Conclusion: “Mapping the Europeanisation of the Universities in the 1980s and 1990s”

It’s the economy, Europe!

To begin, we must emphasise the importance of notions of competition and discourses about economic change and opportunities that circulated both in and outside universities. The early Europeanisation of universities which we studied in our case studies, so we believe, did not simply happen because university leadership was ‘economically interested’ in European subsidies. Even if the actions of the European Commission provided universities with a new opportunity to gain access to larger education markets and new funding opportunities for research, opportunities alone do not explain why these universities so eagerly (and in some cases: so efficiently) turned to Europe. Indeed, while the Erasmus/Socrates Programme and the Framework Programmes for Research and Technological Development effectively allowed the universities of Ghent, Aalborg, Valladolid, Berlin and Lund to gain funding for student and faculty mobility, for new research projects, and for administrator training and mobility – the ‘opportunity’ of a European mindset and funding had to be made attractive, first.

To understand why Europeanisation worked, we therefore believe it is crucial to stress that the Europeanisation of universities in the later 1980s and early 1990s both promoted and reproduced a more general competitive mindset. This conclusion is in line with several studies of changes in research and education policy in Europe during the 1980s and 1990s, for example for Britain (Agar, 2019), Germany (Mayer, 2019) and Denmark (Lamberty, 2022). In our case studies on Aalborg, Ghent and Valladolid, it is, for instance, exemplified by the fact that these universities perceived a true ‘need to compete’, and often explicitly linked it to the Single European Act of 1986, with its prospect of a common European market. More generally, these changes must be related to the emergence of an international economistic discourse within the education sector, where older leitmotifs such as equality were replaced by economic efficiency (Berman, 2022; Garritzmann, 2016). From the 1980s onwards, the OECD had a strong influence on shaping global education policy in this direction, including for higher education (Ydesen, 2019).

This competitive mindset had several layers. First, there was an awareness inside universities of the need to compete with other universities on a national level, most explicitly articulated in the Belgian case but manifest at other universities, too. But notions of competition, secondly, were also linked to a more comprehensive (European and transnational) knowledge society discourse that circulated among national and international policymakers, researchers, and university staff all at once. As we already briefly explained in the introduction to this special issue, this discourse was strongly in the making in the 1980s and 1990s. As observed in connexion with Lund University: while the concept of the knowledge society itself was rarely invoked in this context, the source material contains examples of ideas and metaphors which would eventually become associated with knowledge society discourse. This applies to some of our other case studies as well. Among these ideas we may note the expectation of an increasingly globalised, competitive and unpredictable world and a closely related notion of universities taking on a partly new and ever-more important role in such a world. Universities, it was assumed, were indispensable for scientific and technological competitiveness, be it in the interests of the region, the nation or Europe (or all three at the same time). Likewise, higher education was imagined to be a prerequisite for the competitiveness and career opportunities of individuals in a future labour market unhindered by national borders and restrictions.

As these notions of competitiveness suggest, the economic narratives behind the Europeanisation of the universities did not solely revolve about hope and optimism but also about fear of missing out and being left behind. This interplay between what we could call ‘Euro-phoria’ and ‘Euro-FOMO’ was present in a 1987 speech by the rector in Valladolid, Fernando Tejerina García. Here, he spoke enthusiastically about the Erasmus Programme and what undoubtedly seemed like the emergence of an integrated European university landscape. At the same time, he pointed to the very real risk that his university might not be able to take part in the sudden abundance of opportunities and resources, not for lack of interest but for lack of a proper informational infrastructure. At almost the exact same time, Geert Mareels, a student representative at the University of Ghent, criticised his university’s comparatively low participation rate in European mobility schemes. Continued failure in this respect, he warned, would also mean a failure to develop a ‘higher international consciousness’ and to ‘combat xenophobia’. These remarks indicate that Euro-FOMO sometimes went beyond mere economic considerations. Europeanisation, it appears, was more or the less the equivalent of modernisation – and what was the alternative to being a modern university? Nobody wanted to find out.

