders (Kushnir, 2016). Hence, Europeanisation has been the accompanying process of the evolution of the European project, and its dynamic nature could be understood as a process of adopting the aims and features to support the development of the European project (Exadaktylos et al., 2020).

The establishment of the post-1945 European institutions largely aimed to make another war in the European area politically unthinkable and materially not possible. Nonetheless, those post-war institutions ended up prioritising elite governance over popular participation. As a result, a Europe founded on education seems to have started appearing as a more truly people's Europe than what we have inherited from the post-1945 institutions. Education has emerged as an instrument for defeating a lack of unity within the EU, and even more so, for developing deeper relationships between the EU member states, as well as between the EU and its neighbours.

Education in general and higher education (HE), in particular, have historically played an important role in European politics. Writing almost two decades ago, Grek (2008, p. 208) argued that education was ‘slowly moving from the margins of European governance to the very centre of its policy making.’ More recently, I have emphasised a similar phenomenon in my paper (Kushnir, 2021b), highlighting how the European Education Area (a related but distinct initiative from the EHEA, meant for all levels of education specifically in the EU countries) has been used by EU decision-makers to facilitate the deepening of the relationships among the EU member states in the context of the rise of populism, economic crises and other challenges the EU has been facing. Robertson et al. (2016) maintain that specifically HE has been instrumental in crafting the European project particularly through facilitating academic mobility, inspiring the building of a European single market and the concept of the European citizen.

The processes that make up the European HE space are complex and have a long history. For example, the EU has been coordinating a number of education policy initiatives with a focus on HE. Examples include the famous Bologna Process (BP) which has established the European Higher Education Area (EHEA) and the associated Education and Training (ET) Work frameworks 2010/2020, which both later served as a foundation for the European Education Area (Robertson et al., 2022). Feeding on these growing policy interconnections, the EHEA has emerged as the largest all-encompassing HE harmonisation initiative not only in the European region but much wider – in the world, having transformed into an ‘international higher education regime’ (Zahavi & Friedman, 2019, p. 23).

Some scholars, seemingly, anticipated or assumed that the work on building the EHEA and its BP would have come to an end back in 2020 (Gareis & Broekel, 2022; Mendick & Peters, 2022; Pires Pereira et al., 2021), which was the deadline for the achievement of a ‘fully functioning EHEA’ (EHEA, 2024h). However, this did not happen. What follows is a brief reminder about some of the key aspects of the EHEA and its BP.

Education ministers from four countries, namely the United Kingdom, Germany, France and Italy, initiated work towards the EHEA at their meeting in France in 1998, before calling upon other EU member states to join them (EHEA, 2024a). The EHEA started developing as a platform for Europeanisation, more so after the adoption in 2001 of the goal for the EU to become ‘the most competitive and dynamic knowledge-based economy in the world.’ This followed Lisbon Council in 2000 when this goal was originally set specifically for the EU (Corbett, 2011, p. 36). The link of the EHEA and Europeanisation was reinforced by EHEA's growing membership initially limited to the EU countries, frequent references in the EHEA official communications to developing a European identity of those in the EHEA and, after all, the inclusion of the term ‘European’ in the actual name of the EHEA (Kushnir, 2016). Eventually, the EHEA started broadening European borders by inviting non-EU countries to become members, but this was accompanied ‘by aggravating tensions in the development of a territory-identity integrity in Europe, constructed by the Bologna Process’ (Kushnir, 2016, p. 665). Nonetheless, the BP has grown to become the biggest HE initiative worldwide (Zahavi & Friedman, 2019).

The BP has evolved over time. Initially, it was about harmonising HE systems in the EHEA to ease academic mobility and employability (e.g. comparable cycles of studies, credit system to measure workload, quality assurance standards, etc.) (EHEA, 2024a). Then, the focus was more on developing and implementing the values of democracy and academic freedom in the EHEA, as suggested by the Rome Ministerial Communique (EHEA, 2020). More recently, in the context of the Russian full-scale invasion of Ukraine, ‘the EHEA has begun to emerge as a platform for political cooperation beyond HE for the promotion of peace in the European region’ (Kushnir, 2023, p. 1). Not only did the scope of the Bologna initiatives evolve, but so did the territorial reach of the EHEA. Currently, there are 47 active members in the EHEA, following the suspension of the memberships of Russia and Belarus in April 2022 in response to the invasion of Ukraine (EHEA, 2022).

