Introduction to Special Issue: “Mapping the Europeanisation of the Universities in the 1980s and 1990s”

Introduction

In the mid-2020s, a European dimension is strongly present in universities across Europe. Since the 1980s, hundreds of thousands of students and teachers have each year participated in Erasmus and other exchange programmes. The Bologna Process has created a common structure for higher education and the ‘European Research Area’ has been in place for a quarter of a century. Several European Universities alliances have been launched, and discussions are underway to introduce a common European degree. Today, the prestigious grants of the European Research Council (established in 2007) set a standard for what is considered ‘excellent’ research. Indeed, whether one looks at European-level institutions and initiatives as central nodes or mechanisms in a Bourdieuan academic field (see e.g. Boncourt, 2017; Kropp and Larsen, 2023) or as a status intermediary that circulates and amplifies scholarly reputations (Edlund, 2020) – the far-reaching power of European (Union) institutions and agencies in the higher education sector is today recognised by scholars of many theoretical convictions. Yet where some scholars and politicians celebrate this educational and scientific European integration and point to EU educational initiatives as great ‘examples of progress’ (Draghi, 2024; European Commission, 2012), in other contexts the first signs of political pushback and something we could term ‘Euro-educational skepticism’ are on the rise (Matthews, 2024; van der Bij, 2024).

It should therefore come to no surprise that historians of higher education and knowledge, as well as sociologists, policy scholars, political scientists and economists, have increasingly turned their attention to Europeanisation and education in general (Alexiadou, 2007; Grek and Lawn, 2009; Sorensen and Eeva, 2024) and the ways in which European integration processes impacted European universities and the wider European student body and society with them (Christensen and Holst, 2020; Dobbins and Kwiek, 2017; Pabian, 2009). From counting Erasmus-babies to mapping the mobility of scholars across borders (European Commission: Directorate-General for Education, Youth, Sport and Culture and ICF, 2017) and triangulating the effects of European funding on research topics (Kropp and Larsen, 2023), the policy and scholarly literature on the effects of European higher education policies is growing fast (Haikola and Östling, 2025). Especially in recent years, valuable studies on the history of European science and research policy have begun to emerge (Irion and Volf, 2024; Lehmann, 2021; Mitzner, 2020; Verbergt, 2024), as well as promising attempts to analyse the role of education in the process of European integration (Ruppen Coutaz and Paoli, 2025).

Even so, much work remains to be done if we want to understand the Europeanisation of universities in its full historical and sociological complexity. The history of the Europeanisation of the universities as a whole – encompassing higher education as well as research – essentially remains to be written. Studies on the history of the Europeanisation of higher education for example often focus on top-down policies enacted by the European Commission (Corbett, 2005; Pépin, 2006a), with much emphasis on the late 1990s and the Bologna Process, which consisted of a series of ministerial meetings and agreements between European countries to ensure comparability in the standards and quality of higher-education qualifications (e.g. Gornitzka, 2007; Olsen, 2007). As a result, concrete historical case studies of the earlier periods, as well as more general interpretations of the Europeanisation of universities on the meso-level of institutions, remain out of sight. How, indeed, did universities react to the policies of the European Commission? How did European ideas and policies spread, change institutions or fail? Much of the political science and sociological literature on Europeanisation has highlighted what we can call ‘accomplished’ Europeanisation in hindsight. This means that the unpredictable and complex process of Europeanisation has remained overlooked – with historians as well as other scholars being insufficiently up to date on the specific activities and practices that were part of the Europeanisation of universities.

Before we continue, an important clarification in the relationship between internationalisation and Europeanisation is needed. While Europeanisation can indeed be understood as a specific form of internationalisation, it simultaneously transcends this category. This is especially true when the processes of Europeanisation are related to EC’s/EU’s legal framework and institutional architecture, which establish a supranational system characterised by binding legal norms and deep political coordination. This distinguishes Europeanisation from more conventional forms of international cooperation, which typically rely on intergovernmental mechanisms and voluntary alignment. Moreover, Europeanisation in this fashion tend to entail a substantive normative dimension: it concerns how the EC/EU actively has shaped domestic norms, practices, and behaviours, rather than merely facilitated increased cross-border interaction (Börzel, 2009; Featherstone and Radaelli, 2003; Ladrech, 2010).

