The European Universities Initiative: further stratification in the pursuit of European cooperation?

ABSTRACT

The European Commission’s flagship European Universities Initiative (EUI) announced in 2017 laid out a novel regional approach to internationalisation by promoting the establishment of integrated transnational networks of universities, or alliances. Launched in consecutive pilot rounds, the EUI provided a fixed-sum grant to each alliance with the expectation that participating institutions and national governments co-fund their activities. Given the hierarchical structure of the European higher education space and varying national support for the Initiative, capacities of institutions to participate appear both unequal and exclusionary. This study draws on documentary evidence and interviews with EUI alliance representatives, exploring accounts from three distinct alliances from the 2019 pilot round. With nuances between the examined cases, it argues that the design of the EUI, intended as a vehicle for enhancing cooperation and excellence, intensifies vertical stratification of European higher education by supporting relatively advantaged institutions with respect to international partnership opportunities and resources.

KEYWORDS:

• Europe
• higher education
• alliances
• stratification

Introduction

In a September 2017 speech at the Sorbonne University, French President Emmanuel Macron introduced the European Universities Initiative (EUI): an internationalisation scheme led by the European Commission (EC) which would integrate the teaching, research and civic engagement functions of universities in Europe into transnational alliances. The scheme, formally launched in 2019 in two consecutive pilot rounds, established 41 alliances, resulting in 284 higher education institutions (HEIs) participating across the 27 European Union (EU) countries plus Iceland, Norway, Serbia, Turkey and the United Kingdom (UK).¹ Irrespective of the number of partners, each alliance received from the EC €7 million (€5 million from Erasmus+ and a further €2 million from Horizon Europe) to establish their European University over a three-year trial period. No guarantees of further support were given to participating alliances, although the 2022 EUI call offered two separate funding tracks, with one dedicated to existing alliances looking to ‘deepen, intensify and expand … existing cooperation’ (European Commission 2022).

The aim of the EUI, according to the EC, is to foster ‘excellence, innovation and inclusion in higher education across Europe, accelerating the transformation of HEIs into the universities of the future with structural, systemic and sustainable impact’ (European Commission 2021). With the Bologna Process leading to the creation of the European Higher Education Area² (EHEA) and Erasmus+ developing the primary mechanism for international student and staff mobility, the EUI builds on previous European integration and intra-regional mobility initiatives in higher education (HE), an incremental process which is characterised as being advanced by voluntary participation rather than executive fiat (Garben 2011). In keeping with previous integration initiatives with respect to HE, the EUI is enacted by universities with the support of national and sub-national governments; its inception and implementation by the EC also continues recent developments, reflecting the growing involvement of the Commission in European HE governance and policymaking (Corbett 2011).

The European HE landscape is a highly uneven terrain however, with differing experiences of regional integration and resourcing. The disadvantageous positioning of the principally Eastern European countries joining the EU since 2004 (the ‘EU13’) in relation to Bologna is well documented, with their outcomes varying by country and policy level (Kozma, Rébay, and Óhidy 2014). The balance of in- and out-bound Erasmus+ flows is also tilted towards the pre-2004 Western European member states (the ‘EU15’) (Breznik and Skrbinjek 2020), as it is with research funding and outputs vis-à-vis participation in Horizon 2020 (Quaglio et al. 2020). Layered on top of this is the diffusion of university associations, networks or leagues, which further cluster and stratify HEIs into respective tiers of visibility and reputation (Musselin 2018). These inequalities across the sector illustrate the reoccurring tensions between excellence and inclusion, two imperatives in European HE policy discourse driven at varying levels and manifested through neoliberal logics of institutional competition, forms of soft governance exhibited in national implementations of the EHEA, and in integrationist mechanisms guiding intra-European cooperation and cohesion (Kushnir 2020). These discourses are enacted variously across the EHEA in reference to participation in mobility and through lifelong learning, quality, research and student employability (ibid.), illustrating some of the challenges faced by region-wide HE initiatives.

Taking this unevenness as a starting point, this article engages the EUI, asking whether the needs-blind funding model and design of the scheme itself, which draws on the existing advantages of HEIs’ former networks, partnerships, and government support, consolidates the positioning of HEIs higher in the European HE hierarchy. Its inverse poses the question whether HEIs disadvantaged by their geographies, constrained resourcing or opportunities are disproportionately excluded from the scheme, with the implication that the EUI as designed has the potential to consolidate, and possibly exacerbate, existing asymmetries across the European HE space.

To address these questions, the article explores the perspectives of three EUI alliances in their pilot stage, examining how they formulate their objectives and navigate asymmetries of funding, input, and status from different positions within the hierarchy. Following an overview of scholarship on stratification and its entanglement with regional HE policymaking, the article outlines the case study design used to analyse these alliances and identifies the key features of each case. The findings are then presented in three sub-sections, each exploring different dimensions of institutional stratification furthered by the EUI, followed by a discussion of the overarching findings and their implications for European HE policymaking.

