Creating a culture of interrelations: Europeanisation processes at the University of Valladolid,c. 1982–1988

Transition, Europeísmo and University Reform

A guiding and unifying principle of la transición was to avoid the polarisation and conflict which had led up to the Spanish Civil War between 1936 and 1939, followed by the right wing-dictatorship of Franco. Democratisation in the late 1970s and early 1980s therefore rested on compromises (Reid, 2024; Townson, 2024). A market economy and wage restraint were combined with union rights and increased social spending. An Amnesty Law of 1977 included all crimes ‘of a political purpose, whatever their outcomes may have been’, committed up to that point in time. The constitution of 1978, approved by 87% of the voters in a referendum, was the work of a committee with broad representation, including all the major parties and the newly legalised Communist Party. The process saw the Left abandoning republicanism in favour of parliamentary monarchy and the Right accepting a decentralisation of the country into autonomous communities.

Another aspect of the Spanish transition was the turn towards Europe. Indeed, there is a long-standing tradition of europeísmo among Spanish intellectuals, that is, of paying homage to and identifying with a common European cultural heritage. One example of this was the so-called ‘generation of 98’, who around the turn of the 20th century promoted European liberalism, modernisation and industrialisation as the way forward for a Spain which had just lost most of its remaining colonial possessions in a humiliating war with the United States in 1898. This project of national regeneración was, as philosopher José Ortega y Gasset explained at the time, ‘inseparable from Europeanisation’ (quoted in de la Guardia, 2015: 199; see also Ortuño Marínez, 2014).

During Franco’s reign, europeísmo acquired a political dimension yet again.The exiled opposition viewed the emerging European integration project as a club of democratic role models for a future Spain. Simultaneously, the regime itself sought to wash off its fascist legacy. By establishing economic ties with Western Europe and the United States, they paved the way for rapid economic growth from the late 1950s. At the same time, the Spanish leadership was determined to avoid political influences from its Western partners in trade. In 1962, a Spanish request for association with the EEC was rejected (Brydan, 2019; de la Guardia and Perez Sánchez, 2024; López Gómez, 2016; Moratinos Lagartos, 2023). Through Spain’s membership in organisations like the UNESCO and the OECD, however, the regime did come into contact with new educational policy ideas like the economics of education and human capital theory, adopting a view of education as a long-term national investment and the main driver of economic growth, rather than just a means of ideological and religious reproduction (Delgado Gómez-Escalonilla, 2020a, 2025; Gónzalez-Delgado and Groves, 2024; on the economics of education and the role of the OECD more in general, see Elfert, 2019). In the Spanish case, such investments were found to be badly needed: throughout the 1960s, commissions from the OECD warned that the country’s booming industries were far too dependent on foreign technology and expertise. The remedy was an expansion of the entire educational sector, modernisation of curricula and teaching methods and more money to research and innovation. Pressures for change also came from radicalised students and teachers within the country, calling for pedagogical reform and democratisation of university life.

The General Education Law (Ley General de Educación – LGE) of 1970 was an attempt by the Franco regime to respond to these challenges by means of what one historian has called ‘authoritarian modernization’ (Delgado Gómez-Escalonilla, 2020b: 74). The LGE emphasised the connection between education and economic and scientific progress, which in the case of universities included the introduction of new faculties like industrial engineering and commerce and entrepreneurial studies (Infante Díaz, 2012). It also included writings on pedagogical reform, student participation and social mobility, although it has been pointed out that these more far-reaching aspirations lacked legitimacy in regime circles and essentially remained unfulfilled when Franco died a few years later (Delgado Gómez-Escalonilla, 2025; Fernández-Soria and Sevilla Merino, 2021; Milito Barone and Groves, 2013).

In 1977, the first democratically elected Spanish government, led by the Union for the Democratic Centre (UCD), applied for full accession to the EC. In this context of transition, support for Spain’s integration with Europe became a unifying vision for conservatives, socialists, communists and regional nationalists, as well as the major media outlets and the emerging civil society. As this indicates, Europe and the EC to some extent became a projection surface onto which various parties could attach different and not seldom contradictory hopes and aspirations. However, there was also a widely shared assumption that European integration was necessary for Spain to catch up on not only democracy, but also on economic, scientific and technological progress (Crespo MacLennan, 2004; Forner Muñoz, 2024; López Gómez, 2016).

Europeísmo would thus also influence changes in research and higher education. Following the LGE, student enrolments had increased significantly on all levels throughout the 1970s, but they had done so at a time when economic growth came to a halt. The early transition governments were therefore faced with the dual challenge of finding new ways to finance education, while also trying to reform an educational system which tended to favour private, Catholic institutions over public ones, and which ‘still bore the classist, religious and authoritarian hallmarks left by almost 40 years of dictatorship’ (Groves, 2015: 358; see also González-Delgado and Ferraz-Lorenzo, 2023). For the Socialist Workers Party (PSOE), who replaced the UCD in power in 1982, educational reform was a main priority. In the University Reform Law (Ley de Reforma Universitaria – LRU) of the following year, Franco’s centralised and hierarchical system was replaced by university autonomy. Individual universities were thereby given greater freedom and responsibility in economic matters, curriculum development, staff recruitment and the creation of internal governing bodies. These changes were not only presented as means to do away with the past, but also with reference to an international context. The Minister of Education and Science, José María Maravall (1983), stressed the need to draw on European educational systems for inspiration. Similarly, the legal document itself began by stating that the integration of Spain with ‘the advanced industrial societies’ also required its ‘full incorporation into the world of modern science’ and ‘the cultivation in Spain of the scientific mentality and spirit’. For that purpose, it was imperative to draw on ‘the experiences of near-by countries’, which showed that the most vital institution in that respect was the University (Boletín Oficial del Estado, 1983). At the same time, university autonomy, along with the regional autonomy created by the new constitution, meant that individual universities would have different conditions for approaching and adapting to this international context, and perhaps also different motives for doing so.

