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European Journal of Higher Education
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The globalisation challenge for
European higher education:
convergence and diversity, centres and
peripheries
Anne Corbett
a
a
European Institute, London School of Economics and Political
Science, London, UK
Published online: 07 Apr 2014.
To cite this article: Anne Corbett (2014) The globalisation challenge for European higher
education: convergence and diversity, centres and peripheries, European Journal of Higher
Education, 4:3, 297-300, DOI: 10.1080/21568235.2014.903575
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/21568235.2014.903575
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3. BOOK REVIEW
The globalisation challenge for European higher education: convergence and
diversity, centres and peripheries, edited by Pavel Zgaga, Ulrich Teichler and John
Brennan, Higher Education Research and Policy – Volume 4, Frankfurt am Main, Peter
Lang, 2013, 389 pp., £44 (hardback), ISBN 978-3-631-63908-5 / £44 (ebk), ISBN 978-3-
653-02598-9
What is Europe’s higher education role in an age of globalization? What sort of diversity
is tolerated within a common frame? How can researchers best analyse the European
higher education phenomenon? Read on. This is a book with the potential to change the
habitual answers to all three questions.
Higher education has never had such resonance in European Union (EU) policy as it
has had over the last decade. The Bologna Process is a demonstration of the belief that
national systems gain by being part of a voluntary European Higher Education Area.
Most of the 47 participating countries, supported by stakeholders and the European
Commission, have adopted a common pattern of three stage degrees, quality assurance
procedures, transparency measures in relation recognition, in outline at least, and,
increasingly, an acceptance that students have some role to play in steering the system.
The EU growth and innovation strategy for its 28 member states builds on coordinated
policies within a ‘knowledge triangle’ of education, research and innovation. Budgets for
research and education have been vastly increased for the next seven years.
This book does not, however, take the high road on the Europeanizing of higher
education. The wider picture is ignored. This volume starts with the claim that after a
decade the concerted European effort to create convergence and unity is not all that it
seems. Behind the Bologna facade there is tension. In the words of the editors, the 1999
zeitgeist has changed. Where there was a strong wish for European unity after the events
on 1989–1990, now there are risks of fragmentation. Their general line is that by focusing
in this book on themes of diversity, differentiation and periphery, rather than on policy as
seen from the centre, the risks of fragmentation will be displayed, and we will better
understand what still holds higher education Europe together, or what could.
The book’s 19 contributors range from promising early career researchers to some of
the biggest names in European higher education studies. They have produced 15 research
chapters, drawing on a range of social science disciplines. These come in the form of
mini-monographs, grouped as a three-part book. Part 1, labelled ‘Front issues’, concerns
the interaction of globalization and European policy ideas and instruments which spur
differentiation, if not divergence. Part 2 treats value issues, including learning, equity and
opportunity. These provide a comparative backdrop to Part 3 which is given over to
Eastern and South-East Europe, and in particular the states which have emerged from the
European Journal of Higher Education, 2014
Vol. 4, No. 3, 297–300
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4. former socialist republics of Yugoslavia and Albania; an area now known as the Western
Balkans.
The upside to the book’s approach is that this coverage provides competing
paradigms to explain current developments. The book kicks off in familiar territory: the
neoliberalism framing that sees EU institutions as a transmission belt for globalization,
rather than a bulwark against it. The authors, Janja Komljenovic and Klemen Miklavic,
draw on policy statements of the Council of the EU (ministers) and the European
Commission, as well as actor interviews, to conclude that European higher education is
being shaped a ‘hegemonic economic imaginary’ (50). They do not treat the politics. But
the political consequences of a neoliberal paradigm are evoked in the chapter by Ellen
Hazelkorn and Martin Ryan. Their contribution is on the impact of global rankings
on higher education systems in Europe. I read here signs of a political drama to come.
The logic of performance measurement, institutional stratification and targeted resource
allocation, instruments which breed system differentiation, now plays out continent-wide
(95). With uneven distribution of capability and capacity both across and within the 28
EU member states, and the four candidate countries, how will the rich not get richer, the
poor poorer? And with what national consequences?
Other chapters present other reactions to the political and social risks of what an
erstwhile colleague at the London School of Economics calls the ‘monoculture’ or one-
size-fits-all of a neoliberal paradigm (Bronk and Wade 2013; http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/
53175/). Daniela Dolenec and Karin Doolan take the street protests of Croatian students
in 2008 revolt as sowing the seeds of social transformation. Voldemar Tomusk, who
presents himself as a moralist, attacks the death of learning for all but a select few (158).
An effective social science input comes from Susan Robertson. She builds on Habermas’
theorisation of legitimacy to examine the politics of England’s headlong rush to
marketization in higher education over the last few years. The combination of empirical
political digging and a robust theory enables her to unpack one of the great mysteries of
neoliberal policy: how it is that neoliberal policies have been seen as rational on social, as
well as economic, grounds despite the known consequences?
The more unusual aspect of the book for the higher education literature is its attention
to competing paradigms. A strong argument is made to draw on anthropology and
international relations theory to conceptualise European higher education in terms of
common identity versus ethno-nationalism and the impact of international intervention.