It is thus noteworthy that this movement towards greater European integration was presented as virtually inevitable. Significantly, in both Ghent and Lund, this situation was expressed in the form of a metaphor about a train that was already in motion. ‘We must critically monitor developments, be prepared and, when the opportunity arises, be able to jump on the European train without hesitation’, as the president of the student union in Lund put it in 1988. This hallmark idea of modernity, that economic and technological progress was inevitable, also recurred in other contexts.

While that particular metaphor was not appealed to in each and every case, the pervasiveness of related and similar notions of progress and unavoidability deserves to be emphasised. Towards the end of the 1980s, different universities apparently saw the same pressing need to ‘jump on the European train’, despite their countries having had partly or vastly diverging experiences during the postwar period, and different positions with regards to European integration. At Lund University, for instance, loud and seemingly unanimous calls for Europeanisation first came at a time when Sweden was not part of the EC, when the decision on a national referendum on the matter was yet to be taken and opinion polls suggested that a majority of Swedes would have voted against membership. Seen from another angle, it is noteworthy that university discourse in Valladolid, in a country which had until recently been essentially excluded from the Western European integration project, was fundamentally European in its focus on the common challenges of information technology, de-industrialisation and global competition.

Geography, globalisation and other structural conditions

At the same time, we want to stress in this conclusion that economic arguments alone do not explain why Europeanisation happened. To begin, narratives about the knowledge society and ideas about pan-European inter-university competition were combined in interesting ways with other types of argumentations. Valladolid offers the most complex set of motives among the universities studied in this regard. Support for Europeanisation was in our Spanish case generally articulated through both a historical-cultural identification with Europe and a more forward-looking discourse, in which European integration was seen as a solution to economic problems, both at the national and the local level. As pointed out in the article on Valladolid, these dual perspectives reinforced each other.

As is the case for most historical processes, however, argumentations by themselves cannot explain why things happened. Though further research would be needed to conclude to what extent (internal and external) economic or political conditions influenced processes of ac academic Europeanisation, the case studies in this issue already reveal how certain more structural or material factors influenced whether (and how fast) Europeanisation happened.

The geographical location of the universities, for example, provided an important background condition for Europeanisation in all the cases we have studied, although in different ways. For Ghent, it was obvious that its proximity to Brussels and the EC institutions contributed to the perception that it was a natural part of the European project in the late 1980s and that the Flemish university wanted to be the best at Europeanisation. In Lund, on the other hand, the (perceived) position of the university as far from the Swedish capital but close to the European continent was an important basis for Euro-optimism. In a country populated by ‘reluctant Europeans’ – as one of the leading figures in the Swedish ‘yes’ campaign called his fellow citizens (Dinkelspiel, 2009) – being on the Swedish periphery was an advantage if you wanted to embrace the new European opportunities. For Aalborg, international cooperation in general and European cooperation in particular meant that it did not have to go via Copenhagen to promote change. Its outsider position allowed Aalborg to play a freer role. Valladolid was close to the Spanish capital of Madrid but, on the other hand, located in the predominantly rural Castile–León, whose disadvantageous economic position in the national context had been at the forefront of local politics since Franco’s death. This assured that regional dynamics played into Europeanisation processes at the University of Valladolid too.

Geography was also of great importance to the Humboldt University of Berlin. With its legacy of socialist internationalism, the university on Unter den Linden saw itself as a mediator between East and West after it became part of the Federal Republic of Germany in 1990. It would be interesting to explore Europeanisation processes at other academic institutions in the 1990s that served as bridges between the liberal capitalist world and post-communist societies, such as the Central European University in Budapest and the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna. Similarly, it would be welcome to see more in-depth studies of the Europeanisation of universities in Eastern, Central and South-Eastern Europe, regardless of whether they became part of the EU in 2004 or not (Cain and Satjukow, 2025; Duančić, 2025; Surman and Petushkova, 2022).