The Open University and Europe

The UVa is one of the oldest Spanish universities, dating back to the 13th century. It is the largest university of the autonomous community of Castile and León. Located just north of Madrid, Castile and León was Spain’s largest autonomous community, but also one of the most sparsely populated ones. With an economy predominantly dependent on agriculture, it had for a long time been gradually overshadowed by industrialised regions like the Basque Country and Catalonia, the disparity increasing with the economic boom of the 1960s. The fact that the rural and conservative Castilla was often idealised in Francoist propaganda could not compensate for this. After Franco’s death, anxieties over underdevelopment, lack of industries and rural depopulation were widely articulated in editorials, literary works, speeches and political pamphlets (González Clavero, 2021).

A similar sense of marginalisation may have been prevalent at the region’s leading university too. In the early 1980s, Spain had over 30 universities, having had 12 in the early days of the dictatorship (Paris, 1991; Sánchez Zurro, 1989). While the UVa had of course grown with this general expansion, it had not been at its forefront. Rather, it had gone from being Spain’s third biggest university in 1960 to the 15th biggest 20 years later (Pérez López, 1989). Both the local press and university outlets warned that state funding was insufficient with regards to the increasing influx of students. At the Faculties of Law and of Philosophy and Arts, students and teachers complained about the urgent lack of lecture halls. Elsewhere, the lack of technical equipment was an issue; in 1983, a professor of industrial engineering described himself as a representative of ‘the worst treated Centre at a sidelined university’ (Perán González, 1983).

In university discourse, particular or local problems like these were often connected to another, more long-term issue of existential proportions: the perceived isolation of the Spanish University from its social surroundings, partly self-inflicted, partly to blame on decades of dictatorship. Consequently, openness, communication and breaking down boundaries became common rallying cries for those seeking to reform the UVa from within. The rector election held in early 1982 provides ample evidence of this openness discourse. In a race between five candidates, two of whom dropped out along the way, the election resulted in the victory of Justino Duque Domínguez, a professor of business law born in Valladolid in 1927. Duque was known to sympathise with the socialist PSOE, which later that same year would go on to win the national elections for the first time. Although elected by a narrow margin overall, he gained a strong majority among student voters and presented himself as the candidate with the most far-reaching views on student participation (El Norte de Castilla, 1982g). The tone of his campaign was crisis conscious, his election manifesto portraying the Spanish University in general as a prestigious but essentially stagnating and institution; economically unprepared for a growing and diversifying influx of students; culturally out of touch with social needs. It was therefore imperative to break ‘the isolation from the Society which the University should serve’. He would keep coming back to that theme as a rector (Duque Domínguez, 1983a; El Norte de Castilla, 1982a, 1982f, 1983a).

This notion of an existential crisis was shared by all five rector candidates, and metaphors alluding to the University’s isolation and lack of purpose were omnipresent in their campaigns (El Norte de Castilla, 1982b, 1982d, 1982e; La Hoja del Lunes, 1982). As student associations were formed around the UVa in the following years, the same calls for change were voiced from that direction as well. The Grupos Libres Universitarios, especially dedicated to student participation in university politics, demanded a university which was ‘dynamic, flexible and open to the future’ (Grupos Libres Universitarios, 1987). The Ateneo Universitario de Valladolid complained in its manifesto from 1984 that ‘[t]he University lies lethargic, disconnected from a society that seems to be in constant turmoil, and demands an urgent transformation’ (Ateneo Universitario, 1987).

What did ‘society’ mean in this context? One frequently implied answer to that question was regional economic interests. A sign of the times was undoubtedly the birth of the University–Business Foundation of Valladolid (FUEVA) through an agreement between the UVa and the city’s Chamber of Commerce and Industry. Plans for the foundation were announced in early 1984, although it did not become operative until 2 years later. Sharing facilities with the Faculty of Medicine and having a board slightly tilted towards company representatives, the FUEVA was intended to serve as a two-way communication channel of seminars, workshops and exchange programmes, the latter of which were mainly focused on arranging internships at local companies for university students. On the one hand, this would provide companies with direct access to cutting-edge scientific research, giving them ‘sufficient support in the face of the unstoppable avalanche of technological development’, as the foundation’s director Pablo Caballero Montoya put it. On the other hand, the academic world would become better equipped to keep research and education up to date with the needs and interests of business (Azofra et al., 1988). In an article in El Norte de Castilla (1985), it was noted that this exchange would not only favour the two parties directly involved but also ‘more broadly, contribute to social progress’. Another example of this emerging university–company nexus was that the aforementioned LRU of 1983 obliged Spanish universities to install a new type of governing body, a Social Council. Predominantly consisting of individuals from private industry, local authorities and unions, the consejos sociales presumably guaranteed that broader interests were represented in academic activities. The Council at the UVa was inaugurated in 1986 under the leadership of Manuel Guasch, president of the Fasa–Renault plant in Valladolid. When portrayed in a strongly favourable article in El Norte de Castilla (1986b), Guasch described himself as ‘one hundred per cent businessman’, promising to bring ‘business-mindedness to educational matters’. At the university’s Opening Ceremony of the following academic year, he spoke of the need to create ‘a culture of interrelations’ in which the University and other social institutions recognized that their interests and challenges were fundamentally the same (Acto de apertura, 1987).