The aim of this thematic issue is to address this gap in the literature by mapping the Europeanisation of five universities during the formative period of the 1980s and 1990s. In the issue, we address three key questions. We ask (1) how the Europeanisation of universities happened, (2) why it happened, and (3) which effects this Europeanisation had on both universities and wider university-society relationships. More precisely, we tackle these questions by combining case studies of five seats of learning located in different parts of Europe and in countries with different relations to postwar European integration: Ghent in Belgium, Aalborg in Denmark, Valladolid in Spain, Berlin (Humboldt University) in (East) Germany and Lund in Sweden. Through these case studies, we hope to gain a complex understanding of the processes of Europeanisation in different contexts. At each of these places during the 1980s and 1990s, processes of Europeanisation emerged against the background of national concerns, regional considerations and local traditions, making them ideal testing grounds to question how the Europeanisation of higher education and research came to fruition and why it accelerated in this period and at these places. Working comparatively, the combination of these five cases also enables us to untangle what the relative importance of internal and external forces and actors was, whether economic or cultural ideas about ‘knowledge’, ‘Europe’, ‘universities’ played a role, and what the relationship was between top-down coercion and bottom-up voluntary participation in the Europeanisation of universities (Östling et al., 2026).

Universities are part of a broader higher education and research landscape that also encompasses universities of applied sciences, technical universities and business schools. While these institutions all often fall under the umbrella of higher education, they differ in important ways. For instance, some universities of applied sciences offer master’s degrees or even PhD programmes, yet they do not hold the same status as traditional universities. It is also important to remember that there are significant differences between European countries in terms of what is considered part of the national university system and what lies outside it. This special issue focuses specifically on universities rather than higher education in general. Although we recognise that Europeanisation has also shaped other types of higher education, these dimensions lie beyond the scope of the present contributions.

In the remainder of this introduction, we lay a general scholarly foundation on which these five empirical studies can rest. In a first part, we outline what we see as three different phases of postwar European research and higher education policy, which form the crucial intellectual background of policy initiatives against which one needs to understand the case studies. In a second part, we explain in more detail how we conceptualise ‘Europeanisation’ as a historical process, and how we relate our work to the current literature on this vast process of postwar change. After having defined this key concept, we then introduce two other theoretical frameworks that we use to structure our methodological choices: ‘institutional work’ and ‘discursive institutionalisation’. This part is followed by a presentation and contextualisation of the five universities we investigate and a summary of the findings of each article. In the jointly written concluding article of this issue, we bring forth some key observations from our mapping of the Europeanisation of universities and try to widen the perspective.

Three phases in postwar European policies of higher education and research

During the first decades after the Second World War, higher education and research policy were not central areas in European integration endeavours. Although pan-European visions for science were formulated as early as in the 1950s, higher education and universities were primarily perceived as national concerns. Only in the last two decades of the century, a new order took shape in which a common European research and higher education policy started to emerge.

Nevertheless, it is possible to discern a first phase of the postwar Europeanisation of universities that ran parallel to political processes of Europeanisation from around 1950 to the mid-1960s. During this time, several specific initiatives were taken but no overall plan for the Europeanisation of universities and higher education was implemented. The joint research efforts in space research and particle physics, such as CERN (inaugurated in 1954), are one example; another is the educational and research centres established to promote European culture and identity, including the Collège d’Europe in Bruges and the Institut für Europäische Geschichte in Mainz. Even if, overall, these initiatives were pinned on ideas of pan-European cooperation among scientists and universities, they remained relatively bound to specific institutes and locations.

Yet another example is the Standing Conference of European Rectors (CRE), an association of European university rectors and vice-chancellors whose first meeting was in Cambridge in 1955, even though the actual establishment only took place in 1959–1964. Various plans for one or more elite pan-European universities were put forward in the 1950s, not least by figures close to the European Atomic Energy Community, but nothing materialised, largely because the CRE opposed them. According to Lehmann (2021), this organisation was even welded together by its opposition to the visions of a common university. The opposition from the rectors was based on their fear that they would lose power and resources if there was a shift from the national to the European level. In a seemingly paradoxical way, this process forced European university leaders to Europeanise their cooperation to avoid the Europeanisation of the continent’s academic system.

The second phase of postwar European research policy encompasses roughly the years 1965–1980. This was a time of radical change for the university, famously described by Trow (1973; see also Trow, 2006) as ‘the transition from elite to mass higher education’, with an unprecedented influx of students, a strong expansion of the whole academic sector and a general left-wing radicalism (Rüegg, 2011). Against this backdrop, the CRE, for example, came to rethink its approach to European co-operation. For this collective of university rectors, Europe more and more became a solution to national problems such as funding issues and accusations from the younger generation of a lack of international commitment. The organisational structure that had been created in the previous decade to kerb European integration was hence being used for the opposite purpose, namely to find supranational solutions to national problems (Lehmann, 2021; Mitzner, 2020).