This brings us back to reasoning about the mission of Europe. The peace-promotion ideal, mentioned above, gradually became a thing of the past, as new generations could not relate to it. Polyakova's (2016, p. 70) powerful words shed more light on this,

Nevertheless, as the findings spelled out later in this book will demonstrate, Polyakova's (2016) observation has begun to change with the start of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, evidenced by the case of the EHEA. This is one key aspects of the relationship between European cooperation in HE and the evolving mission of Europe that will be discussed in this book.

This book explores the role of European cooperation in HE, illustrated by cooperation in the framework of the EHEA, in understanding the evolving mission of the European project in the early 2020s. This focus of the book is timely and original for three main reasons. First, this book reports on the only study about the four founders of the EHEA, focusing on the interconnectedness of their EHEA membership agendas and their wider political agendas. Second, the study reported here addresses a temporal-contextual gap in the available field of research on the EHEA by covering the most recent period of the early 2020s, namely after the Brexit transitional period and after the start of a full-scale Russia–Ukraine war. Third, the study highlights an innovative theoretical dimension in this topic – relying on neo-institutionalism in the analysis of Europeanisation politics particularly in the context of EHEA memberships.

While the literature about the participation of Germany, France, Italy and the United Kingdom in the EHEA is diverse, no research explores them jointly as the four founders of the EHEA, with the exception of my recent co-authored article on the geopolitics of the European HE space (Kushnir & Yazgan, 2024) that stems from this same project and represents its extract. Part of the significance of this book lies in addressing this gap by investigating the role of European cooperation in HE represented by the EHEA in understanding the evolving mission of the European project.

This first collective case study makes an essential contribution to the scholarship about the EHEA by advancing our limited knowledge about its initiators and their Europeanisation in the early 2020s. Revealing these trends is also significant and timely for theorising differentiated Europeanisation from a HE perspective and informing EHEA international level policymaking in the run-up to its new deadline of 2030. The first years after the 19 November, 2020 stocktaking ministerial meeting are crucial in shaping the directions of work of EHEA's signatories. Although the concept ‘differentiated Europeanisation’ stems from EU Studies, it has also been applied to the analysis of the EHEA, the boundaries of which spread far beyond the EU. Veiga et al. (2015) applied it, but only in the area of HE harmonisation and only in the context of Germany, Italy, Norway and Portugal. Even though Germany and Italy featured in that study, it did not answer the questions posed by the project reported in this book. This is because the scholars relied only on the analysis of country's Bologna reports prior to 2009, did not review the situation post-2020, did not offer an in-depth exploration of the perspectives of key HE actors on the EHEA membership and did not view it as a case of a wider Europeanisation agenda of the countries. Veiga's (2023) more recent reflective piece brings together the discussion of political differentiated integration in the EU and differences within the EHEA. While discussing Brexit, this work does not specifically focus on the temporal context of the early 2020s and the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. It also does not rely on empirical research, which means it does not focus on data collected from the stakeholders in the four founders of the EHEA and does not apply the neo-institutionalist lens.

There is a need to bridge the scholarship about EHEA membership and wider Europeanisation particularly with regard to the countries that initiated the EHEA – as a platform for Europeanisation to understand the nature of this Europeanisation. The state of affairs in the early 2020s is of a special interest here because in addition to the change of European geopolitics in 2020 following the end of Brexit transitional period, the year 2020 was the deadline for the achievement of a ‘fully-functioning EHEA’ (EHEA, 2024h) and planning EHEA's further work.

In light of the above, the specific research questions that this book sets out to explore include:

By exploring the answers to the above research questions, this book puts forward and unfolds the following argument: European cooperation in HE, illustrated here by the case of the EHEA, is an instrumental platform for the meaning-making process of the European project's mission which has increasingly been gaining momentum in supporting political stability in the European region, particularly in the early 2020s period. The findings suggest that the stakeholders of each of the EHEA's founders, despite having different priorities and visions for their memberships in the EHEA and EHEA's role for Europe, have all been contributing to the crafting of the purpose of the European project, that has increasingly been transcending the borders of the EU, as an insurer of stability and cross-country dialogue.