The discourse on openness and interrelations also had international connotations, and more precisely European ones. As we saw in the previous section, Europe was often upheld as a democratic role model for Spain in the context of the transition, and the LRU of 1983 underlined the need to draw on the experiences of other Western nations. As for the discursive Europeanisation at the UVa, however, a more common theme was to view Spain as already being a part of Europe and therefore facing the same challenges. The need to reform Spanish universities was thus not primarily connected to the Spanish transition but rather to the much more general and fundamental economic and structural transitions taking place across the continent, and indeed other parts of the world as well: the transition from industrial economies to service economies, inflation and the economic decline since the early 1970s, the globalisation of money flows, and so on. Addressing a crowd of students in the summer of 1983 on the theme ‘Towards a new University?’, Rector Justino Duque explained that the LRU did not simply correspond to Spanish conditions. Instead, the law should be seen as part of the changes sweeping across Europe, essentially in response to the economic and structural changes that had begun in the past decade. Therefore, the search for a new University ‘cannot be confined within the narrow limits of regions, nor even those of nations, but has to be receptive to all experiences that occur beyond our borders’ (Duque Domínguez, 1983b; El Norte de Castilla, 1983b). Invited by the previously mentioned Ateneo Universitario to lead a tertulia – a group discussion or an informal seminar – on the EC in 1985, he spoke of Europe’s general need to reform its economic structures to better compete with Asia, especially Japan. If this succeeded, Europe would play a pivotal role as a prosperous and peaceful alternative to the two superpowers. At the same time, he pointed to Spain’s potential and highly important role as a political, cultural and economic bridge between Europe and Latin America (Ateneo Universitario, 1987).

Duque’s interest in Europe was not merely rhetorical. Shortly after taking office, he assisted in the forming of an Institute of European Studies at the university, a collaboration project between members of his own Faculty of Law and the Faculty of Economic and Entrepreneurial Sciences. The starting point was a comprehensive symposium on ‘Spain and the European Communities’ in late 1982, with contributions mainly from academics from various Spanish universities, but also from Gian Paolo Papa, the Communities’ ambassador in Madrid, and José M. De Areilza from the Council of Europe. In an introduction, the rector himself stated that the purpose of the institute was to promote the ongoing process of Spain’s adhesion to the Communities, but also to provide systematic analyses on the short- and long-term consequences of this adhesion, not least from the specific perspective of Castile and León. Duque further declared that Europe was ‘more than anything, a historical entity with a cultural content’, and that the current pursuit of political and economic integration could only be achieved on that basis. In line with this view, contributions to the symposium offered a mixed bag of fishing rights and European economic policy on the one hand, and historical and cultural perspectives on the other. Concerning the latter, the symposium was yet another example of how Europeanisation was presented as a common project of which Spain was already a self-evident part, rather than a national challenge on an uncertain path to democratisation and liberalisation. Areilza’s lecture, for example, was essentially an appeal to ‘Western Europe’s ideological identity’, in which Spain was ‘firmly entrenched’ and which he hoped would serve as a moderating force in an otherwise unstable global climate (1 Symposium sobre España y las Comunidades Europeas, 1983).

Apart from the symposium, the Instituto de Estudios Europeos held a somewhat low profile during its first years, although in 1984 it did arrange a course on EC-policies for university staff and functionaries of local authorities (Duque Domínguez, 1989). The purpose of the course was to ‘prepare’ regional institutions for their ‘possible collaboration with European institutions’ (Programa, 1983). The institute is nonetheless significant in that it exemplifies a growing interest in Europe and the EC at the UVa in the years before the Spanish adhesion, as well as the pioneering role played by the Faculties of Law and of Economic and Entrepreneurial Sciences in that respect.

So far, I have pointed out that discourse on the open university contained two notions of openness: towards economic interests and towards Europe. It would be mistaken, however, to draw a sharp line between the two, as they were in fact often two sides of the same coin. This is illustrated by the Opening Lecture of the academic year of 1982/83, given by Julio García Villalon, a professor of business mathematics. Villalon had been one of Duque’s competitors in the rector election of 1982, with a campaign that emphasised the need for new programmes, faculties and research centres corresponding to the demands of the ‘post-industrial society’. For instance, he proposed more resources to informatics, engineering and languages (El Norte de Castilla, 1982c, 1982f). A few months later, when granted the honour of addressing the entire university at the tradition-laden Opening Ceremony, Villalon returned to the problems of post-industrial society from an international perspective. The lecture, which bore the title Universidad, region, crisis económica (García Villalon 1982), repeatedly referred to ‘Europe’, ‘the European countries’ and ‘the Western countries’, while making comparatively few mentions of Spain. This was in accordance with Villalon’s view that the crisis referred to by the title was essentially a European one. It was brought on by rapid technological change, particularly within automation, information technology and computer technology, resulting in stalled economic growth and rising unemployment numbers, and necessitating structural changes which seemed politically impossible in the short term but economically unavoidable in the long term. The process was particularly problematic for a continent which consisted of advanced industrial societies but was far behind countries like the United States and Japan in terms of the mentioned technologies.