In this special issue, we have focussed on the period from the early 1980s to the mid-1990s, a formative phase in European university and research policy. As noted above, an important conclusion is that discursive Europeanisation, often expressed in hopes for new economic opportunities for research and education, was prominent during this period. If we were to move further forward in time, to the years after 2000, it is likely that more structural factors would have driven and reinforced the Europeanisation of universities. One general factor may have been what educational and social scientists refer to as policy convergence. Researchers (e.g. Grek and Lawn, 2009) have shown how the education sector in Europe as a whole underwent a kind of homogenisation process in that similar policies were adopted in country after country. It would therefore have been surprising if higher education did not also become more European during the same period.

There were also more specific structural factors, however. For example, the increasing dependence on funding that educational programmes, research groups, faculties and sometimes entire universities developed as more and more money became available in the common European system. To illustrate this, the first Framework Programme (1984–1987) had a budget of €3.8 billion, the fourth (1994–1998) €13.2 billion, the seventh (2017–2013) €50.5 billion and the ninth (Horizon Europe; 2021–2027) €95.5 billion. The share of the EU budget for research programmes also grew proportionally: from 3.8% of the total EU budget spent on the Framework Programme in 1998, it increased to 5.7% in 2012 and 7.6% in 2020 (Verbergt, 2024: 65). In other respects, too, economic, organisational and social ties on a European level became closer from the late 1990s onwards, partly as a result of the Bologna Process and a general increase in the mobility of students, teachers, researchers and administrators. It is reasonable to assume that these structural changes also influenced the Europeanisation of individual universities, but how this happened and what forms it took deserve further study.

Building upon older connections

A common theme running parallel through all five papers is the complex intersection between narrow Europeanisation and more general forms of internationalisation, including contacts, exchanges and collaborations with non-European universities. To understand how Europeanisation happened, this entanglement needs to be taken seriously. Until the mid or late 1980s, a general internationalisation dominated, when actors such as AUC Rector Caspersen began to distinguish more explicitly between internationalisation and Europeanisation. Moreover, the methodological focus of this special issue on processes that have been labelled and considered as ‘European’, building on Hirschhausen and Patel’s seminal definition of Europeanisation (2010), runs the risk of artificially neglecting other regional or more global practices of cooperation that also shaped universities at the end of the 20th century. There is therefore a need for a more thorough examination of the different levels of internationalisation addressed in the various contributions, including forms of regional cooperation, Americanisation, Sovietisation and internationalisation with ‘developing countries’ beyond mere Europeanisation.

In the 1970s and 1980s, most European universities were still shaped by the global political context of the Cold War. In Western and Northern Europe, US Americanisation played an important role, perhaps particularly in Aalborg and Lund. This form of internationalisation was linked to the focal influence of the ‘American university’ as a new global role model for higher education institutions, which increasingly replaced the ‘German university’ in the second half of the 20th century (Östling, 2024). The only case study in the (former) Eastern European bloc, the Humboldt University, was also shaped by the Iron Curtain. In the GDR, Berlin’s oldest university served as an academic hub for a form of socialist internationalism (in distinction from internationalisation, due to its ideological commitment to communism) for both Eastern European and Third World countries. Even after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the university on Unter den Linden saw itself as a mediator between East and West. In Valladolid, on the other hand, there were proposals to establish Europe as a kind of ‘third way’ and as a prosperous and peaceful alternative to the US and the Soviet Union, beyond the Cold War binary. Moreover, beyond the realm of the two superpowers, all the universities had significant international links with other continents. In Aalborg, Ghent and Lund, for example, there was a commitment to Africa and Asia, while Valladolid had a special connexion with Latin America. Alongside these broader forms of internationalisation, there were also more regional forms of cooperation (involving several countries within a region), such as the Nordplus Programme for northern European universities.

A key observation is that the Europeanisation practices at all universities in the late 1980s and early 1990s intersected with, built on and gradually but only partly replaced these older traditions of internationalisation. New European collaborations at universities for example often explicitly built on older connections and agreements. In Valladolid, the cursos para extranjeros initiated during the Franco era became a starting point for collaboration agreements with foreign universities in the 1980s, most of them European ones. These relations were later continued and expanded in the framework of European educational programmes. AUC followed a similar pattern. In the early 1990s, unifying institutions were established such as the International Office and other units coordinating international initiatives. However, not everything was automatically integrated into the framework of the European education programmes; there were also cooperation agreements with the United States – and, later, China.