During this same period, the European Communities also started to show interest in higher education policy. Slowly but surely, the basic structures for a future common European research and education policy thus were being created. Some concrete initiatives from the 1970s would moreover prove to have direct effects. The EC’s education policy action programme from 1976 can be seen as a starting point for the major initiatives launched in the 1980s, as it signalled a unique form of cooperation in areas that were fundamental to the structure of nation states, using pilot projects, study visits and specific sub-programmes (Pépin, 2007). The Joint Study Programme, for example, was a direct precursor to the Erasmus Programme launched in 1987 (Lehmann, 2021). Another new addition during this period was the European University Institute (EUI), which, after a protracted process, began operations in Florence in 1976. Although not an EC institution, it was to have great symbolic and real significance for European postgraduate education and research in parts of the social sciences and humanities (Palayret, 2025).

Based on these early initiatives, the EC in the early 1980s increasingly emerged as a player of growing importance. Prior to this period, it had mainly been individual academics and technocrats who rallied behind European efforts to develop common research and education policies. But when in the late 1970s and early 1980s advanced knowledge increasingly was regarded as a vital resource in the new ‘knowledge society’, these issues also became an element of overall strategic work on the part of European Communities policymakers and politicians.

The idea of scientific or academic knowledge as an increasingly important power resource, for individuals as well as societies, indeed appears to be a driving force for new pan-European initiatives in the research and higher education sectors. It first arose among Western social scientists in the 1960s and 1970s, in the context of university expansion and massive public spending on higher education and research. A variety of labels existed for this alleged new order, such as ‘post-industrial society’, ‘information society’ and ‘knowledge society’ (Hornidge, 2011). In the 1980s and 1990s, the latter concept was popularised by policymakers, administrators and lobbyists. Inspiration came from globalisation, the rise of financial capitalism and the rapid development of information technologies, but also from a series of international economic crises. Discourse was often deterministic, envisaging the knowledge society as both the cause and goal of social developments.

In this context, universities were understood as ‘integral to the continuous flows of people, knowledge, information, technologies, products and financial capital’, and hence also as vital for global competitiveness (Välimaa and Hoffman, 2008). Besides being centres of innovation and scientific know-how, universities were also ascribed responsibility for providing individuals with the skills and capabilities necessary to cope in an increasingly competitive, constantly changing world (see also Andersson, 2010; Heidenreich, 2003). Such visions could also lead to calls for international cooperation, for instance between European universities. In 1984, the first Framework Programme for Research and Technological Development was launched in this spirit to promote ‘the development of economic activities’ by balancing ‘scientific and technological development within the Community’ (Council of the European Communities, 1983). With a budget of the equivalent of €3.8 billion today, it was a considerable investment for the time, even if today it does not seem like an astronomical amount (Irion, 2024; Mitzner, 2020).

By the early to mid-1980s, a third phase of postwar European research policy becomes discernible. A significant milestone was the adoption and launch of the Erasmus Programme by the European Council and Parliament in the summer of 1987, initially with the aim of increasing student mobility in higher education. Such EC initiatives did not remain limited to member states of the EC, but increasingly expanded into other parts of Europe, particularly after the fall of the Iron Curtain. For instance, in 1990, the Council of the European Communities adopted TEMPUS (the Trans-European Mobility Programme for University Studies), which promoted academic exchange between Western and Eastern European countries. The aim was to enable comprehensive higher education and modernisation reforms in the former Eastern Bloc. Besides new ideas about a ‘knowledge economy’, the end of the Cold War and the dissolution of the Soviet Union thus also shaped this period of Europeanisation.

Another important factor shaping the development of higher education in Europe during the 1980s and 1990s was the emergence of new demands on the role of academics, closer collaboration with industry and growing expectations that universities should contribute to economic growth. By the mid-1990s, the OECD emphasised that research and the expansion of higher education were key drivers for job creation and economic development. This, in turn, paved the way for new concepts aimed at enhancing efficiency in public administration, inspired by New Public Management and the rapid increasing marketisation of universities (Östling, 2024).

Particularly in the 1990s, when the transformation of higher education and science in Central and Eastern European states was linked to the implementation of EC/EU norms and standards (Surman and Petushkova, 2022), this resulted in a gradual geographical broadening of EC initiatives regarding the university landscape. Accordingly, the EC/EU Socrates Programme, launched in 1994 and lasting until 1999 with the aim of fostering cooperation, mobility and exchange among educational institutions across Europe, included numerous countries that joined the EU following the enlargements in 1995 (Sweden, Austria and Finland) and in 2004 (10 further countries, including seven from the former Eastern Bloc), as well as Turkey.

