EU Higher Education Law: The Bologna Process and Harmonization by Stealth

In March 2010, the European Higher Education Area was officially launched,
proclaiming the culmination of a ten-year timeframe projected at Bologna in
1999, when the education ministers of 29 European states signed a declaration
that would fundamentally influence the future of their higher education
systems. Forty-seven countries, including all EU Member States and other
countries as far afield as Kazakhstan, now take part in the so-called ‘Bologna
Process’. Remarkably, this vast enterprise, which has led to rapid and
sweeping changes in almost all higher education systems in Europe, has taken
place outside the framework of the European Union and the Council of Europe.
In fact, as this important legal analysis shows, it appears that with the
Bologna Process the Member States have tried to sidestep the EU’s growing
influence on higher education.

Although the Bologna Process has generated an impressive literature addressing
what it might mean, where it suddenly came from, and how it has become so
powerful, until now the legal implications of the process, and its tense
relationship with EU law, have been left almost entirely unexamined. This work
fills that gap. Among the often controversial issues raised are the following: ;

• avoidance of the democratically legitimate procedures of the EU’s
  institutional framework for cultural reasons connected with state sovereignty;

• the scope of EU legal competence for various kinds of activities in the
  educational sector;

• specific areas of overlap between EU law and the Bologna Process and their
  implications;

• voluntary intergovernmental cooperation as a paradigmatic global shift of
  internationalization policies in education;

• the idea that the university is being redefined, from a social institution to
  an industry;

• the increasingly influential role in the process, by means of funding and
  coordination, of the European Commission;

• financial support programmes and devices to enhance credit and degree
  recognition;

• students as recipients of services; and

• teachers and the free movement of workers.

  The author describes how the scope of the Bologna Process was significantly
  broadened during a series of meetings during the decade, analyses the
  relevance of the case law of the European Court of Justice and provides a
  detailed description of the adoption of the process into the national laws of
  France, Germany and the United Kingdom. A concluding normative assessment
  scrutinizes the process on the basis of democracy, transparency and
  accountability.

  As the first study of the legitimacy of Bologna from a European law
  perspective – and by extension of the ‘Europeanization’ of higher education,
  including the role of the EU, EU law, and law in general – this is a
  critically important contribution to a contentious debate that clearly holds
  great significance for the future of law and society. Educators and education
  policymakers are sure to read and study it with interest.