Situating the EUI in European HE initiatives

Institutional diversity within high-participation HE systems can be theorised relationally across a given scale in horizontal and vertical terms (Teichler 2007). Horizontal differentiation, or inversely dedifferentiation, describes processes of change within HE systems with regards to mission, scope and type, as well as structural diversity of governance and ownership (van Vught 2008). These forms of diversity in theory enable mass participation, specialisation and research production, which broadly correspond with the inclusion, innovation and excellence agendas of HE policymakers, although sceptics observe that the relationship between horizontal diversity and growth is highly normative and context-dependent (Reichert 2012).

Vertical differentiation, or stratification, on the other hand, is the bifurcation of interdependent systems into classified or de facto tiers based on positional competition between institutions for social status and limited resources (Cantwell and Marginson 2018; Teichler 2007). Market-based competition is well understood to drive stratification while stifling horizontal diversity, with mimetic tendencies moving HEIs towards increasing isomorphism, notably with regards to research activity (Meek 2000; van der Wende 2008). Even in less marketised, more egalitarian systems like the Nordic model, hierarchies of institutional value are cast as inevitable biproducts of massification. As Cantwell and Marginson observe, ‘all [High Participation Systems] are characterised by some level of vertical stratification, even though the height and slope of the mountain, and the space at the summit, have many possible permutations (Cantwell and Marginson 2018, 147).’ Importantly, there is inherent tension in vertical stratification, where institutional aims of equity, or greater access and inclusion of non-traditional students, come into conflict with selectivity, in which elite and elite-aspiring HEIs contribute to limiting access to maintain their exclusivity (Kehm 2010). This tension is often crudely ascribed to two positional groups within a hierarchical system: a small group of research-intensive elite HEIs and a non-elite, demand-absorbing majority. However, this simplified conceptualisation elides the HEIs in the burgeoning middle tier having characteristics of both groups, primarily resulting from lower-status HEIs ‘drifting’ or converging through a combination of regulatory, financial and normative pressures (Neave 1979). While there remains considerable diversity within national HE systems globally, studies indicate a pattern of academic drift towards more research-orientated organisations and academic specialisation (Bonaccorsi and Daraio 2007; Pinheiro, Charles, and Jones 2016) – in effect, less horizontal diversity and within these narrowing parameters, greater verticality.

Bringing European integration efforts into this discussion shines light on the impact of previous harmonisation schemes on system diversity at the regional level. The Bologna Process, conceived to increase graduate employability and the international attractiveness of the sector, aimed to harmonise national HE systems and enhance compatibility while maintaining systemic diversity across the region. Both harmonisation and diversity have arguably been achieved through the process, albeit at differing levels, with macro-level convergences of qualifications frameworks and other structural components, and micro-level diversification of programmes and procedures (Huisman 2009). But as Huisman and others point out, the Bologna Process alone insufficiently explains organisational convergence and change across the European HE sector, with the roles of government and markets, globalisation and global rankings also driving isomorphism and academic drift (Van Damme 2009). The influence of competitive, performance-based funding models in research-intensive HE systems constrains how HE excellence is defined in European policy discourse, which in turn fuels convergence and stratification across the sector (Erkkilä and Piironen 2014). Bologna, in some regards, can be seen as having de-bordered national systems and introduced a framework for region-wide competition through the agreement’s enhanced compatibility and comparability of its outputs, namely degree qualifications (Enders and Westerheijden 2011).

The EUI follows on from Bologna, made not only possible by its encompassing regional framework, but also complementary to its stratifying logics. Some have argued that the increased competition sparked by Bologna has decreased universities’ coherence within national systems and increased their coherence internationally through, inter alia, regional university networks and consortia (Huisman, Stensaker, and Kehm 2009). This argument closely foreshadows the architecture of the EUI, as its alliances are modelled on international networks of positionally similar HEIs or stem directly from them (Crăciun et al. 2023; Stensaker, Maassen, and Rosso 2023). The EUI also builds on Erasmus+ and Horizon Europe, the EC’s flagship HE programmes which draw on the EHEA’s enhanced international coherence to promote intra-regional student mobility and research collaborations. The scheme’s requirement for a wide geographic dispersion of members in each alliance reflects its strategic intention to extend the reach and coherence of these underlying programmes. Furthermore, the concurrent rise of university associations in Europe, while having preceded Bologna, is intensified by the increased international coherence and mobility resulting from these programmes, and in turn contours the mobility landscape through tightened networks of exchange and collaboration (Musselin 2018). EUI alliances as ‘network[s] made up of heterogeneous networks’ are therefore the product of a confluence of new organisational actors and a reorganised, de-bordered institutional landscape, facilitated by mobility-enhancing policy frameworks (Charret and Chankseliani 2023, 23).

With the EUI still in its infancy, its impact on institutional diversity is speculative, but its initial formations provide clear indication as to the types of HEIs it was ostensibly conceived to serve and consolidate. Two statistical analyses of all EUI alliances similarly concluded the basis of EUI alliance formation is strongly structured on similar institutional status and pre-existing partnerships or networks (Crăciun et al. 2023; Lambrechts, Cavallaro, and Lepori 2024); importantly, they also found that, relative to the wider European HE landscape, alliance members are predominantly research-intensive, holding higher positions within international rankings, better resourced, and having a higher share of in-bound Erasmus+ students. These commonalities of course co-vary, with institutional profile (research vs. education) and levels of funding corresponding to market positioning in the European HE hierarchy (Lepori, Geuna, and Veglio 2017). Individual universities’ prior engagement in international partnerships or networks, while seen as widely dependent upon access to national and European-level resources (Karvounaraki et al. 2018), evidently constitute the ‘building blocks’ of alliance formation as they shaped the path-dependencies of members’ future opportunities like participating in the EUI (Stensaker, Maassen, and Rosso 2023, n.p.). For some alliance members, their participation in formal university networks or associations are also reflective of their enhanced ability to collectively exert influence on policy, with university networks functioning as de facto ‘European interest groups’ (Vukasovic and Stensaker 2018, 351).