Besides revealing an increased political intensity and willingness to be part of pan-European initiatives, this third phase after the mid-1980s also, more broadly, marks a transition from one order of European scientific cooperation to another. Wedlin and Nedeva (2015) indeed called the ‘old’ order of the 1960s and 1970s one of ‘Science in Europe’, characterised by European funding complementing national funding and focussing mainly on applied research. This model was replaced by a new one called ‘European Science’ in the 1980s and 1990s, which according to these authors was characterised by a more pan-European ambition and a desire to integrate national systems into a common European structure. In addition, a programmatic competitive mentality became pervasive in the European Union’s science policies, and ‘scientific excellence’ was strongly emphasised.

This new order built upon older ideas of the ‘knowledge society’ and manifested itself politically in the European Research Area (ERA), launched in 2000 and linking several EU research programmes and resources. Ultimately, the ERA aimed to promote EU’s competitiveness and was thus closely linked to the so-called Lisbon Strategy, whose strategic goal was for the European Union to become ‘the most competitive and dynamic knowledge-based economy in the world’ by 2010 (Verbergt, 2024; Wedlin and Nedeva, 2015). Alongside these research efforts, significant policies were also implemented in the field of higher education. At a 1999 meeting in Bologna, education ministers from 29 countries agreed to create a unified European higher education landscape. Called the Bologna Process, the overarching objectives were to promote mobility, employability and overall competitiveness of the continent. Over the following decade, a new common education and degree system was gradually implemented, bringing us to the current moment in which many aspects of university life and mobility are unthinkable without taking account of postwar intragovernmental initiatives and the EU’s history of programmes and initiatives (Cino Pagliarello, 2022; Corbett, 2005; Marquand, 2018).

What is the Europeanisation of universities?

The Europeanisation of the specific universities that are discussed in this issue – Ghent, Aalborg, Valladolid, Humboldt University of Berlin and Lund – logically happened against the background of these three phases in the history of European higher education and research policy initiatives. Importantly, however, we do not see the overarching Europeanisation of universities as an accomplished outcome of a linear and teleological process of ‘integration’, but rather as part of ‘a variety of political, social, economic and cultural processes that promote (or modify) a sustainable strengthening of intra-European connections and similarities through acts of emulation, exchange and entanglement and that have been experienced and labelled as ‘European’ in the course of history’ (Hirschhausen and Patel, 2010: 2).

This understanding stands in contrast with how the concept of Europeanisation came into academic use in the 1990s, mainly in the fields of law and political science. In these fields, it served to analyse the development of political and economic institutions within the EU, and the adaption of nation states to the demands of union-membership. Social scientists supplemented this top down-perspective by studying how European governance shaped cultural and personal identities. Either way, the history of Europeanisation was essentially equated with the history of the EU (Greiner et al., 2022; Hirschhausen and Patel, 2010).

In contrast to these approaches, the case studies presented in this issue tend to emphasise a more recursive and unpredictable process of Europeanisation. In this, our approach to Europeanisation conceptually aligns with that of political historians such as Kiran Klaus Patel or Martin Conway, who have in the past 15 years adopted a concept of Europeanisation with a critical edge towards teleological narratives of ‘an ever-closer Union’. Patel’s work, for example, has undermined the dominant teleological narrative on Europeanisation by analysing the many competing Europeanisation projects developing in the postwar period, thereby decentering the EC/EU (Lehmann, 2021; Mitzner, 2020; Patel, 2018). As such, he has convincingly shown that the EU was not the dominant factor or ‘final destination’ of all processes (Patel, 2018, 2022), and that Europeanisation processes may well also include processes of disintegration, demarcation and conflict – a finding several of the case studies in this issue indeed confirm. With a similar spirit, historians have also demonstrated the fundamentally contingent, socially constructed and discursive nature of ‘Europe’ and Europeanisation (Ceretta and Curli, 2017) – an approach which has also manifested itself in the sociology of Europeanisation (Büttner et al., 2022; Trenz, 2016) and with the ‘narrative turn in European studies’ (Bouza García, 2017).

With these new studies, the concept of Europeanisation has been widened significantly. Historian Michael Gehler has made a distinction between European integration as a fairly recent political project on the one hand, and Europeanisation as a multitude of phenomena with long historical roots and fluid geographical boundaries on the other (Gehler, 2016). In addition, the literature on Europeanisation has gone far beyond the EU and its predecessors. Attempts have been made to account for Europeanisation processes which emerge unintentionally or involuntarily, for instance as the result of new technological infrastructures (Kleinschmidt, 2010), of initiatives which did not necessarily have Europeanisation as their goal (Dittrich, 2022; Szidat, 2022) or even of Euroscepticism and resistance to other, more articulated forms of Europeanisation (Gosewinkel, 2015; Müller and von Hodenberg, 2024). Hirschhausen and Patel (2010) thus propose three ways of studying Europeanisation: in the form of ideas, discourses and visions (Europe Imagined), as the realisation of such ideas through organisations and activities (Europe Constructed) and as an unintended consequence (Europe Emergent).