Specifically, German Bologna stakeholders view Germany's EHEA membership largely as a tool for generating and maintaining political stability in the region, and Germany takes an active leading role in this process. France's Bologna stakeholders take a moderating role in leading the European region together with Germany in their stability-seeking process relying on the EHEA as a platform for this. Italian EHEA-related stakeholders, despite taking a coordinating role in the EHEA, have been trialling ways of staying apolitical before succumbing to the unavoidable connection between politics and HE. This attitude to politics may, arguably, be rooted predominantly in the assumed conflict between EHEA's inherent link to Europeanisation (Kushnir, 2021a) and Italy's growing Euroscepticism, coupled with a commitment to the security of the region. A similar conflict seems to be present in the attitude of England, Wales and N. Ireland (EWNI) which is one of the two UK members in the EHEA, along with Scotland, but this conflict is expressed differently in EWNI's positioning of its EHEA membership. EWNI, where England's Bologna stakeholders set the tone for work (Kushnir & Brooks, 2022), have been focused on observing the developments in the EHEA and wider politics surrounding it, keeping the HE cooperation ties which have been established and looking outwards to cooperating with other regions. EWNI's attitude to the Europeanisation politics of the European region is that of a former empire – willingness to maintain international connections and external influence, while not being an active leader in the EHEA or in the European project. For Scotland, which is the other UK member in the EHEA, HE cooperation in the framework of the EHEA is an instrument for Scotland's politics of Europeanisation, particularly the mending of the EU ties, shaken after Brexit.

The first striking difference regarding the membership status of the four cases in the EHEA is that unlike the other three cases, the United Kingdom has two separate ‘seats’ – for Scotland and separately for England, Wales and Northern Ireland (EWNI). The United Kingdom's two memberships are presented on the EHEA website as the ‘United Kingdom’, which refers to EWNI, and the ‘United Kingdom (Scotland)’ which stands only for Scotland (EHEA, 2024b). Aside from this, it is also important to point out that Germany's membership has its own complexity, given Germany's federal states' independence in policymaking (Toens, 2009).

UK-devolved administrations and their related policy actors work together in governing HE in different parts of the United Kingdom (Gallacher & Raffe, 2012), and thus, tight links and some overlaps in the work of key stakeholders from EWNI and Scotland were considered. Evidently, the list of German, French and Italian stakeholders in the EHEA is less complex, given their singular membership in the EHEA (Table 1).

The overarching research design of this project was informed by BERA (2018) Research Ethics Guidelines, which was the latest edition of the Guidelines at the time of designing this project. Data collection followed a favourable ethics decision (Ref: KUSHNIR 2021/414) from the Schools of Business, Law and Social Sciences Research Ethics Committee (BLSS REC) at Nottingham Trent University. The write-up of this book is also informed by relevant updates in the recently published fifth edition of the BERA (2024) Research Ethics Guidelines.

This book presents a collective case study of four EHEA's founders' perspectives on the role of European cooperation in HE represented by the EHEA in the evolving mission of the European project in the early 2020s.¹ As per Stake's (1994) definition, a collective case study involves some level of comparison, but it is not a comparative study per se. Instead, it aims to provide a comprehensive discussion of the issue under investigation across several cases. The analysis in this book relies on (1) in-depth semi-structured elite interviews with an opportunistic/snowball sample of key Bologna stakeholders in the countries of interest, as well as (2) their official communications, both on the national as well as the international level of the EHEA.²

The interviews (see Table 2) with EHEA stakeholders in the four countries (Germany n = 8, France n = 4, Italy n = 7, UK n = 6) were conducted in 2022, except for the UK case study. The interviews in the United Kingdom were conducted in 2021, as the first phase of the project. While the timing of the UK interviews (January–March 2021) – a few months earlier than the rest of the interviews (January–July 2022) – did not seem to have an impact on the content of what was discussed, there was one important topic that was omitted from the UK interviews because of their timing. The fact that they took place a few months before the launch of the full-scale attack on Ukraine by Russia in February 2022 meant that the UK stakeholders' responses to the war were not a matter of discussion.

