Deliberative governance in the European Higher Education Area. The Bologna Process as a case of alternative governance architecture in Europe

Abstract

Designing political institutions is a balancing act between upholding democratic ideals and accommodating constraints. Advocates of deliberative governance in the European Union live this tension in a particularly polarized manner, torn between the deliberative ideal of consensual decision-making and the reality of power politics. To which extent does deliberative governance provide a suitable conceptual framework as well as a mode of governance in its own right for European policy-making? This paper applies five features of deliberative governance suggested by Teague (2001) in his study of European social policy to the genesis of the Bologna Process and subsequent domestic reforms. The Bologna Process has, since the Sorbonne declaration of 25 May 1998, aimed at creating a European Higher Education Area. This study concludes that deliberative governance has the potential to start a long-term process of progressive domestic policy change and therefore deserves further investigation.

Keywords:

• Bologna process
• deliberation
• Europe
• governance
• polity

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I am grateful to the Fulbright-Schuman program for sponsoring this research. I would also like to thank the Center for Studies in Higher Education of UCBerkeley for their warm reception; the referees for their very useful comments; and the editor, as well as Claudio Radaelli, Damian Chalmers, Simon Hix, Christian List, Martin Lodge, Christine Musselin, Jérôme Aust, Pauline Ravinet and Anne Corbett, who helped me formulate the ideas leading to this article.

Notes

The Bologna Process officially started with the Sorbonne declaration of 25 May 1998. But the Bologna declaration of 19 June 1999 gave its name to the process because it had a larger number of signatories than the original four participants to the Sorbonne.

In the 2008 consolidated version of the Treaty articles 165 and 166.

According to Ravinet (2005: 17), debates on the reform of degrees had already started on the basis of a reform in two years in Italy.

The questions asked were: ‘How much do you think you have learnt on higher education policy from [Bologna process] meetings?’; and ‘How do you think these meetings have influenced your opinions on higher education related issues? For more information, see Hoareau (2009).