Our proposal to focus on universities should also be seen as such a move ‘beyond the EU’, bringing to light other aspects and organisations when thinking about the strengthening of intra-European connections and similarities. To do that, the papers in this issue draw, for example, on the analytical repertoire of Europeanisation ‘from the bottom-up’. This concept has been applied in the literature in a broad sense – potentially referring to any project or initiative emanating ‘from below’ the EU-level, demonstrating how civil society organisations (Trenz, 2011), popular culture (Maldener, 2022), the world of sports (Weber, 2022) and the mass media (Herzer, 2019) have functioned as agents or intermediaries of Europeanisation and not merely as recipients thereof. Similarly, we have been inspired by the recent special issue on the history of European science policy in the Journal of European Integration History (2024), where a distinction is made between Europeanisation in and through science. The former type refers to policy initiatives of the EC/EU, the latter to initiatives which originated outside of that structure in the postwar period, like the aforementioned CERN (Forgiarini, 2024) and the Standing Committee of the Social Sciences (Kropp, 2024). A central argument is that such external activities paved the way for the EU’s rise to prominence in science policy, for instance by fostering European awareness among scientists and by creating networks and infrastructures which were eventually assimilated into the overarching European structure through ‘late appropriation’ (Irion and Volf, 2024). Together with our work, this demonstrates that bottom-up Europeanisation has often been or become intertwined with top-down Europeanisation, and that historians are well advised to combine the two approaches.

Related to this bottom-up approach, the focus on universities also allows us to enter conversation with the growing interest in the emotional and experience-based dimensions of Europeanisation that are involved in travelling, leisure activities and cultural exchange. Here, concepts like the ‘Europeanisation of identities’ (Brand et al., 2024), ‘everyday Europeanhood’ (Frame and Curyło, 2024) and ‘vécureal Europeanisation’ (Greiner, 2022) have been used. An insight from this field of research is that everyday Europeanisation follows its own development curve and does not necessarily run parallel with European integration as a political and economic project (Brand et al., 2024). Again, this confirms the need for a multifaceted, non-linear approach to Europeanisation – also in studies of universities.

Drawing on this vast literature, and on Hirschhausen and Patel (2010) in specific, we thus understand Europeanisation as a broad, multi-levelled and multi-directed phenomenon, which is underpinned by ideas and discourses and materialised by actors carrying out activities in a multitude of settings. At the same time, we postulate that the Europeanisation of universities may also have occurred as a late appropriation of activities which originally had a different purpose altogether. Furthermore, since we analyse Europeanisation from the perspective of individual European universities, the concept of Europeanisation from the bottom-up is applicable throughout our articles. Yet, all our case studies point to an interplay between the ‘bottom’ and the ‘top’ – that is, between Europeanisation processes initiated at the university level, or even at the level of single faculties, departments or individuals, and those initiated at the supranational level.

Understanding the Europeanisation of universities: Key concepts

Indeed, the interplay between bottom-up and top-down dynamics of Europeanisation is a central theoretical and methodological thread in our work. In each of the five cases included in this special issue, bottom-up and top-down dynamics of (university) Europeanisation coexist and intermingle. In Berlin as in Valladolid or Lund, actors ‘on the ground’ picked up science policies and ideas but also influenced ‘phases’ of Europeanisation and policies made at the top. In Aalborg and Ghent, too, ideas about a unified higher education landscape circulating in European policy milieux landed in universities’ laps, but rectors and administrators also evaluated and gave feedback on EU- or nationally steered internationalisation programmes.

As mentioned already, we thus present the Europeanisation of universities as both a recursive and a discursive process, in which ideas, actors and their activities take a dynamic place between macro-, meso- and micro-levels. We have herein been inspired by two strands of sociological work, which we see as useful background theories of institutionalisation to understand how and why the Europeanisation of universities happened in the 1980s and 1990s. On the one hand, we have taken inspiration from the work of Vivien A. Schmidt on ‘discursive institutionalism’ (Schmidt, 2008, 2017); on the other hand, we have been inspired by the writings of Thomas Lawrence, Roy Suddaby and Bernard L. Lawrence on ‘institutional work’ (Lawrence et al., 2009). Together, these works have enabled us to prioritise and take seriously the agency and reflexivity of university or ‘knowledge actors’ (Östling et al., 2023) in the Europeanisation of universities, and to take account of differences in national university contexts as differing backgrounds for an overarching Europeanisation. In addition, these theoretical frameworks have steered our methodological choices. It is indeed one thing to know how to define Europeanisation; it is another to decide how to study the Europeanisation of universities, which are notoriously large and complex institutions with archives that stretch from departments to rectoral offices, student magazines and press releases.