The geographic distribution of HEIs participating in the EUI is also seen as a stratifying characteristic. Although the Initiative counterbalances the relative weight of large national HE systems with its requirement for regionally distributed membership, the scheme is dominated by Western European (particularly German and French) HEIs, including in leadership roles as alliance coordinating chairs (Jungblut, Maassen, and Elken 2020). This imbalanced representation of national systems in the Initiative undermines the argument that EUI alliances as multi-sited supranational universities reduce intra-regional competition by spreading their constituent membership across the EHEA landscape (Lehmann, 2019, cited in Gunn 2020); this may hold true on an individual alliance basis, but the collective effect of the Initiative does not strike a balance across the geographical corners of European HE. While just over half of participating HEIs were ranked in the ARWU Shanghai Rankings top 1000, the strong majority of these are Western European, further reflecting the West-East status divide in the European HE landscape (Lambrechts, Cavallaro, and Lepori 2024). There is indication that these asymmetries are less evident in the latest 2022 round; however, the 2019 and 2020 EUI pilot rounds where the majority of the currently 44 alliances were formed³ reflect, and thereby appear to consolidate, these various inequalities at the regional level.

Methodology

This study forms part of a broader investigation into the role of EUI alliances in driving the construction of a supranational higher education space in Europe. The research draws on two sets of qualitative data collected and analysed by the authors. The first is a compilation of relevant policy texts, including 47 documents and position statements by key European university associations, member organisations and stakeholders and 74 webpages from three selected alliances and their member universities. Documentary texts were analysed thematically (as per Bowen 2009), drawing out the alignments and key positions of the various actors involved in or impacted by the EUI scheme (Brooks and Rensimer 2023). Alliances’ webpages were similarly analysed for their textual content to observe the public face of each alliance (Lažetić 2020). All documents, including webpages, were collected between April and June 2021 and are outlined in the supplementary table of data.

The second data source is a series of semi-structured interviews with 12 alliance leaders, member HEI coordinators or other stakeholders in organisations representing European HE. Interviews were conducted remotely using video teleconferencing software with individual participants; each interview lasted between 45 minutes to one hour and focused on participants’ understandings of the EUI’s objectives (including their own alliances), key challenges, its role in European HE policymaking, and envisioned impact on national HE systems in Europe.⁴ Interviews were conducted between September and November 2021 and are also outlined in the supplementary table of data.

The findings of this study are grounded in our analyses of the overall dataset. Narratives of three case alliances presented in this article emerge from an inductive analysis of their webpages and interviews with respective leaders holding responsibilities for coordinating their alliances at the joint executive level or within a member university. Findings from these three cases were put into dialogue with our findings from related organisations and stakeholders in the broader study dataset, analysing case data according to grounded themes which emerged in the process of reviewing the wider set of documents and interview transcripts (Bowen 2009). To maintain the anonymity of individuals, participants are referred to in this study using their organisational name and a number only, cited in square brackets [e.g. YUFE 2]. Organisational documents are cited in-line using organisations’ abbreviations and standard academic referencing.

The case study approach in this investigation was chosen to locate and contextualise the positions of European HE policy actors in the specific practices and experiences of EUI alliances. Technically the EUI itself is the case, with each alliance constituting separate embedded units of analysis under the shared contextual umbrella of EC policymaking in HE (Yin 2014). Our use of background documentary data is also consistent with the vertical case study approach which draws scalar links between policy discourse (the EUI) and its enacted forms (individual alliances) (Bartlett and Vavrus 2017). Nevertheless, for clarity of convention, we refer to the three alliances examined in this study as case alliances.

We selected case alliances from the 2019 pilot round with the aim to maximise the amount of time each had to establish its online presence, functions and offerings, as well as gain some experience in coordinating and consolidating organisational practices. Although there is no formal classification of alliances to date, key distinctions and regional asymmetries were brought to our attention by then-available literature on the EUI (e.g. Gunn 2020; Jungblut, Maassen, and Elken 2020). Among the 17 alliances in the 2019 round, we selected three on the basis of their key differences with regards to:

• size (in terms of the number of member universities and total students)

• member universities’ profiles (ranking, visibility)

• purpose or thematic focus (e.g. student mobility, innovation, civic engagement, interdisciplinary challenge, etc.)

• national composition

• internationalisation portfolios, understood as either bilateral international partnerships or association with formal university networks representing shared organisational interests and identities (for example, ‘young’ research universities, entrepreneurial universities, etc.).