Another reason for downplaying the national dimension was that nation states, in Villalon’s analysis, were simply not that important anymore, as they were both too small and too big to deal adequately with global developments. On the one hand, fierce international competition would sooner or later require an economic and techno-political strategy ‘coordinated at the European level’. On the other hand, it was increasingly clear that the EC was a community of regions just as it was a community of nations, and that a predominantly agricultural region like Castile and León had more in common with similar regions in other European countries than with the more industrialised parts of Spain. In this vision of a near future in which vital decisions were taken either at the European or the regional level, Villalon also saw a partly new role for universities: they would no longer be vehicles for national development primarily, but more firmly anchored in their local societies, while also adapting to a global context. Here, Villalon stressed the need for tighter relations between universities and private companies, and that ‘eliminating every type of obstacle’ that may exist in those relations must imply consequences for how research and higher education were conducted. As for the former, priority should be given to research ‘aimed at being applied in its social and economic environment’, and to creating common institutions that could ‘facilitate’ such applications. Higher education, too, had to be developed with a greater emphasis on applicability and utility: in a constantly changing society, it was paramount to teach students to be independent, responsible and flexible: ‘The Company [. . .] will expect of the University to train individuals who have learned to learn, who are capable of easily adapting to changing circumstances’. Yet, this did not imply that the content of knowledge transmission was unimportant. On the contrary, flexibility and adaptability could not be expected from a person whose personality and inner life was in constant flux, but rather from someone whom the University had provided with a solid ‘cultural motivation’. Such a motivation, Villalon said, must rest on two pillars: the recreation of local cultural identities on the one hand, and the consolidation of Western cultural identity on the other.

In conclusion, the discursive Europeanisation at the UVa in the early 1980s both confirms and nuances previous research on how education was framed at the European level. Political scientist Cino Pagliarello (2022; see also Klose, 2013) has demonstrated that the European Commission’s first modest initiatives in this area in the 1970s were tied to social and cultural goals, especially to that of providing tomorrow’s European citizens with a common identity. By contrast, the more far-reaching attempts to formulate a supranational education policy from the late 1980s and onwards were framed in economic terms, underpinned by a new crisis narrative on Europe’s competitive disadvantages in key technological areas. This section has testified to the presence of that narrative at the UVa too. It has also made clear, however, that this emphasis on economic competitiveness did not necessarily replace, or even preclude, more idealist or cultural motives in that context. On the contrary, for Julio García Villalon and Justino Duque, Europe was united both by its history and its future: by a common cultural identity and by a horizon of expectation in which economic opportunities as well as threats and challenges seemed to abound. According to the two of them, these challenges increased the importance of the cultural dimension rather than rendering it obsolete.

Thus, those two forms of Europe Imagined – Europeanisation as a struggle for scientific and technological hegemony and Europeanisation as a cultural and historical project – not only coexisted but were also intertwined and mutually reinforcing. The two forthcoming sections will show more examples of this. Moreover, they will show that interest in Europe at the UVa not only manifested itself in university discourse, but also in a variety of academic activities and initiatives.

Bilateral mobility

In 1984, Justino Duque was replaced as rector of the UVa by a 15 year’s younger professor of thermodynamics, Fernando Tejerina García. This premature change of leadership was another effect of the LRU of 1983, which obliged Spanish universities to hold new elections for governing posts within a year. A native of León in the same autonomous community, Tejerina had completed his undergraduate studies in Valladolid during the first half of the 1960s and then his doctoral studies at the University of Valencia. He had continued his academic career at the Autonomous University of Barcelona before returning to the UVa in 1980. While an editorial in El Norte de Castilla (1984a) worried that the new rector did not share the left-leaning Duque’s views on university democracy, Tejerina launched a motto which seemed to be in line with that of his predecessor: on being sworn in, he promised to pursue a university that was ‘Scientific, open, innovative, critical and participatory’, stressing that openness applied to Spanish society as well as the international environment (El Norte de Castilla, 1984b).

Whereas Duque’s term as rector was interrupted after 2 years, Tejerina would go on to serve two full terms, from 1984 to 1994, experiencing the intensification of European integration towards the end of the 1980s. Yet, even in the preceding years, the rector of the UVa was himself responsible for initiatives in that direction. The year that he took office, Tejerina installed an International Relations Service, tasked with elaborating collaboration agreements with foreign universities, many of them European ones. A Vice-Rectorate of International Relations was established the following academic year. As opposed to mobility programmes launched at the European level a few years later, most notably Erasmus, the ones that emanated from the UVa were almost exclusively bilateral, formed on a university-to-university basis. Just like Erasmus, however, they were typically focused on using scholarships to promote international exchange and mobility. Students, teachers and researchers from one university would spend a few weeks at the partner university, participating – in their respective capacities – in lectures and seminars. The host university would also be responsible for providing an activity programme including cultural and physical activities. Another goal was often that collaboration would eventually yield somewhat more tangible results as well, such as the creation of integrated courses or common publications or research projects.

Whether the bilateral agreements signed in the early and mid 1980s represented any form of intentional Europeanisation is doubtful. To be sure, it seems likely that they were to some extent influenced by Spain’s adhesion to the EC, or the anticipation thereof. Yet, it must be stressed that the actual agreements made few references to that context, and even fewer assumptions about a common European identity or common European challenges. Rather, they tended to treat international contacts as ends in themselves. To quote an agreement signed with the Belgian University of Ghent in 1986, ‘the extraordinary importance of every form of cooperation between universities’ (Convenio, 1986) was more often assumed than explained or specified. But since these agreements, as we shall see, later became part of more explicit, large-scale efforts to integrate European universities, they nonetheless serve as an interesting example of what Hirschhausen and Patel (2010) have called Europe Emergent – especially seeing as many of them had roots that went even further back.