First, let us explain why the work of institutional sociologist Vivien A. Schmidt is useful to understand the Europeanisation of universities in the 1980s and 1990s. On the most general level, Schmidt’s work attempts to explain how ideas turn into action – a question that is highly relevant when thinking about the way in which the ‘European idea’ and European policies were (not) realised in universities. As a scholar interested in institutional and political change, Schmidt has over her career highlighted how discourse, as the interactive process of conveying ideas, can transform (and even deconstruct) institutions. In this, she has been careful to explain that, while very powerful, ideas only change institutions in the right ‘meaning context’, and when they are transmitted via a fitting ‘logic of communication’ (Schmidt, 2008, 313). Actors, according to Schmidt, need to use their skills and abilities to convey information in line with the historical – local, periodical, cultural, political, etc. – context in which they find themselves. Their timing, the content of their ideas, as well as their communicative style and register, are thus all crucial to explain institutional change.

Applying Schmidt’s insights into what she terms the persuasive power of ideas (Schmidt, 2017) to the case studies selected for this issue, we have therefore paid particular attention to how ideas about Europe and the European higher education landscape worked in university contexts – how, when and why ideas circulated and convinced others, how they were repeated and refined, embedded in practice and imported and exported. To do so, all the case studies draw on university magazines, speeches, university-wide circulars, and other public-facing publications in which ideas about Europe and European higher education were articulated. By carefully checking how discourses on Europe related top-down initiatives to local contexts, we thus present a variegated view onto the ‘discursive Europeanisation’ that took place in universities in the 1980s and 1990s – aligning ourselves, indeed, with the Europe Imagined and Europe Constructed approaches mentioned in the previous section (Hirschhausen and Patel, 2010).

Importantly, this focus on ideas as possible factors drivers for change is not just useful to explain how Europeanisation always happened in context – or, as Schmidt would have it, in and through discourse – but it is also useful to bring our work on the Europeanisation of universities into conversation with the wider history of universities. As mentioned in the first part of this introduction, the second and third phases of European higher education and research policies were characterised by theories and notions of an emerging knowledge society. Up to now, however, it has only been assumed that the process of the Europeanisation of universities was closely entangled with this emerging discourse of the knowledge society in the postwar era, but this topic has rarely been empirically explored (Salajan, 2008). By checking how the knowledge and information society discourse became entangled in discourse about Europeanisation, we thus cover an important gap in the literature on university history in the twentieth century. In addition, we investigate how knowledge society discourse was embedded in a broader semantic web that also included ideas about Europeanisation.

Of course, besides ideas-in/and-contexts being crucial factors to understand how and why universities Europeanised, we also felt it was important to take account of the actual actors and activities that carried processes of Europeanisation. To do so, we found that Schmidt’s overarching theory of institutional change rhymes particularly well with the theory of institutional work proposed by sociologists Thomas Lawrence, Roy Suddaby and Bernard L. Lawrence. By putting emphasis on the intentional work or ‘purposive action’ that people perform within organisations, these authors launch a ‘research area to establish a broader vision of agency in relationship to institutions, one that avoids depicting actors either as ‘cultural dopes’ trapped by institutional arrangements or as hypermuscular institutional entrepreneurs’ (Lawrence et al., 2009: 1). Like Schmidt, Lawrence and others we thus see actors as reflexive, skilled and creative beings who work with the constraints and contexts in which they find themselves to enact change – and they do so by performing activities.

The concept of activities, indeed, has been particularly useful for us to direct our archival and analytical focus on Europeanisation in universities. Besides looking at and analysing discourses of Europeanisation, each of the five case studies in this issue also presents a view onto the array of practices or activities that were part of Europeanisation processes (an approach which, as Lawrence et al., 2009 also point out, moves the focus from ‘accomplishments’ to activities). Here, each of us have methodologically ‘followed’ key actors – those expressing important views on Europe and Europeanisation – to get a view onto their activities. Whether it was letter writing, being mobile, forming alliances, instructing people on how to apply for funding or lobbying with European administrators – Europeanisation, so we argue, included a variety of activities that were done by a variety of people. Focussing on (groups of) actors and their activities moreover made it possible to question which facilities and contexts enabled certain types of work, why certain actors engaged in ‘Europeanisation work’ and others (in the same university) did not and how much ‘effort’ people put into Europeanisation at a specific moment in time and in a specific place.

