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Depuis son avènement et plus fortement à partir des années 90, l’Union européenne est tiraillée entre une volonté croissante d’implication dans le secteur de l’éducation et le principe de subsidiarité affirmant la primauté des États membres sur ce secteur sensible. N’ayant pas les moyens d’intervention - notamment législatifs - dont disposent ses États membres sur ce secteur, l’Union européenne a fait émerger des instruments de gouvernance se distinguant des processus politiques conventionnels. Parmi ces instruments se trouve la Méthode Ouverte de Coordination européenne en éducation, appelée cadre stratégique Éducation et Formation 2020. L’objectif de cette thèse est de comprendre comment à travers la MOC, le système politique se transforme lorsqu’il s’organise non plus au niveau de l’État-nation, mais bien au niveau européen. Pour analyser cette transformation, nous nous basons sur la théorie générale des systèmes sociaux de Niklas Luhmann et sur la mise en place d’une ethnographie du politique visant à observer la MOC « en action ». Nous proposons d’analyser la MOC comme un cycle politique alternatif, ne se basant pas sur la prise de décisions législatives, mais bien sur des mécanismes d’apprentissage ou de dissémination d’informations et de bonnes pratiques à propos des systèmes éducatifs européens. À travers cet emprunt de rationalités alternatives, notamment scientifiques, la MOC redéfinit ce que l’on entend par politique au niveau européen en élargissant les moyens d’action de l’UE. Ce faisant, la MOC renforce la globalisation du politique au-delà de l’État-nation., (POLS - Sciences politiques et sociales) -- UCL, 2022

One of the most radical assertions made by the German sociologist Niklas Luhmann was that of late modern society’s lack of self-control (Luhmann, 1990). Indeed, from the perspective of systems theory governing modern society is at once expected and impossible. The history of the political system must be understood as a series of attempts to achieve a task that cannot be achieved: that of actually governing or controlling modern society. The constitutional Nation State and the separation between legislative, executive and judicial powers has been the most conventional modern attempt by the political system to control society. In late modernity, the political system added yet another attempt to control modernity’s own lack of control: that of “governance” instruments, sometimes alluded to under the terms “governing without government” (Rhodes, 1996). Several authors have linked this type of ambiguity to the “Governance Turn” (Armstrong, 2016; Kjaer, 2010), the “Comparative Turn” (Grek, 2009, 2010) or the “Knowledge Turn” (Fenwick et al., 2014; Freeman & Mangez, 2013; Normand & Derouet, 2016). The main topic of interest of this paper is the involvement of the European Union in the sector of education through the Open Method of Coordination. The attempt of the EU to govern education is fostered and legitimised by the observation of society’s future as full of risks and uncertainties exceeding by far national territories – unemployment, terrorism, transformation of the labour market, etc. These observations, apparent in the “Lisbon Dramaturgy” (Laffan & Shaw, 2005), far from acting as an obstacle to the European involvement in education, operate instead as resources legitimating further political action at EU level. This involvement, however, does not take the conventional form of government. Instead, at a transnational level, the political system partly takes the form of governance processes, such as the OMC. The OMC is often defined by its informality (Alexiadou, 2007

Le discours relatif à la nécessité d’apprendre déborde aujourd’hui du champ de l’éducation scolaire. Un volume toujours plus important de connaissances et de données emplit le champ politique traditionnellement organisé autour des notions de réforme et de décision davantage qu’au départ de processus d’apprentissage. À l’échelle transnationale tout particulièrement, le système politique semble emprunter au domaine de l’éducation les éléments centraux de son lexique : il ne s’agit pas tant de décider que d’apprendre, de s’autoévaluer, d’échanger des bonnes pratiques, de s’améliorer, de chercher à mieux faire, non pas pour (s’) éduquer mais pour (se) gouverner. La forme traditionnelle de la décision politique recule et fait place à une nécessité perpétuelle d’évaluer, de présenter des cas et des pratiques exemplaires et, plus généralement, d’apprendre. L’objectif de cette présentation est de montrer comment les processus d’apprentissage, et le lexique qui leur est propre, dépassent le cadre du système éducatif et caractérisent de plus en plus la prise de décision politique. Pour ce faire, nous analysons les récents développements du secteur européen de l’éducation, et plus particulièrement le cadre stratégique Education et Formation 2020. L’analyse de nos données issues d’entretiens, d’analyse de documents et d’observation de réunions fait ressortir l’importance croissante de l’apprentissage dans la prise de décision politique. Loin d’être un frein à l’implication européenne dans le secteur de l’éducation, la nouvelle forme de prise décision politique, basée sur l’apprentissage, est centrale au développement de l’espace européen de l’éducation. En effet, celle-ci entretient une convergence des attentes entre Etats Membres, tout en respectant le principe de subsidiarité, principe faisant de l’éducation une matière avant tout nationale.

