The EU wants the “European Research Area” to become an academic frame of reference in its own right, aiming for a competitive dynamic between national academic traditions and the global hegemony of US research. At first glance, such an attempt at a Europeanisation of academia seems to be vertically posited by the EU Research Framework Programmes, and is of little appeal to certain strategies of academic self-promotion in the Social Sciences and Humanities (SSH), which prefer to portray themselves as independent from such political projects. Historically, they have established fine-tuned but precarious relations to their respective national-cultural fields. Recently, however, the European Research Council (ERC) succeeded in establishing a genuinely academic logic that relates to strategies of scientific autonomy: By adhering to the meritocratic rules of academic legitimacy the ERC created a kind of competition that (at least in ambition) spans across all of Europe. In doing so, for the first time both the governance-oriented and the critical or humanist idealist elites can actively relate to the ERC as a European institution able to consecrate academic excellence. As a consequence, they contribute to the discursive construction of a European order characterized by a symbolic and material integration of elites, the opening up of national fields and the primacy of economic competition. The presentation additionally draws on results of a structural topic model of all ERC grant research summaries in the SSH 2007-12 and tries to embed the results in the larger picture of a political sociology of fields of cultural production.