Overall, we thus found that university staff, rectors, professors, students and so on, all took on different roles – some acting as brokers, intermediaries, translators or go-betweens, others as leaders, pioneers, or spokespeople and so on. This makes it possible to think of these actors as belonging to specific groups, which were crucial to make Europeanisation work. We could see these groups in line with how anthropologist Jean Lave and sociologist Etienne Wenger theorised ‘communities of practice’, or how Peter M. Haas defined ‘epistemic communities’; but other terms like (more long-term) ‘advocacy coalitions’ (Cairney and Sabatier, 2015; Sabatier, 1993), ‘discourse coalitions’ (Hajer, 1993), or experts networks could apply, too. In such groups of people who ‘share a concern or a passion for something they do’ (Lave and Wenger, 1991) as well as a set of beliefs which provide a value-based foundation for their actions (Haas, 1992), people learn how to persuasively act better as they interact regularly – paving the way for specialisation, professionalisation and therein, a further acceleration of Europeanisation.

This last statement, of course, already brings us to some of the conclusions of our work – which we pick up in more detail in the concluding article to the issue where we work comparatively to explain how and why Europeanisation worked, and how this process transformed universities as crucial knowledge institutions in contemporary societies. First, however, we would like to introduce the case studies in more detail, moving from contexts in which enthusiasm for the European project was already since the 1950s an important background feature to spaces where clashes between various ideas of Europe found expression in the Europeanisation of universities, too.

Five universities, five laboratories for Europeanisation

The five universities examined in this thematic issue each illustrate distinct pathways through which the Europeanisation of universities unfolded across Europe in the 1980s and 1990s. Shaped by varying historical trajectories, political traditions, academic systems and national as well as geographic contexts, these universities provide valuable insights into the different forms Europeanisation has taken within higher education. That said, we acknowledge that the five cases to a certain extend reflect the characteristics of traditional universities. Moreover, it should be borne in mind that although Europeanisation has been a major driver of change in recent decades, one should not underestimate the role of national governments, both within and beyond the EU, in shaping the structure of higher education, including universities.

Each case study is presented in the order of the respective countries’ accession to the EC/EU, even though Europeanisation took place both before and after their entry into the Community/Union. We begin in Belgium with Ghent University (UGent), located in the East Flanders. Founded in 1817, Ghent University is today one of the country’s oldest and largest public universities. Belgium was one of the founding members of the EC in 1958 and has consistently demonstrated a strong commitment to advancing European integration. In the late 1980s, however, this did not mean that all universities were equally Europe-minded. In fact, it was only when the administrators at Ghent University in 1986 realised that other Belgian universities were receiving more EU funding, that the university’s central administration launched an intensive campaign to position Ghent University as a truly ‘European University’. In the article “Europe as Opportunity: How Europeanisation Changed Ghent University in the 1980s and 1990s”, Marie-Gabrielle Verbergt illustrates how Europeanisation at this university was thus propelled primarily by external economic pressures and a discourse of ‘institutional opportunities’. Providing a three-phased history of discursive Europeanisation at this Flemish university, she furthermore explains how – building upon the articulation of this corporate identity – central administrators in the 1990s efficiently institutionalised Europeanisation, thereby defining not just for Ghent University, but for other universities, too, what it meant to ‘be European’.

Our next case is Aalborg University (AAU) established in 1974 in the northernmost part of Denmark far away from the national political institutions in Copenhagen. AAU was established as a reform university. This was reflected in a strong emphasis on pedagogical innovation, particularly through problem-based learning (PBL) as well as collaborative group and project work. With fewer than 7000 students until the 1990s, AAU remained one of Denmark’s smallest universities for many years. In her article ‘A Careful Embrace. Tracing the Europeanisation of Aalborg University, 1980–1994’, Maria Simonsen shows that, from its inception, AAU distinguished itself through its strong regional focus and was unusually early in its commitment to international collaboration. For AAU, international issues became a means of establishing a distinct identity within the Danish university landscape. Denmark joined the EC in 1973, following a lengthy negotiation process. Since the university was founded shortly after Denmark became a member of the EC, the EC and its institutions have always been an integral part of AAU’s environment. Thus, AAU has no clear ‘before and after’ in relation to the EC.