The participants for the interviews were initially recruited through contact information on key HE stakeholders' websites, provided on the EHEA website, and subsequent contacts that followed. Each interview lasted about an hour and, being informed by the neo-institutionalist approach, focused on strategic decisions of these stakeholders regarding their work in the EHEA and the implications it has had for Europe.

In order to bolster the claims made by the interviewees, supplementary data were sought from the official communications, both on the national levels of the countries of interest, as well as the international level of the EHEA. Some national official communications were provided by the interviewees, other official communications were searched on the stakeholders' websites (Table 1) of each of the four countries, using the keywords ‘Bologna’, ‘European Higher Education Area’, ‘EHEA’, ‘European Union’, ‘EU’, ‘Europe’, ‘European’ and ‘Brexit’. For some of the Bologna actors listed on the EHEA website, the search did not return any results (EHEA, 2024c, 2024d, 2024e; 2024f, 2024g). This may be either due to their more passive involvement in the reforms, as some of them also suggested in their e-mail responses to the invitations for interviews or due to being guided by more centrally issued documents, such as by relevant ministries. Table 3 below provides the list of the stakeholders whose official communications have been analysed and the number of these official communications that was sourced.

Acknowledging that both the interview data and national-level official communications prioritise the views of a few EHEA actors, international official communications were included to consider the significant roles of other members and consultative members of the EHEA. The international communications that were available on the EHEA website issued between 2016–2022 (Vignette 1) were collected. This time span was chosen because of the 2016 Brexit referendum in the United Kingdom, which intensified the debates about European cooperation after 2016 not only in the United Kingdom but also far beyond in the European region. The year 2022 marked the end of the data collection phase for these case studies. The inclusion of these documents adds depth and context to the interviewees' perspectives and allows for a more comprehensive understanding of the issues at hand.

The audio recordings of the interviews were transcribed and then thematically analysed, along with the official communications. The analysis of the interview transcripts and official communications was conducted following Braun and Clarke's (2006) and Clarke and Braun's (2017) framework for analysis, which includes six key phases. Familiarisation and coding – the first two phases – focused on grouping similar data segments. This allowed to identify and take note of the patterns associated with the role of European HE represented by the EHEA in understanding the evolving mission of the European project after 2020. The multiplicity of the codes became the foundation for the next two phases – searching for themes and reviewing them. The remaining two phases focused on defining and naming the themes. Then, the themes were restructured to establish relationships among them and to finalise the super-ordinate themes in an integrated analysis.

Two major themes with important sub-elements were generated: (1) continuing memberships of EHEA founders are a rational-choice of their national Bologna stakeholders interlinked with their countries' wider political stances (i.e. aspiring to lead Europe by Germany though its EHEA membership, supporting and moderating the process of the leading of Europe by France, coordinating the EHEA while (unsuccessfully) trying to stay away from bigger politics by Italy, implementing a heterogenous agenda by the two UK members); (2) the EHEA serving as a platform for the advancement of the meaning of the European project (as a guarantor of stability in the region and international cooperation). Illustrative interview quotations for these themes and their sub-themes were finally supplemented and supported by relevant quotations from the official communications.

Following this introductory chapter, the book includes subsequent eight chapters.

Chapter 2 provides an underlying theoretical framework for the analysis in this book which revolves around the ideas rooted in neo-institutionalism.

Chapter 3 maps the landscape of existing research on the European project and European cooperation initiatives in higher education, focusing predominantly on the EHEA and points to a few major gaps in this research.

Chapters 4–7 present and discuss the findings generated from the interviews and official communications from Germany, France, Italy and the United Kingdom, respectively, supplemented with the findings from international official communications.

Chapter 8 integrates the findings presented in the four data Chapters 4–7 in light of the theoretical considerations and the literature review presented in Chapters 2–3.

Chapter 9 offers concluding remarks.