The purposive selection of the three cases captured important distinctions across each of these criteria. As a limitation of the research design, the expansive criteria for only three cases prevented the study from isolating any one criterion, leading to a sample inevitably unable to reflect all the criteria in equal measure. Knowing, for example, that the geographic distribution of universities participating in alliances leaned heavily towards Western Europe (Jungblut, Maassen, and Elken 2020), we selected one alliance from the 2019 round with majority non-Western European members. Selecting on this basis precluded reflecting other criteria, resulting in only one of three cases stemming from a formal university network, one consisting of prominent research universities, and so on. Had the study been designed to deductively test the hypothesis that the EUI advantages already advantaged universities, we might have selected more alliances comprised and led by Eastern Europe, for example (although only four out of seventeen were majority non-Western European alliances and only two were led by non-Western European universities).

As another limitation, all three selected cases were led by Western European universities, two of which were French. This inevitably shaped the findings emerging from those sources and potentially weighted the evidence to reflect perspectives informed by their national contexts. This does not necessarily impair our generalisations of the Initiative; nearly one-third of alliances from the 2019 round were indeed led by French universities. Again, selecting on this basis might have captured more diversity of leadership while subordinating other selection criteria, such as their thematic focus and network membership, which were considered equally integral to the study design.

Lastly, our focus on alliances from the 2019 round precludes some adjustments made by the EC in the most recent round to redress geographical and other institutional imbalances in alliances (observed in Crăciun et al. 2023; Lambrechts, Cavallaro, and Lepori 2024). As a rapidly evolving development, this is an area for future empirical investigation.

Key aspects of the three cases are summarised briefly in Table 1 below.

Table 1. Key features of case EUI alliances.

Alliance	Membership^a	Coordinating chair	Thematic focus	Students and staff^b	Prior relationship
CIVICA – The European University of Social Sciences	Bocconi University (Italy) Central European University (Hungary/Austria) European University Institute (Italy) Hertie School (Germany) London School of Economics and Political Science (UK) National University of Political Studies and Public Administration (Romania) Sciences Po (France) Stockholm School of Economics (Sweden)	Sciences Po (France)	Leading European universities of social sciences, business management, and public policy; emphasis on joint teaching, research and civic engagement	Students: 50000 Staff: 10000	No single network or association, but close inter-institutional partnerships for dual degrees, ERASMUS student and staff exchanges
EU-CONEXUS – European University for Smart Urban Coastal Sustainability	Agricultural University of Athens (Greece) Catholic University of Valencia (Spain) Klaipeda University (Lithuania) La Rochelle Université (France) Technical University of Civil Engineering (Romania) University of Zadar (Croatia)	La Rochelle Université (France)	Small and medium-sized HEIs located near coastlines, united by interdisciplinary theme of smart urban coastal sustainability; emphasis on research collaboration, staff mobility, and innovation with societal and industrial applications	Students: 41223 Staff: 5,421	No single network or association, but based on two clusters of universities with existing inter-institutional partnerships
YUFE: Young Universities for the Future of Europe	Maastricht University (Netherlands) Nicolaus Copernicus University (Poland) Tor Vergata University of Rome (Italy) Universidad Carlos III De Madrid (Spain) University of Antwerp (Belgium) University of Bremen (Germany) University of Cyprus (Cyprus) University of Eastern Finland (Finland) University of Essex (UK) University of Rijeka (Croatia)	Maastricht University (Netherlands)	‘Young’, student-centred, research-active universities; Strong emphasis on international student mobility, student experience, and graduate employment	Students: 190,000 Staff: 32000	Young European Research Universities Network (YERUN)

^aThis table reflects alliance membership at the point of data collection mid-2021. New members have since been added to EU-CONEXUS (Frederick University, Cyprus; University of Rostock, Germany; and South East Technological University, Ireland) and CIVICA (IE University, Spain; and SGH Warsaw School of Economics, Poland).

^bFigures were taken from the EC’s European Universities Factsheets (n.d.) and reflect alliances’ membership at point of inception.

Findings

Our analysis of the documentary sources and interview data documented repeating narratives of inequality and asymmetry across the EUI landscape. Examining these data collectively, we identify three broad forms of inequality reflected in the EUI 2019 pilot round, each stemming from existing imbalances between institutions and between national systems. These aspects are explored further below, with the cases serving to illustrate and nuance each theme.

Geographies of partnership

The size of each alliance differed markedly, with some in the 2019 round containing four to six HEI partners (e.g. EUART, EU-CONEXUS) and others having ten or more members (e.g. YUFE, ECIU). Seen in terms of their geographic reach across the European HE landscape, the composition of each alliance was guided by expectations set by the EC to maximise the diversity of countries participating in alliances. Representation from ‘different parts of Europe’ would ‘enable a new generation of Europeans to cooperate across languages, borders and disciplines, developing a strong European identity’ (European Commission 2021, 2). Underpinning this was also the Commission’s perceived need for political buy-in from smaller EU member states sharing authority over Erasmus+ funding [EUA 1]. As such, alliances from the 2019 and 2020 rounds typically included at most one university from each country.

As noted previously, however, the national composition of the alliances does not reflect an equal geographic distribution between the 32 countries which participated in the pilot stage of the EUI. This skewed concentration across the cohort of 2019 alliances ‘allows an alliance to be considered “geographically balanced” by having only one or even none HEI [sic] coming from a Central or Eastern European country’ (ESU 2018). This critique lends emphasis to the EUA’s position on the need for buy-in; but as a university-led initiative, the imbalance is ultimately a reflection of existing asymmetries of power and advantage within the European HE landscape, with international partnerships and networks dominated by Western European universities.