The latter is a reminder of the fact that several parallel forms internationalisation coexisted. For instance, the legacies of postwar Americanisation and Sovietisation, which Natalia Tsvetkova describes in the case of German universities as failed attempts at cultural imperialism (2013), did not simply disappear after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Although we have not systematically investigated how exactly Europeanisation related to other internationalisation policies and initiatives, a form of internationalisation that focussed on the world beyond Europe lived on in certain parts of the universities both in the shadow of, and next to, the European offensive we have mapped. For example, in the same pages of the Humboldt University newspaper that informed about EC programmes from 1990 onwards, scholarships linked to other parts of the world were also discussed, including the US Fulbright programme. This was also true for the university magazines in Aalborg and Ghent.

In our five case studies, we have hardly found any strong criticism of Europeanisation, but it is quite possible that these voices were not heard. What we occasionally have seen, however, is that various people have pointed out that the world is bigger than Europe and that European euphoria must not narrow the academic outlook. Around the year 2000, a more programmatic internationalist tradition may also have returned at the universities, be it in the form of a general discourse on globalisation, in a specific interest in certain non-European regions (the Middle East, China, South Asia) or issues such as economic development, global health or human rights. In this context, we should also remember that many of the most important academic impulses in the late 20th century came from the United States and, to some extent, the United Kingdom, for example in terms of how universities should be governed and how research should be evaluated. In general, we can conclude that the various manifestations, intersections and shifts in internationalisation deserve more in-depth study.

Key actors

Building upon older practices, of course, can only be done by people – which leads us to the question of which actors were involved in Europeanisation processes. Clearly, the case studies reveal that a multitude of ‘knowledge actors’ (Östling et al., 2023) fuelled and shaped the Europeanisation processes at their respective universities – a finding which, by itself, is significant in that it shows how networks and coalitions were crucial to make Europeanisation work. Thinking more analytically, however, we can derive from the five case studies four partly overlapping ideal-typical categories of actors: (1) the top-level actors, that is, the university leadership, including rectors, presidents and vice-chancellors; (2) the academic level of professors and researchers from different disciplines; (3) the mid-level actors, who were responsible for the administration and institutionalisation of international affairs; and, finally, (4) student representatives and associations.

Firstly, many (mainly male) university leaders promoted Europeanisation as part of their agendas to create better economic and political conditions, to improve national and international reputation, and to build a better future for their universities in the transition from an industrial to a knowledge society in an increasingly globalised world. For example, Sven Caspersen, the long-standing rector of Aalborg University Centre, embraced internationalisation early on to differentiate his institution from other universities in Denmark and established links with international partners (including personal trips across the Atlantic) before turning his main attention to Europe in the late 1980s. Justino Duque Domínguez, rector of the University of Valladolid between 1982 and 1984, prioritised Europeanisation, linked to a discourse on the ‘open university’, as a means of overcoming the provincialism of his region and the isolation of the university from the wider society. In a peculiar case, Heinrich Fink, rector of the Humboldt University between 1990 and 1992, turned to ideas of Europe and cooperated with European partners, including the European Parliament, in his struggle against the Berlin Senate to protect the process of self-democratisation and autonomy of his university from what he interpreted as a ‘Western takeover’ during German reunification. The individual biographies and careers of these university leaders shaped their ideas about Europeanisation, as was exemplified by Lund University’s vice-chancellor Boel Flodgren who had been inspired by American academic traditions. Thus, the trajectories and objectives of the rectors could vary enormously from case to case, but the five articles nevertheless demonstrate how university leaders became central drivers of Europeanisation in the 1980s and 1990s. This finding marks a dramatic shift from earlier studies that outlined how individual rectors, as part of the Standing Conference of European Rectors (CRE), had opposed a shift of resources and power from the national to the European level in the 1950s to the 1970s (Lehmann, 2021).

