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

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.