Many authors have underlined that processes of Europeanisation of education emerge despite the European Union’s lack of formal power in this matter. We would like to argue, in contrast, that this alleged lack of power is precisely what enables the EU to open up a range of possibilities for its implication in the domain of education. The paper focuses on the Open Method of Coordination in education as an instance where a “European space of education” (Dale, 2009; Lawn, 2011) emerges. Now baptised Education and Training 2020, the OMC in education is inherently ambiguous: it is meant to belong to the political field, yet lacks many of the characteristics one would expect to detect in political arenas. Several authors have linked this type of ambiguity to the “Governance Turn” (Armstrong, 2016; Kjaer, 2010), the “Comparative Turn” (Grek, 2009, 2010) or the “Knowledge Turn” (Fenwick, Mangez, & Ozga, 2014; Freeman & Mangez, 2013; Normand & Derouet, 2016). The main technologies of governance analysed in these cases are indicators and benchmarks, which give form to the European education space through the creation and accumulation of statistical data, leading to the comparison and the ranking of Nation States’ performances. Using interviews with key actors, direct observations and document analysis, our paper calls for a broadening of the analysis of the political forms that emerged within the European governance of education. Our objective is to complement the analysis of the quantitative side of the European governance with an analysis of the qualitative political learning processes at work within the ET2020 working groups. We show how the informal character of the ET2020 working groups operates not as an obstacle but rather as a resource for their development (Kjaer, 2010). The distance that separates them from more formal circuits of decision-making actually facilitates discussions and, potentially, strengthens the ability of their members to engage in processes of “lea

The report highlights "the need for evidence-informed policy-making as a precondition for well-functioning democracies" and "how our thinking is challenged by today's information environment, which also makes us vulnerable to being misled by disinformation".

The question of the relation between society and time, and more precisely how society observes its future and reacts to this observation, has been studied by a number of sociologists (Andersen & Pors, 2017; Esposito, 2013; Koselleck, 2004; Luhmann, 1982, 1993; Opitz & Tellmann, 2015; Rosa, 2013). Whereas pre-modern society experienced its future as “the constant anticipation of the End of the World on the one hand and the continual deferment of the End on the other” (Koselleck, 2004:20), early Modernity rather saw its future as carrying a promise of equality, freedom, progress, and inclusion of everyone within the realization of the Nation State (E. Mangez, 2017; Vanden Broeck, 2017). Eventually, late modern society, characterized by an ever more developed functional differentiation, reinforcing subsystems’ autopoiesis and interdependency at the same time, began to observe its future as full of risks (Luhmann, 1993). What emerged then is a typically modern paradox: while we certainly have much more knowledge than ever before, we have at the same time much less certainty (Beck, 1992). The observation of the future as uncertain and risky, coupled with the gradual erosion of normative expectations in favour of cognitive expectations (Luhmann, 1975; Vanden Broeck & Mangez, 2016), leads us to a problematic observation : One has more difficulty than ever to know what one has to do (Mangez & Vanden Broeck, 2016). In such a context, knowledge has gained a fundamental role in late modern society, as a means to limit uncertainty. The consequences for the political system are significant: as dealing with information and knowledge does not require any legal status, the Nation State loses its role as society’s central point of observation and new, or already existing, often transnational, “knowledge-based” organizations (Fenwick, Mangez, & Ozga, 2014) gain centrality within the political system (Kjaer, 2010). Numerous authors have described this phenomenon as the shift from gove