EU's higher education policy and European University Alliances – A case of renewed regional integration?

After 5 decades of EU coordination of higher education polices (Corbett 2003; Pépin 2006; Cino Pagliarello 2022b)), the European Universities Initiative appears to have triggered a new wave of significant institutional changes in the EU: 26 out of 27 Member States are co-funding the initiative; 9 changes to national regulation have either been passed or are being discussed to facilitate international activities of universities (Claeys-Kulik et al. 2022), transnational governenace structures have emerged to steer and coordinate the Alliances' activities and Alliances are building up institutional capacities to lobby and feed their interests into both the EU and the national governments policy making processes. This has, among other things, led to Member States in the Council endorsing 10 consortia piloting the idea of a European degree label and a European legal status for alliances of universities, which depending on the outcome, may require further European standards or European institutions to be set up. Therefore, we seem to be witnessing a further contraction of the European transnational higher education space, although scholars have only speculated on whether this is a move towards further supranationalism fueled by the functional spillover or towards a transnational coordination process driven by the needs of the novel organisational form of university alliances (Gunn 2020; Cino Pagliarello 2022a; Charret and Chankseliani 2022; Maassen, Stensaker, and Rosso 2022). My interest in this research lies in examining whether there is evidence to suggest a renewed appetite from the EU member states and the university stakeholders for further integration of higher education policies at EU level and what are the drivers of this process. Employing a discursive institutionalist lense (Schmidt 2008), I critically analyse three mechanisms of importance in this policy initiative: the power in (and the spread of) ideas related to the vision of the „transformation of European universities“; the motives of international, national and subnational actors (in particular European Commission, EU Member States and key university stakeholders) in driving this initiative and the extent of input, throughput and output legitimacy of the EUI policy process and its governance (Schmidt 2013). To gather empirical data, I intend to undertake a three-level study, starting with discourse analysis of key EU-level documents and statements, followed by a comparative case study of several cases of EU governments with differing attitudes towards EU integration in higher education policy in order to analyse their engagement with the European Union on matters of higher education policy over the last 5 years. Finally, through interviews and document analysis, I plan to analyse the reactions and self-perceptions of universities engaged in the European University Alliance initiative in order to get the perspective of the policy beneficiaries on their involvement and contribution to the integration of higher education at European level. Ultimately, the results of this study will contribute to the literature on European integration in soft policy areas as well as the more philosophical discussions on the conception of higher education as a public good for a public that goes beyond the nation state.