European University Alliances's Community of Practice as an Emerging International Organisation

The European Universities Initiative launched in 2019 has created a critical mass of networks of universities across the EU (specifically 64 European University Alliances consisting of over 500 higher education institutions) that have become an important stakeholder shaping EU level policy developments and actively advocating for coordinated legal and funding changes in the Member states which would facilitate their transnational collaboration in teaching, research and mobility. If we define Europeanisation as the 'domestic impacts of European-level institutions' (Olsen 2002), the resulting governance and policy changes at Member State level arguably constitute a third wave of Europeanisation of higher education policies (following the earlier implementation of the Erasmus programme and the Bologna Process requirements in the EU countries). This paper will analyse the role of the recently established FOREU4ALL Community of Practice, a collective interest representation organisation of all European University Alliances, as an emergent international organisation, which has gained an important political role in the European-level decision-making processes in higher education, but also in fostering domestic policy change at Member State level. Its precise relationship to the member European University Alliances and in particular to the individual universities that are part of the Alliances is as of yet unclear, which makes it a fascinating research object, despite the caveat that it is a moving research target. In particular, the paper will ask what is the role of this organisation in expediating two mechanisms of Europeanisation of higher education taken from Moumoutzis & Zartaloudis (2016), namely social learning and peer pressure of EU Member States. The hypothesis is that the organisational form of a Community of Practice is well placed to foster both enhanced communication channels among universities and their Member States about each others' transformation efforts as well as to create a degree of horizontal side-pressure, which enables not bottom-up and not top-down but rather, a kind of "sideway Europeanisation". The analysis will rely on a set of interviews conducted among EU-level policy stakeholders directly involved in the ongoing policy processes at EU level as well as interviews and participant observations from two most-similar case study countries with different policy outcomes.