Already in the late 1940s the UVa started arranging cursos para extranjeros, summer courses in Spanish for foreign students. By the early 1960s, the courses had become standardised and were given annually, while they had also been adopted by several other Spanish universities. Every August, some 80–100 students would spend around 4 weeks in Valladolid to study Spanish at one of three different levels, along with a course in Spanish culture and history. The foreign students were also offered activities, such as cinema, theatre and excursions in the region. A vast majority of them came from Europe, primarily from France and Italy, but also from places like the Netherlands, Denmark, Switzerland, West Germany, Belgium and Great Britain. Beyond Europe, the United States and Japan were the main exporters of foreign students. A separate course in Hispanic studies was offered to students from the Indiana State College of Pennsylvania, and eventually to students from other universities as well (Hernández, 1989).

As historian González Gómez (2014) has observed with regards to the University of Salamanca, cursos para extranjeros was an opportunity for Spanish universities, and to some extent the cities and regions in which they were located, to obtain a bit of international prestige during the Franco era. Indeed, even some 10 years after the dictator’s death, the annual arrival of foreign students in Valladolid was given ample and upbeat coverage in the local press, where it was seen as testimony to the favourable international reputation of the UVa, the city and the Castilian variety of Spanish (El Norte de Castilla, 1986c, 1986d, 1987b; Mañoso, 1988). However, when César Hernández, the vice-decan of the Spanish Language Department and long-time course coordinator, was interviewed in El Norte de Castilla (1987a), he also mentioned another advantage: the cursos generated continued and expanded contacts between Valladolid and some of the home universities of the participating students, sometimes serving as ‘the starting point for the agreements and partnerships signed with other European universities’. Recent agreements with the Universities of Ghent, Lille III and Saarbrücken were cited as examples.

These international collaboration projects went from the bottom and upwards, in several steps. The agreements signed between rectors under the auspices of the International Relations Service almost without exception mentioned ‘already existing contacts’ (Convenio, 1986) or expressed a desire to ‘give an official character to and encourage already existing relations’ (Convenio, 1985).This usually meant that they had started at the department level years before. The agreement with the University of Lille III is an example. A project description from the spring of 1981 shows that César Hernández and the director of the Department of Romanic Studies in Lille at that point had made detailed plans for a regular exchange of students and teachers between the two universities (Proyecto, 1981). The following year, Hernández wrote a letter to the newly elected rector Justino Duque, informing him of an upcoming visit to Valladolid of two teachers from the French university, as well as mentioning last year’s exchange. He hoped that the Rectorate would agree to cover some of the costs involved, something that Duque’s predecessor had apparently done the year before. Finally, Hernández suggested that the collaboration be formalised by Duque and his French counterpart and that the same be done with the similar collaboration developed between the Spanish Language Department and the University of Saarbrücken in West Germany (Letter, 1982). That wish was granted by Rector Tejerina in 1984, at which point the agreement was also expanded from the department level to the faculty level (Proyecto, 1984). This meant that, for instance, professors of contemporary history and literature went from Valladolid to Lille the following year (Letter, 1985). Agreements with several other European universities followed a similar route, often starting with the Spanish Language Department but eventually involving other departments or faculties as well (see e.g. Acuerdo, 1985; Convenio, 1983, 1984, 1986, 1988; Proyecto, 1987).

When Spain entered the EC, international contacts became valuable for partly different reasons. In his annual speeches at the university’s opening acts, Tejerina often commented on this development at length. Speaking about Erasmus in 1987 and the signing of the Magna Charta Universitatum in Bologna the following year – an event in which he had participated personally – the rector envisaged the emergence of a truly European university landscape, where studying in different countries would be no more difficult than doing so in different Spanish cities. Tejerina’s view as to why this was important confirms much of what was observed in the previous section. Like Julio García Villalon’s speech in 1983, those of Tejerina a few years later illustrate how the widely embraced, though not always specified, ideal of an open university gradually became equated with openness towards Europe on the one hand, and openness to regional economic needs on the other. Exemplifying the UVa’s ‘ever-more intense relationship with society’, he listed the agreements signed with other European universities in the past academic year, followed by the ones signed with public institutions and private companies (Acto de apertura, 1987). Second, Tejerina shared the idea of Europe as a continent held together by history, culture and values, but also by the problems and challenges posed by an increasingly globalised world: ‘the society of the next millennium will be a very competitive one’ he said, particularly addressing the students. This created a complex web of societal needs: the open European University would have to simultaneously strengthen cultural identity and cutting-edge scientific and technological innovation (Acto de apertura, 1988).

As far as international collaboration agreements were concerned, new expectations thus came to the fore. It was no longer just about formalising or extending previously established bilateral contacts for their own sake, but about being integrated into a larger, international context of both risks and rewards. This shift of expectations was sometimes reflected in the agreements themselves, as exemplified by the collaboration between the UVa and the French University of Poitiers. Started in 1982 as a student exchange between the Department of Hispanic Studies in Poitiers and the Department of French Philology in Valladolid, and eventually involving the respective Faculty of Law at the two universities as well, it was made into a more formal agreement 3 years later (Convenio, 1985). In 1986, Jean-Louis Decherat, vice-president of the French university, pointed out to Tejerina that Spain’s adhesion to the Communities opened new possibilities, especially considering the Erasmus Programme. For instance, it would now be possible to ‘receive European help’ in matters which were of interest in anyway, such as creating integrated courses (Letter, 1986a). Tejerina’s response was wholeheartedly positive (Letter, 1986b). An updated and extended agreement was signed in 1988 ‘in the hope that these collaboration efforts will soon be part of what is taking shape at the European level’ (Acuerdo, 1988).