The composition of two of the three cases in this study weighed in favour of Western Europe. Selected partly on this basis, EU-CONEXUS was a rare exception as one of the very few alliances from the 2019 round without a majority Western European composition (shown above in Table 1). The coordinating chair universities, which held additional responsibility for steering the acquisition of each alliance’s future members, were nevertheless based in either France or the Netherlands in each of our cases, including EU-CONEXUS. Their membership and leadership were consequently products of HEIs relatively experienced in internationalisation and partnership-building. In interviews with our three case alliances’ chair universities, participants similarly describe how the vision of forming an alliance emerged from within their own institutions, and the decision-making authority to select and engage with partners rested with them prior to their establishment as an alliance.

The scope and membership of the case alliances were initially guided by the coordinating chair universities; however, within these parameters, it was their prior partnerships with other universities which circumscribed the formation of each alliance. This is especially the case for YUFE, where most of the alliance comprised previously of members of the Young European Research Universities Network (YERUN), an association of 22 universities which facilitates joint teaching and research between members and advocates members’ interests in European policy forums. One YUFE interview participant asserted that the universities entering the alliance had no prior joint activities and formed the alliance with a separate vision to YERUN; however, it was also noted that their membership in YERUN had enabled the universities to collaborate previously, and in keeping with studies on university networks and organisational identity (Stensaker, Maassen, and Rosso 2023; Vukasovic and Stensaker 2018), build trusting and effective working relationships among organisations with similar values and interests.

So this is basically how the selection was made. Previous commitment in joint actions and of course, also the knowledge of the institutions was key, so knowing that the executive boards were very driven and committed to bring change within their institutions was a crucial element. [YUFE 1]

Our other two case alliances did not stem from any one association. For CIVICA, however, its members were already closely networked, having long-held professional and institutional partnerships, materialising in dual degrees, Erasmus exchanges, and research collaborations on a bilateral basis. Despite the diverse interests of partner universities, CIVICA was seen as an opportunity to reaffirm these relationships [CIVICA 2]. Having these pre-existing ties was seen by the coordinating chair as an essential criterion, both for facilitating buy-in within each institution and effective navigation through the pilot phase [CIVICA 1].

For EU-CONEXUS, there were two separate clusters of universities which each had pre-existing ties as ‘traditional partners’ [EU-CONEXUS 1]. One representative noted that the full partners in the alliance were closely aligned in their research areas and aspirations, and that their constitution focused on their challenge-themed multidisciplinary research rather than student mobility. Its concentration on research and composition of relatively lower-profile HEIs explain its atypical membership at inception, as alliances themed on student mobility would skew in the direction of larger, Western European countries (as per Breznik and Skrbinjek 2020), while a research-focused alliance thematically focused on coastal sustainability need not.

At the system level, universities’ geographical locations within Europe clearly matter in relation to their involvement in the Initiative, with principally Western European HEIs steering and shaping these alliances to consolidate their existing partnerships. Interview participants cited the importance of familiarity, trust, and alignment of aims with university partners they had previous relationships with, a finding strongly corresponding with surveys of collaborative HE partnerships in Europe (Karvounaraki et al. 2018). The mobilisation of these relationships into an alliance inevitably reflects a concentration of prior advantages in terms of networks and opportunity, thus leading to the consolidation of the existing internationalisation landscape across Europe.

Resourcing

The European HE space is an uneven and highly heterogeneous landscape in terms of universities’ access to resources and funding (Lepori, Geuna, and Veglio 2017). The EUI introduces new forms of inter-institutional and international cooperation which appear to exacerbate existing differences between universities, as it compels HEIs firstly to co-fund their alliance activities, and secondly, merge a group of distinct institutional models with varying funding modalities and revenue sources under a unified budget and governing structure. The resources which alliance members must marshal to participate in the Initiative vary, but can be prohibitive for many (Claeys-Kulik, Jørgensen, and Stöber 2020), including lower-tier HEIs which might benefit most from internationalisation. The 2019 and 2020 round alliances were provided the same block of funding (€5 mil from Erasmus+ and €2 mil from Horizon Europe) from the EC regardless of differing financial need, and this carried uneven implications for participating HEIs and for alliances comprised of members of different means.

These differences in material resources and finances were frequently raised by interview participants, reflecting concerns raised in policy documents that smaller and less prestigious institutions will be excluded without targeted additional support (EURASHE 2019; Schüller 2021 writing for ACEEU). The fixed-sum grant from the EC also meant that having more partners in an alliance resulted in smaller shares of EC funding and larger co-funding obligations for each member. For large alliances like YUFE, with ten members in its pilot round, only half of the costs of partners’ EUI activities were funded through the scheme itself. The implications of this, according to an interview participant, was that participation in the alliance came at a steep price that likely had an influence on the shape of their alliance’s membership.