The oldest university in this thematic issue is the University of Valladolid (UVa), founded in the 13th century in what is now the autonomous region of Castile-León, north of the Spanish capital of Madrid. The UVa enjoyed a period of great prominence in the 16th century, when it was declared one of the three Major Universities of the Crown, along with those of Alcalá and Salamanca. It was reorganised as a state university in the 19th century. Like all Spanish universities, the UVa experienced a significant transformation in the late 1970s and early 1980s: from the influence of Franco’s authoritarian regime to a new democratic society that embraced European integration as a necessary step towards modernisation and international cooperation. The same period also saw changes on an organisational level. As new universities and university districts were created in the 1960s and 1970s, the UVa lost its campuses and centres in Bilbao and Santander. In subsequent decades, however, it incorporated new campuses in Palencia, Soria and Segovia, maintaining its position as the largest university in Castile–León. While Spain joined the EC in 1986, Karl Haikola contends in his article ‘Creating a Culture of Interrelations: Europeanisation Processes at the University of Valladolid, c. 1982–1988’ that the process of Europeanisation began well before this formal accession. It was shaped by earlier discourses and initiatives and rooted in a strong historical and cultural identification with Europe. At the same time, the article shows that Europeanisation processes were also strongly influenced by economic considerations, both locally and globally oriented ones.

The fourth university examined in this thematic issue is the Humboldt University of Berlin (HU), founded in 1809–1810. The University of Berlin was a world-renowned institute but was heavily impacted by Germany’s turbulent history in the 20th century: the flight of scholars after 1933, the war and the university’s subsequent integration into the German Democratic Republic (GDR) in a divided Berlin. HU became the largest and most prominent university in the GDR, but experienced a turbulent shift from a totalitarian to a democratic system by the end of the Cold War through the sudden and difficult process of German reunification. In the article ‘Between socialist past and European future: The Europeanisation of the Humboldt University of Berlin’, Martin Kristoffer Hamre analyses the crucial years in which this shift took place by exploring the different visions of international engagement within the HU. In this case, the Europeanisation process intertwined with an older tradition of (socialist) internationalism within the former Eastern Bloc, when the HU reinvented itself as a mediator between Western and Eastern Europe.

In the wake of Sweden’s victory over Denmark in 1658, Lund University was established in the newly annexed province of Scania, symbolising the consolidation of Swedish authority in the region. Since the establishment of this centre of knowledge in 1666, it has grown to one of the most traditional and prestigious universities in the country. Even though the university in Lund is geographically located more than 500 km from Stockholm and its powerful national institutions, its location in the south later gave it a favourable geographical position of being closer to continental Europe. This proved advantageous when the push for European integration gained momentum in the late 1980s, particularly as Sweden, after years of debate, decided to join the EU in 1994. In his article ‘European Awakening. Discursive Europeanisation and Academic Embrace of Europe at Lund University, 1985–1995’, Johan Östling traces how a European discourse developed out of a general rhetoric of internationalisation at the university, but also through emergent European collaboration with and through the nearby University of Copenhagen.

Taken together, these five universities comprise five laboratories for academic Europeanisation. They all had different starting points and belonged to specific political, geographical, economic and intellectual contexts, which is precisely why it is scholarly fruitful to treat them within the same analytical framework.

By doing so in this special issue, we also hope to contribute to the development of university history as a genre. It is a potentially wide-ranging field with numerous points of intersections, inviting inquiry from multiple perspectives and theoretical approaches. Given the university’s extensive past and global presence, one might expect a rich and thriving historiography. Yet many studies of the universities have remained traditional in scope and have often been closely linked to historical jubilees (Dhondt, 2015; Östling, 2018, 2023; Pietsch, 2025). The last two decades, however, the field of university history has undergone a significant transformation, evolving into a dynamic and diverse enterprise influenced by broader trends in social, cultural, intellectual, institutional and global history. In recent years, moreover, several of the modern universities, including the more experimental reform institutions established in the 1960s and 1970s, have reached a stage of maturity. This development has paved the way for new approaches and fresh perspectives on topics such as modern universities architecture, pedagogical practices and relationships with the state (de Coninck-Smith, 2020; Lüthje and Schütz, 2024; Pellew and Taylor, 2021; Simonsen and Rüdiger, 2024; Whyte, 2015). The growing body of recent publications underscores that the time has come, not only to historicise modern universities and to situate them within a broader historical context, but also to put the history of older, more traditional universities into these new contexts (Simonsen, 2025).

In this special issue, we take further steps towards developing university history. We do this by shifting the chronological focus even further forward in time and concentrating on the 1980s and 1990s. In connexion with this, we also discuss the universities in relation to the emergence of a new, post-industrial social order, the ‘knowledge society’. Last but not least, we interpret the transformation the universities in light of Europeanisation processes: what they looked like at five seats of learning, why they occurred and what their consequences were.