An information folder printed by the UVa a few years later shows that the agreement with Poitiers and almost all of the other ones mentioned in this section had been placed under the umbrella of Erasmus and similar European programmes at that point, along with a host of new international collaborations and partnerships which had not existed prior to 1987 (Information folder, 1990; see also Diario de Burgos, 1989; Mañoso, 1988). To that, it must be added that the size and scale of the older partnerships increased significantly with the inflow of European resources. While this of course testifies to the impact of European higher education policy, the continuity with the previous years, and the interplay between top down- and bottom up-Europeanisation, is obvious. The case of Valladolid and Poitiers exemplifies that the implementation of Erasmus was not necessarily about creating something out of nothing, but to some extent also about using and developing ideas and structures which had been created between individual universities in the preceding years, or even in the preceding decades.

Institutions of Europeanisation

Whereas many of the collaboration agreements of the 1980s thus had a pre-history, the same period also saw the creation of entirely new institutions, corresponding to – and most likely contributing to – a growing interest in Europe and the EC. In connection with the previous section, we should observe that this often resulted from a growing demand for practical information about Erasmus and similar programmes, sometimes tied to a certain fear of missing out on lucrative opportunities. In 1987, Rector Tejerina announced that the UVa would enter into collaboration with the Servicio Europa, a Madrid-based information office aimed at keeping universities and other institutions up to date on European projects in education. (Acto de apertura, 1987). When the affiliation was made official, a representative of the Servicio stressed that ‘the European challenge is information, knowing what is going on’. (Mañoso, 1987).

Other initiatives sprung from interest in the political, economic and legal institutions of the Communities, as well as the culture and history of Europe. The example of the Institute of European Studies was briefly discussed in a previous section. The Institute also had close ties with what eventually became the European Documentation Centre, housed in the Faculty of Law under Justino Duque’s directorship. The existence of such a centre at the UVa was referred to already at the Institute of European Studies’ aforementioned ‘Symposium sobre España y las Comunidades Europeas’ in 1982. However, the EDC does not seem to have become fully active until Spain joined the EC 4 years later. It was part of a transnational network overseen by the European Council, which had assisted in the creation of documentation centres in member and aspiring member countries since the 1960s. Several other EDCs were formed at Spanish universities around the same time as the one in Valladolid. Their purpose was to provide scholars, students and any other interested citizen with publications from or about the Communities (Reyero and Ruiz, 2023; see also Duque Domínguez, 1989). Apart from that, local centres were free to do other things as well, and the EDC of the UVa did. This meant that the boundary between the Centre and the Institute was quite fluid. For instance, the former soon offered the 2-year study programme ‘Law and Economy of the EEC’, which was shared between the Faculties of Law and of Economic and Entrepreneurial Sciences, that is, the same two faculties involved in the Institute of European Studies. Besides economic and legal aspects, the programme also included geographical, historical and sociological perspectives on European integration, and even some meta-glances at how knowledge about the integration process was produced through statistics, reports and other kinds of documentation (Information folder, 1987).

Furthermore, the European Documentation Centre shared the Institute of European Studies’ ambition of analysing Community developments from a regional perspective first and foremost. This was indicated by another of its initiatives, beginning in 1986: a journal titled Castilla y León en Europa. In the pages of the journal, that perspective was reflected in frequent writings on, for example, the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF) and its potential advantages for Castile and León (see e.g. Hernández Sánchez, 1988a; Villaverde Castro, 1987).

Both the Institute and the Centre correspond to what Pfister (2015) has called the epistemic dimension of European integration, referring to how Europe ‘becomes manifest in terms of knowledge [. . .] about what an integrated Europe is, how it is functioning, about the direction and options of its development’. Yet, Pfister further notes, epistemic Europeanisation is not simply about observing, analysing or informing about European integration. Research fields like European Studies and EU Studies also contribute to that process. One reason for that is that there is a constant discursive interplay between researchers and policymakers, who tend to draw on and mutually reinforce the same conceptual repertoire. This was clearly the case for the symposium arranged by the Institute of European Studies in 1982, as we have already seen, and likewise for Castilla y León en Europa, where EC-insiders like Juan Colino Salamanca would sometimes report on processes in which they themselves were involved. A former lawyer, Salamanca had received his training at the UVa before entering Spanish politics and the PSOE in the 1970s, and from there the European Parliament in 1986. Writing for the journal a year later, he celebrated the ‘happy anniversary’ of the Spanish adhesion by summarising the country’s first year as a member state (Colino Salamanca, 1987).