I think we’re at fifty-fifty EU funding and other means funding, including institutional co-funding, so for what [YUFE] is costing us, we can only cover half of that by the EU funding… It’s an expensive project for a university to be a part of. [YUFE 2]

The significance of the financial cost was further differentiated by the model of HEI ownership, with private HEIs having fewer sources of financial support outside of tuition fees. As an alliance with only six funded partners at inception, EU-CONEXUS covered 80% of its operating costs with Commission funding, but the remainder was the responsibility of each member to procure, introducing a greater challenge for its private partners.

Twenty percent of [our] core financial support is rather big and for a private university, the money has to come from some other activities, as we do not receive any other financial support from the government. [EU-CONEXUS 2]

In practice, these financial asymmetries present challenges within alliances, both in terms of the contributions participating HEIs can make and in their positioning and influence within the alliance. The coordinating chair representatives of YUFE and EU-CONEXUS commented similarly that

There are … wealthier institutions and less wealthy institutions, and wealthier institutions often push for more, more quickly. But that is also not trivial, so the question then arises on whether we are going to follow a single speed or a multiple speed approach … and what is going to contribute more to building a really cohesive European university? [YUFE 1]

We have to be patient with some partners because we cannot move on as quickly as we want … It’s not that big an imbalance, maybe some lacks here and there … the partners that can compensate with institutional investment do that, [but] we see also a lot of in-kind contributions from institutions that do not have the material co-financing. [EU-CONEXUS 1]

As participants noted, funding was paradoxically skewed towards the chair university to cover its costs for shouldering a greater input in establishing the alliance. Doing so, however, was said to increase the financial challenges for alliance partners, and in some cases fuel tensions between the chair and other partners where authority and resources were seen to be unevenly concentrated in one HEI.

The issue of resourcing is further complicated by financial contributions from HEIs’ respective local and national governments, which are highly variable in their amounts and conditions, often aligned with the degree of political support for the Initiative (LERU 2021). Interview participants from Spanish and French HEIs underlined the importance of funding from their national governments, enabling them to uphold their existing EUI commitments and objectives. German federal government support for its participating HEIs was more complicated, as funding from the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) was contingent on new, previously unscheduled activities within alliances. While state-level ministries were described by a participant from a German university as generally supportive without conditions, such funding varied in volume and by the number of EUI-participating universities within each state.

Several national governments made no contribution to their HEIs for EUI activities. As a participant from a related university network observed, this was not necessarily a reflection of lacking political interest, as Portugal was seen to be very supportive when it held the EU presidency [COIMBRA 1]. In sharp contrast, the Dutch government, despite having 11 HEIs in EUI alliances, took a view of the EUI as an ‘elitist initiative’ that fuelled internationalisation at the expense of Dutch language-speakers and the wider pool of HEIs in the Netherlands [YUFE 1].

As a result of the varied external funding to alliance partners, some HEIs could carry out their EUI commitments more adroitly than their partners.

So it’s not a level playing field across the alliance where everybody starts out with the same resources … also for the universities it varies how much extra they can or want to put in at what given point in time. [YUFE 2]

For the HEIs with financially unsupportive national governments, the limitations on how HEIs could participate and finance their activities were described as having the effect of introducing or amplifying inequality within alliances. More importantly, however, these limitations would have amplified the challenges experienced by universities financially unable to participate in the Initiative, adding to the general findings from an EUA survey of universities opting not to participate in the pilot rounds due to its attendant costs (Claeys-Kulik, Jørgensen, and Stöber 2020).

Opportunity and risk

With the high level of resource commitment required, HEIs participating in alliances shoulder a degree of risk without any guarantee of support from the EC beyond the pilot stage, raising questions of alliances’ long-term sustainability (EURASHE 2019). According to stakeholders in each alliance, risk calculations varied depending on their members’ financial, institutional, and in some cases geopolitical, circumstances (in the extreme cases of the UK HEIs, for example, where participating in an alliance presented a means of mitigating the risks associated with being outside the EU). However, the way each case alliance characterised the stakes involved in participation also varied with their member HEIs’ relative positions within regional and national HE hierarchies, with sharp contrasts in the language used to describe their motives for forming or joining an alliance, the relative importance of the Initiative within their international portfolios, and the consequences of failure.

Participants from all three cases recognised the experimental nature of the EUI pilot phase, both as a time for alliances to solidify shared objectives and for the Commission to trial its initiative and adjust in subsequent rounds. On one end of the spectrum, CIVICA stakeholders spoke repeatedly of the experimental nature of the opportunity, positing that their alliance was ‘testing a large set of activities’ [CIVICA 1] and describing the wider Initiative pilot as a ‘laboratory for experimenting new ways of cooperating in a very positive, encouraging free trade kind of space’ [CIVICA 2]. They added,

The truth is that we didn’t know exactly what we were going to get out of this, and so we wanted to make sure that that initial pilot phase allowed us to try out a whole heap of things, without necessarily giving ourselves too much pressure as to what would necessarily come out of each of those things. [CIVICA 2]

Participants from YUFE similarly described their pilot stage experience as an opportunity to refine and build on their interests and strengths, without drawing on the language of experimentation or exploration. Participants from EU-CONEXUS, however, challenged the idea that the pilot stage essentially represented an opportunity to trial ideas.