The chapters by Jana Baćević and Tatjana Sekulić on Bosnia and Herzegovina portray a
state constructed by international intervention in order to corral the ethnic rivalries which
brought on the 1992–1995 wars in Yugoslavia and led to the federation’s break-up,
i.e., by the 1995 Dayton Peace Agreement and the continuing role of the High
Representative of the International Community. Today Bosnia and Herzegovina take
the form of a weak state composed of statelets based on ethnic and religious divisions: 10
autonomous regions, the republic of Sprska and the district of Brcko (311). The famous
universities of the region remain fragmented on ethnic grounds. Although the universities
have internationalization strategies and there is some transnational research collaboration,
Baćević sees universities as pawns in a culture war. Their mission is constructed in
response to the broader societal dynamics of the region and as such universities in this
region have become instruments of conflict as well as its victims (302). Does the
European nature of higher education have the potential to create new dynamic?
The empirical evidence is not encouraging beyond the heartfelt cry of the Vice Rector
of Sarajevo University calling the introduction of Bologna the best thing that could have
298 Book review
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5. happened. Manja Klemencic’s study makes the point nicely as to how obscurantist EU
institutions can be. In supporting reform of the higher education systems of Albania,
Croatia, Serbia and Slovenia, the EU has advocated institutional profiling. This would be
a step to diversification and the competitiveness agenda of autonomous universities and,
who knows, the creation of flagship institution. It is a controversial policy throughout the
region. But more immediately, in Albania and Serbia, the idea has no purchase at all on
their day-to-day concerns. Their big problem is how to cope with the influx of students
into higher education. One down for the EU.
Martina Vukasović and Mari Elken in their four-country case study identify the
general practice of governments, regardless of the facts, to label any national
controversial reforms ‘Bologna’. That is one down for governments. Pavel Zgaga, long
concerned with centre-periphery tensions as both a Bologna actor and academic, does not
go quite so far as to label these regions the ‘policy colonies’ of a centralized power. But
from his work he concludes that it urgent in regions, such as the Western Balkans, to
balance the rigours of political conditionality with better forms of support. It is not too
difficult to see that, behind diplomatic words, there are real concerns about how both the
national and EU political classes operate.
Nevertheless in a context in which centre-periphery fault lines are appearing, there
are general conceptualizations of how higher education systems function which should
not be ignored. The Vukasović and Elken contribution offers an admirably clear example
of how the classics of political science and the wider European literature bring some
much needed fresh air into higher education studies. They disentangle the vertical and
horizontal institutional relationships out of which policy practice emerges. Taking
Europeanization as essentially a top-down process, they argue that it is important to
distinguish between it and transnational policy transfer (Dolowitz and Marsh 1996). This
conceptualization brings to the fore that states, and individual policy sectors, not
surprisingly, also engage in horizontal policy activities. Governments will generally look
to other systems for ideas on how to deal with common policy problems and where to
search for solutions. In the countries that feature in their study, Croatia, Serbia and
Slovenia (parts of the former Yugoslavia) and the Baltic state of Estonia (formerly part of
the USSR) national policy change in each case has been characterized by a top-down
Europeanization, spurred by the Bologna Process. But policy transfer, with its enriching
possibilities for translation and reinterpretation in line with local understandings, was
seen only between the Western Balkans countries in this study. This suggests that a
shared (if tumultuous) history and culture was what counted, although I do not see why,
had there been an organized partnership, this could not have brought in Estonia or other
states too. We have plenty of examples of successful geographically dispersed partner-
ships at institutional level.
Other good things in this book include Elsa Hackl’s study of the policies of system
differentiation adopted by Austria in the past 15 years shows the intersection of
international and EU ideas with national policy-making. It is an implicit challenge to
Western Balkans states to come up with a better critique than blame the politicians.
Marek Kweik takes Poland’s demographic decline to foretell systemic consequences for
many ex-Communist states, in terms of the contraction of equitable access and more
institutional selectivity. John Brennan revisits the quality of policy learning in a selective
higher education structure. Ulrich Teichler has an account of the laughable amount of
guesswork that still goes into the production of student mobility figures. And that is for a
flagship European policy.
European Journal of Higher Education 299
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6. I do, however, have to note a downside. The disparate contributions to this book may
have been processed effectively. But there has not been enough thought for the reader.
My particular gripes are with the lack of a glossary in a book with many unfamiliar terms,
an index punctilious about names but flagrantly unconcerned with issues, and above all, a
lack of tables or text listing the institutions and activities of the Bologna process and EU
higher education, as a reference against which to set the research chapters.
That said, I shall be recommending the book to all around me. As the authors of the
Sorbonne Declaration said in 1998, Europe is about more than the euro and the banks.
This book provides a new view of Europe’s higher education diversity and how that
diversity might be better supported within a confidently European frame.
References
Bronk, R., and W. Jacoby. 2013. Avoiding Monocultures in the European Union: The Case for
Mutual Recognition of Difference in Conditions of Uncertainty. LSE “Europe in Question”
discussion paper series, 67/20013. London: London School of Economics.
Dolowitz, D., and D. March. 1996. “Who Learns What from Whom? A Review of the Policy
Transfer Literature.” Political Studies 44 (2): 343–357.
Anne Corbett
European Institute, London School of Economics and Political Science, London, UK
a.corbett@lse.ac.uk
© 2014, Anne Corbett
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/21568235.2014.903575
300 Book review
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