In the writings of university academics too, boundaries were sometimes equally blurry between describing and analysing European policies and initiatives on the one hand and advocating them on the other. By the same token, the history of the EC was often narrated through a teleological lens, based on more or less explicit assumptions about an ever-closer union. Indeed, Duque Domínguez (1986) assured readers of the first issue that the European Documentation Centre of the UVa did not simply aspire to be ‘a mere documentation deposit [. . .] passively waiting to be consulted’, but also to establish a ‘dialogue’ with those who wanted to partake in ‘the progressive march towards an authentic European cultural unity’. In a later article, taking the Treaty of Rome of 1957 as his starting point, he developed the idea of a continuous development from economic cooperation to common political institutions and – eventually – cultural cohesion. In the near future, one could thus expect ‘a progression towards a European citizen who is morally better because he lives better, in an economic, social and cultural reality which is less contradictory and richer in possibilities than the one that existed before the Treaty of Rome’ (Duque Domínguez, 1988).

For sociologist Alfredo Hernández Sánchez, optimism regarding this progression was infused with a certain measure of historical determinism. Whether writing on the Single European Act (which was signed just as Spain entered the EC) or the growing importance of the European Parliament, Sánchez tended to describe the current trajectory of the EC as the logical conclusion of what had begun in the early postwar period, while also connecting it to macro developments of the 1980s. Like several others in the two previous sections, Sánchez believed that a more thorough-going and encompassing European integration process was both necessary and inevitable given the rise of financial capitalism and the increasing importance of information technologies. This ‘third industrial revolution’ created ‘the objective conditions’ for the realisation of ideas manifested already in 1957. The Single European Act was therefore ‘not just another step, but a significant step in this European becoming, which has the realization of utopia as its final end: “the political union of Europe”’.

This was not to say that things would go smoothly. Sánchez warned that an exaggerated faith in a free, borderless market would increase economic inequalities between richer European regions and poorer ones like Castile and León, and that this imbalance was a long-term threat to integration (Hernández Sánchez, 1988a; see also Hernández Sánchez, 1987). Furthermore, his vision came with a conviction that changes might be as painful as they were necessary: ‘This new society will create a new economic and social structure all over the world, and in this sense, only the peoples who are willing to change, only the peoples who are willing to evolve, only the peoples who are willing to leave the old habits and customs behind, only the peoples who are willing to accept the solutions that are offered to them by the new technologies [. . .] will have a future’. The challenge of adjusting both the younger and the older generation of workers to the changing needs of the labour market was enormous, and placed a pressing responsibility on governments, educational institutions and private industry alike (Hernández Sánchez, 1988b).

Another source of Europeanisation was student associations, the emergence of which was a general feature of post-Francoist universities in the 1980s. In Valladolid, several associations combined an academic profile with a broader, cultural one, arranging concerts, movie nights and excursions as well as lectures and conferences. Several of them also arranged activities related to the EC, or European integration more generally. The most obvious example was the Asociación Cultural Europa, established in 1986 by students from philosophy and arts, architecture, economic and entrepreneurial sciences and – predominantly – law. At an inauguration act at a local bar, presided over by Rector Tejerina, it was stated that the association sought to promote contacts and collaboration between different faculties, and to ‘address current issues in order to bring the university closer to current social reality’ (El Norte de Castilla, 1986e). As indicated by the name, this often implied issues related to Europe and the EC. Among the association’s activities in the following year was the 4-day conference ‘The Spirit of Europe’ in one of the university’s main buildings, the Palacio de Santa Cruz. Most contributions applied an idealistic, long durée perspective to European integration. Vintila Horia, a profesor of literature from the University of Alcalá de Henares, spoke in Hegelian terms of a ‘European spirit’ which had taken different shapes throughout history. As one manifestation inevitably decayed, it became part of the next manifestation: the Roman empire had been followed by Christianity, which was now merging with the heritage of the Enlightenment in ‘the resurgence of the spirit of science’. Other themes at the conference were ‘Europe from Charlemagne to Monnet’ and ‘St. Agustine as the first promoter of Europe’ (Asociación Cultural Europa, 1987; see also El Norte de Castilla, 1987a).

Other associations had similar activities, without having an explicitly European profile. I have already mentioned that the Ateneo Universitario arranged a tertulia on the EC led by Justino Duque in 1985. It later held a 3-day conference on ‘The Future of Europe’ at the nearby castle of La Mota, in collaboration with the EC. Except for the UVa, participating students came from universities in Madrid, Granada, Málaga, Oviedo and Santiago de Compostela. Moreover, the association’s memorias from 1985 to 1986 mentions that it ‘collaborated’ in a variety of university courses on themes like ‘The European Identity’ and ‘The Humanistic Values of Europe’, both at the UVa and other universities (Ateneo Universitario, 1987). Student associations also invited speakers with a more direct political message concerning Spain and the EC. A member of the local Chamber of Commerce and Industry, invited by the Asociación Cultural Europa, stressed that Spanish companies needed to adapt faster to technological developments in Western Europe (Asociación Cultural Europa, 1987). In early 1986, the Asociación Crítico-Cultural Universitaria invited Julio Pascual, president of the Spanish Club Liberal. The title of Pascual’s lecture roughly translates as ‘We are in Europe, there are no more excuses’. His point was that, as a newcomer in a community of technologically superior nations, Spain had to use the one advantage it possessed: its comparatively young population. To do this, it first had to deregulate and liberalize its labour market, which at this point had been under the control of the governing socialists in the PSOE since 1982. If these changes were not made, Pascual warned, Spaniards were doomed to be ‘second-rank citizens in Europe’ (Asociación Crítico-Cultural Universitaria, 1987; see also El Norte de Castilla, 1986a).