I think that there might be alliances that see this initiative as just another project, to reach project results, to do some experiments. But quite many of the alliances I think believe that they are creating and maybe in the future, they may become one entire campus university. [EU-CONEXUS 2]

To underline this point, the participant described what they saw as the disproportionately high stakes, both in missing out on such an opportunity, and in failure. They saw it as an opportunity that could not take place without such a scheme, and whilst funding provided by the Commission was relatively small, it reduced the stakes for HEIs with constrained resources for internationalisation activities and relatively low appetites for financial risk. EU-CONEXUS stakeholders therefore saw it as imperative that their members seized the opportunity to transform their institutions and elevate their position through a successful and comprehensive merger.

The specific importance of the Commission’s role in galvanising and sustaining such opportunities similarly drew out nuances between the three cases. Participants from all three alliances felt that further funding from the Commission was important but inessential, and endeavoured to continue with their alliances’ integration with or without funding in future rounds. CIVICA participants asserted that all members would stay on without further funding, albeit in a leaner alliance model, given the time and resources invested, as the alliance helped ‘to amplify what we could already do’ in terms of internationalisation and external engagement [CIVICA 2]. This position contrasted with YUFE and EU-CONEXUS, insofar as their participants pointed to their newfound forms of political capital, as influencers of national policy with legitimation from the EC, as most important to maintaining the alliance. For YUFE, the initiative served as an endorsement of the ambition of universities to work together beyond bilateral exchanges, with funding from the Commission being symbolically important as it legitimised their activities even where it did not cover their costs. Likewise with EU-CONEXUS, participants felt that their HEIs gained both political support and significance that they did not have as individual HEIs in their respective national policy spaces. These contrasts nuance the notion of university alliances as political interest groups (Vukasovic and Stensaker 2018), highlighting how the value of such to HEIs is hierarchically situated.

Underlying the alliances’ strategic calculations and appetite for risk, EUI participation was ultimately characterised as a convergence of self-serving interests, whereby each member is ‘ready to invest’ because membership directly serves their short or long-term interests [CIVICA 1]. In the case of CIVICA, this meant having to ensure strong buy-in from each partner by focusing on their own institutional objectives and to the extent possible, limiting its focus on EC shared goals.

We really wanted it to first meet [each member’s] goals and define our strategy from that perspective first, and then connect the dots with the Commission strategy … [so] we were careful to make sure that everything we put in the initial submission would also have been something we might have done without funding. [CIVICA 2]

Similarly for YUFE, their strong interest in advancing international student mobility served as the point of convergence and justification for adopting an explicitly cooperative stance. While framing their alliance as ‘a blueprint of how European countries and cultures can come together to strengthen travel’, the interviewee added that their cooperative orientation served to consolidate its members’ competitive edge as an alliance rather than compete with each other [YUFE 1].

The approach of EU-CONEXUS again appeared to take a longer-term view to its returns on investment, emphasising the opportunity to transform and merge with similarly positioned institutions by pooling their resources, research capacities and political capital. Seeing its members as specialised small or medium-sized HEIs with complementary research areas and infrastructures, the alliance’s aim was ‘to use all these complementarities that we have, … putting everything together to be stronger and creating this trans-European university system’ [EU-CONEXUS 1].

These accounts suggest varying institutional imperatives for joining an alliance, each with different opportunity costs. While the goals across the cases were uniformly focused on consolidating or enhancing institutional position, the depth of each alliance’s vision and the stakes for participating HEIs clearly differed across the cases. One might reasonably interpret these divergences in terms of institutional status, where high-status institutions have greater resource stability (including membership in other international networks) and can therefore afford to take more risks (Lambrechts, Cavallaro, and Lepori 2024). In contrast, lower-status institutions might view the EUI as a critically limited opportunity to consolidate their niche strengths, elevate their visibility and thus their status in the hierarchy through affiliation with similarly or higher-positioned peer institutions. Clearly these strategies are attended by different costs (Claeys-Kulik, Jørgensen, and Stöber 2020), and the counterfactual – in this case, the cost of not participating, lacking capacity to participate, or failing to win an EUI bid – would likely reflect the same differential impact on each case.

Discussion and conclusion

The accounts explored above highlight the potentially thorny outcomes of an initiative which aims to selectively elevate European higher education. These tensions articulate with the policy effects of its predecessor, the Bologna Process, championing cross-border engagements by flattening and extending the coherence of transnational HE governance through competitive logics (Erkkilä and Piironen 2014). Our interview participants spoke candidly about the many challenges their institutions faced while navigating the pilot phase, as well as the anticipated gains made through their sustained efforts and risk-taking. Underlying these narratives are the implications of the EUI on the sector more widely, drawing implicit boundaries around which HEIs are able to participate, and making explicit the forms of HE and their attendant geographies seen as most desirable to the Commission (Jungblut, Maassen, and Elken 2020). From the perspective of the EC, the EUI is purposed on two key objectives of increasing the cooperative character of the European HE space and enhancing its international attractiveness and competitiveness (European Commission 2021), with each supported or challenged by distinct logics at national and institutional levels (de Wit 2018). The evidence presented in this study identifies these logics within EUI alliances and institutions; however, the forms of cooperation observed took place within alliances ultimately to enhance institutions’ own competitiveness, which would suggest further stratification of the sector between HEIs participating in alliances and those that do not or cannot.

