From Voluntary Participation to Monitored Coordination: Why European Countries Feel Increasingly Bound by Their Commitment to the Bologna Process

Beginning in the year 2000, higher education policies all over Europe were transformed by the launching and evolution of the Bologna Process, otherwise known as the process of creating a European Higher Education Area (EHEA). Initially, this process was flexible and informal, which makes the rapidity and scope of the changes it brought about surprising: why did European governments commit themselves to achieving the Bologna Objectives, and why so quickly, when there was no legal obligation to do so? I will argue the following: to understand the development of such a sense of obligation, we must take into account the special interests at stake when Bologna objectives are implemented at a national level. We must also consider the legitimacy lent to the process by the Bologna ideals of a knowledge-based economy and society. These elements are present in other studies on this topic. However, and this is rarely considered, we also have to take into account the specific dynamics of the process of creating an institutional coordination and monitoring mechanism. This mechanism has a formal institutional structure and tools for evaluation and monitoring. Our analysis of the way in which it was developed and formalised enriches previous research on the topic and also sheds light on how a flexible European process of voluntary participation became a monitored system of coordinated national higher education policies.