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Maastricht European Studies Papers 2007/07 L. Unbehauen
1. Introduction
Higher education has all times been a very sensitive policy area of the nation state. It
encompasses two notions, namely a cultural and an economic conception. In previous decades
the cultural design, the decent education of the next generation of citizens and their
socialization with certain values, used to be more important. However, external and internal
pressures such as globalization, the ascend of the ‘knowledge economy’, the aging labor
force, increased cross-border mobility and the technological revolution in terms of
information and communication (Keeling, 2006, p. 215) have turned the image in favor of the
economic rational - a rational which is also stressed by influential players like the European
Commission. The most significant development these factors have triggered is the so-called
Bologna Process, an intergovernmental agreement among 45 pan-European states to
restructure and to harmonize the European higher education systems.
Consequently, the question arises to what extent the Bologna Process constitutes a
proof for a shift towards a consensus culture in higher education policy. As a matter of fact, a
wide-spread consensus exists on the purpose of the reform as such but the degree to which
change is supported by national actors is questionable. Therefore, this paper claims that the
success of the Bologna Process mainly depends on the thorough implementation of the whole
reform package. That means that a Bologna à la carte implementation, which is currently
present, has to be avoided to ensure real achievements.
In order to analyze all angles of this issue, the paper will be structured in the following
way. First, the intergovernmental, non-EU-related nature of the process will be clarified,
followed by a rough sketch of the objectives and priorities set out in the Bologna Declaration
and in its follow-up work. Parallel the developing process and the extension of membership
will be outlined. The third section investigates the steadily increasing role of the European
Commission in the Bologna follow-up group (BFUG). Furthermore, the Commission’s
ambition to promote consensus and innovation in the Bologna Process is examined by looking
at its funding and discourse strategies. To give a balanced picture of this process, the fourth
part focuses on the challenges to such consensus, concentrating on six fields where national
resistance to harmonization is present: the balance of incoming and outgoing students,
introduction of the two-cycle structure, loss of educational diversity, language of instruction,
commercialization of higher education and finally the establishment of a European system of
quality assurance (QA) and accreditation. Subsequently, with reference to the findings of the
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