The commentary presented by representatives of alliances and member HEIs in this study supports the argument that EUI participation is a rational institutional calculation which is widely governed by the limitations of existing hierarchies and material realities found in stratified high participation systems (Cantwell and Marginson 2018). As participants from each case alliance explained, the selection of alliance partners was guided by prior relationships between institutions, their viability in terms of access to essential co-funding, and their shared strategic interests; each of these criteria coincide within their respective tiers of the HE hierarchy, much in the same way as the various university networks function to advance the interests of similar universities (Musselin 2018; Vukasovic and Stensaker 2018). Within this conceptualisation of alliance formation, there is an implication of drift taking place, with some positionally lower-status HEIs responding to competitive pressures and moving towards research intensification and academic specialisation (Bonaccorsi and Daraio 2007; Neave 1979). Alliances are an extension of this process, injecting a new regional-level pressure on institutions to specialise and compete for status.

The findings presented here foreshadow the Initiative’s impact on HE stratification and its consolidation of institutional positions within the European HE hierarchy. The three aspects of inequality explored – geographic coverage, resourcing, and opportunity costs – across the three alliance cases find differing accounts and experiences of these challenges, yet still point to similar outcomes at the system level. By implication, the scheme’s partial reallocation of Erasmus+ and Horizon funds to predominantly Western European HEIs with sufficient internationalisation experience and networks consolidates the advantages of those universities positioned higher in the hierarchy (what Claeys-Kulik 2019, describes as the Initiative’s potential ‘Matthew effect’). While the Initiative arguably fosters the diversification of university missions through the wide range of alliance focal themes, and therefore horizontal diversity of the sector (Gunn 2020), it clearly also drives vertical stratification by providing universities with a platform for concentrating their competitive advantages. Insofar as the dual aims of inclusivity and selectivity sit in tension in elite and elite-aspiring universities (Kehm 2010), the case alliances examined here widely reflect the positions of universities higher in the hierarchy. Some of the universities in the case alliances may not be elite nor exclusive (and indeed the YUFE mission explicitly brands itself as non-elitist), but they are evidently different from the demand-absorbing lower-tier HEIs that are often overlooked in internationalisation agendas across the European HE space (de Wit, Yemini, and Martin 2015). Their prior albeit varied capacities to seek out and sustain international partnerships or associate to university networks affirms this, and aligns with recent studies which highlight relationships between European HEIs’ status and scope of international engagement (Crăciun et al. 2023; Karvounaraki et al. 2018; Lambrechts, Cavallaro, and Lepori 2024). While our study examines only three alliances, and this selection naturally shapes and limits broader possible findings among the 2019 alliances, it is their continuities across cases and their consistency with recent scholarship that underscore our argument.

This study also affirms previous scholarship on European HE policymaking’s impact on the diversity, coherence and competitiveness of the sector (Enders and Westerheijden 2011; Erkkilä and Piironen 2014). The Bologna Process set the framework for intra-regional coherence, but in doing so fostered competitive dynamics and metricised expressions of ‘excellence’ that challenge the coherence of national systems and the balance between harmonisation and differentiation (Huisman, Stensaker, and Kehm 2009). In pointing to these effects in our case alliances’ accounts, we draw a direct line from Bologna to the EUI, having argued that the Initiative disproportionately services the agendas of excellence and competitiveness of the European HE sector over the agendas of enhancing inclusion and cooperation. This characterisation contrasts with other HE strategies concurrently advanced by the Commission, like the Teaming and Twinning strategies which target EU13 and other countries on the European periphery. Our findings also illustrate cooperative practices across international space drawing on the harmonisation groundwork of Bologna, including to universities on the margins of either their status segment or geographic location. Viewed from the system level, however, these cooperative engagements between peer institutions account for relatively resourced universities conforming to competitive, research-driven models of higher education (as per the typologies offered in Lepori, Geuna, and Veglio 2017). Looking forward, observable changes to the organisational posturing, ranking and other ‘drift’-related competitive practices of institutions currently in alliances will likely bear this argument out, notwithstanding fundamental changes to the scheme’s funding and selection architecture.

Supplemental data

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/03057925.2024.2307551

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

We are grateful to the Economic and Social Research Council for funding this research as part of the Centre for Global Higher Education [ES/T014768/1], and to all those who gave up their time to be interviewed.

Notes

1. HEIs from these countries were eligible to participate in the 2019 and 2020 EUI pilot rounds because of their countries’ participation in the Erasmus+ programme. The 2022 EUI call expanded eligibility to all countries involved in the Bologna Process (i.e. EHEA), although only HEIs from EU member states and Erasmus+ countries can be full, funded partners.

2. The EHEA consists of the currently 49 countries committed to the shared principles, standards and reforms agreed in the Bologna Process and established through the Lisbon Recognition Convention.

3. Information on the original 41 pilot alliances’ members, sizes and missions are available through the European Commission’s European Universities Factsheets (European Commission n.d.)

4. Ethical approval was granted, prior to the commencement of research, from the IOE Research Ethics committee at University College London (reference Z6364106/2020/11/31). Prior to interview, all participants were informed of the risks and benefits of participating and their consent was obtained via a signed form.