Europeanisation and the Bologna Process; A preliminary to a British study

[Introduction]. This paper addresses the Europeanisation of British politics of higher education, as represented by the Bologna process, by arguing that we must first understand Europeanisation as a process of policy change. It also proposes a methodology for examining Europeanisation of the policy sector at the level of Brussels institutions. This is a preliminary to a further study with an application to the higher education system of England and Wales. The paper engages with Bache (2004) on the Europeanisation of higher education on the question of whether academics, who are the base of knowledge creation and the transmission of academic values, will find in the Bologna process a new site of competition and control, or whether other mechanisms have been found which preserve and even strengthen what Kogan has called ‘academic essentialism’. Using analytic tools of agenda setting and policy change to examine examples of Europeanisation of higher education since 1958, this paper argues that, since the new form of flexible European coordination represented by the Bologna process is necessarily implemented at national level within the existing structures of higher education- government relations, the interest of the Bologna process is as a new venue in which the university community and governments can participate in the development of the policy norms which feed back into national processes. It further suggests that the characteristics of the Europeanisation process may make it difficult to ignore.