The views of invited speakers are not necessarily representative of the student associations as such. It is certain, however, that the activities arranged by these associations around the mid 1980s indicate that interest in Europe and Europeanisation was present among students at the UVa too, just as it was articulated in the speeches and writings of rectors and professors. Through these activities, moreover, student associations became fora for an epistemic Europeanisation similar to the one in Castilla y León en Europa. That epistemic Europeanisation contained knowledge about the EC and its institutions, along with specific assumptions about Europe as an historic and cultural entity, about the direction of the current integration process and, finally, about what Spain had to do to adjust to that process.

Conclusions

While the late 1980s is often seen as the very starting point for the Europeanisation of the universities, the present article has pointed out that the UVa went through an initial phase of Europeanisation in the years prior to that. As for the how-question posed in the beginning of the article, this occurred on several levels: in the speeches and writings of rectors, professors and researchers; in the International Relations Service initiated by the newly elected rector Tejerina in 1984, which would preside over the signing of multiple collaboration agreements with other European universities; in the founding of an Instituto de Estudios Europeos in 1982, which highlights the role of the Faculties of Law and of Economic and Entrepreneurial Sciences as prime movers of Europeanisation at the UVa; in the activities of newly formed students associations which had a decided interest in the European integration process, one of them to the extent of including Europa in its name. By contrast, I have found no evidence of opposition to Europeanisation in the sources, although the potential problems and challenges associated therewith were certainly discussed, for example in Castilla y León en Europa.

These initiatives should be understood in terms of a dynamic interplay between bottom-up and top-down Europeanisation. This applies in an institutional and material sense as well as an epistemological and normative one. As for the former aspect, some initiatives taken at the university level eventually became building blocks in the making of large-scale European infrastructures. This was the case when bilateral collaboration agreements signed between the UVa and other European universities in the early and mid 1980s were later expanded within the framework of Erasmus and similar programmes. Another example is that the UVa: s European Documentation Centre, a local implementation of an initiative from the European Council, evidently drew on the ideas and resources of the Institute of European Studies, founded at the university a couple of years earlier. As for the latter aspect, activities like the Institute of European Studies’ ‘Symposium on Spain and the European Communities’, or the Asociación Cultural Europa: s conference ‘The Future of Europe’, or publications like Castilla y León en Europa, resulted from collaboration with EC-institutions, and acted as shared intermediating spaces between academics and EC-officials. The knowledge produced and circulated in these spaces did not merely reflect or describe Europeanisation; it actively defined and shaped it too, as exemplified when Justino Duque explained that the Institute of European Studies aimed to both analyse and promote Spain’s ongoing adhesion to the EC, or when Alfredo Hernández Sánchez wrote his articles on the inevitability of a future political union of Europe. Drawing on Jasanoff (2004), we may also frame this in terms of co-production between transnational policy making on the one hand, and the epistemic practices and research agendas emerging within particular universities on the other.

That leaves us with the second question of the article: why these initiatives? In the present article, I have emphasised the extent to which Europeanisation at the UVa was promoted as an economic necessity on several levels. On one level, European funds and resources were an attractive prospect for a growing university, to which recent reforms had just ceded both greater autonomy and greater financial responsibilities. The ideal university was therefore a university that was open to both regional economic interests and Europe, and those two notions were interconnected. To go slightly beyond the scope of the present article, this interconnectedness would become increasingly evident in the coming years, for instance when the University–Business Foundation of Valladolid (FUEVA), which I have mentioned only briefly here, became directly involved in European programmes like the COMETT. It deserves to be stressed, however, that the regional approach to the Communities – of which we have seen multiple examples in the preceding pages – should not only be seen against the backdrop of Spain’s recent division into comunidades autónomas. It also corresponded to developments at the transnational level. The 1980s was precisely the time when the idea of a ‘Europe of the Regions’ came to the fore within the European Commission, entailing prospects of material resources as well as direct access to the European policy process (Elias, 2008; Warlouzet, 2024).

On another level, Europeanisation was also understood as a both national and European answer to the rise of information technologies and global competition, especially from the United States and Japan. This aligns with Cino Pagliarello’s (2022) observation that the formation of a European education policy in the second half of the 1980s was mainly driven by a crisis narrative about Europe’s lack of competitiveness. One could further argue that the presence of that narrative in this context testifies to its power and pervasiveness; after all, Spain had until very recently developed in relative isolation from the Western countries with whom its academics now identified and saw common causes. At the same time, this also invites us to think more broadly about the origin and articulation of such motives: were they necessarily produced and diffused by policy makers in and around the European Commission – the focal point of Cino Pagliarello (see also Corbett, 2005) – or was there perhaps a more complex circulation of ideas and narratives between supranational, national and local levels at play? That is a question to keep in mind in future investigations.

While Europeanisation was often discursively linked to common European matters, the national specificities of Spain in the 1980s were nevertheless important. The context of democratisation and transition provided an ideational framework in which calls for Europeanisation became more persuasive. As I have observed, engaging with other European universities was one way of pursuing the generally celebrated ideals of openness and integration with society, thus abandoning the authoritarian ways of the Francoist university. Furthermore, the publications and activities of rectors, researchers and student associations alike show that interest in the actual European integration process often went hand in hand with an interest in and identification with Europe as a historical and cultural entity. Appeals to a common European identity or a common set of Western values should not, I would argue, be viewed as mere rhetorical make-up on what was essentially an economically motivated undertaking. Rather, the fact that these appeals were made at all – and quite frequently so – indicates that they had significance and resonance in the context. Given the general upsurge of europeísmo during the Spanish transition, this is hardly surprising.