A second group of actors who advanced the discourses and practices of Europeanisation at universities on a day-to-day basis were academics, ranging from professors to early career researchers in all disciplines. Their motivations included improving teaching and research and accessing new funding opportunities by building academic contacts and communities with foreign partners, including the EC. These actors initiated bilateral partnerships, organised European conferences, participated in international research consortia, and helped to implement EC programmes at the university in order to attract new third-party funding. As in earlier decades, these researchers continued to a certain extent to engage in forms of scientific diplomacy as representatives of their countries on the international scene, as illustrated by the GDR Reisekader (Niederhut, 2007). Nevertheless, they simultaneously became significant actors in what Hirschausen and Patel call Europe Emergent (2010) in the academic context of a new form of European science (Wedlin and Nedeva, 2015). Indeed, European partnerships often began with personal contacts at the level of individual research projects and departments, before developing into formal bilateral agreements between universities. This is exemplified by the numerous bilateral agreements signed by the University of Valladolid in the 1980s, prior to Spain’s accession to the EC. Likewise, in the early 1990s, newly appointed West German professors at the HU used their former contacts with West European academics to establish new forms of trans-bloc European cooperation at the formerly East-oriented Berlin University. These examples illustrate the complex interplay between bottom-up Europeanisation among individual university researchers and the various top-down EC initiatives, as outlined in the introduction of this special issue.

Thirdly, in the 1980s and 1990s, universities began creating new offices or administrative units and appointed staff members responsible for international affairs and the EC/EU, in order to bring clarity to the confusion of the supposed ‘bureaucratic monster’ in Brussels. These (not seldom female) mid-level administrators played a key role in the institutionalisation of EC policies at their universities and became active nodes of Europeanisation at a more practical level, beyond mere discourses on Europe. This was particularly evident in the case of Ghent University, where Lieve Bracke, head of the Office for European Educational Projects, became a driving force for a deepening of Europeanisation expertise. Similar examples were Lund University’s ‘own EC man’, Inge Brinck, and Sabine Schrade, the EC officer in the Department for Research Affairs at the Humboldt University. These administrators enabled a transnational circulation of information and knowledge about the various EC programmes while acting as ‘agents of internationalism’ (Reinisch, 2016) between supranational, national, regional, and local institutions of higher education. Interpreted through the lens of transcultural brokerage studies, mid-level administrators became therefore important intermediaries and ‘brokers’ not only between higher education institutions in different countries, but also between the top-down and bottom-up levels of Europeanisation.

These three groups of actors – rectors, professors and mid-level administrators – often championed the perceived interests of students when it came to discourses and practices of Europeanisation. The reference to Europe and the implementation of exchange programmes were part of a ‘corporate branding’ to make the university more attractive to students, as the case of Ghent University illustrates. However, the recipients of such messages were not only passively affected and benefitting from EC programmes such as Erasmus but were also actively involved from an early stage. Significantly, it was the Belgian student activist Geert Mareels who, in a speech in 1987, urged Ghent University to become ‘a university in the European league’.

Students and their representative bodies, associations, and magazines thus constitute a fourth, very heterogeneous group of actors in the Europeanisation of universities. Across Europe, student associations such as the Asociación Cultural Europa at the University of Valladolid or the European Students Conference (ESC) at the Charité in Berlin arranged academic and cultural activities related to European integration and international exchange. Students from Aalborg to Valladolid and from Ghent to Lund, joined pan-European student associations in different disciplines such as AIESEC, IASTE and ELSA. This form of student Europeanisation gained momentum with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the crumbling of the Iron Curtain, when student representatives from Eastern Europe, including the Humboldt University, joined various of these pan-European initiatives and networks. International student mobility and experiences enabled new forms of ‘vecurial Europeanisation’ (Greiner, 2022), which influenced ideas about what it meant to be a European student at the end of the Cold War and on the eve of EC/EU enlargement to the north and later to the east. But student magazines, such as Unauf at the Humboldt University, also sometimes served as critical correctives to moments of ‘Europhoria’, criticising the neglect of student perspectives in the process of Europeanisation, denouncing Eurocentrism, xenophobia and racism, and emphasising solidarity with the Third World beyond the European continent.

Internal effects

The first effect of Europeanisation was the emergence of a new discourse. We have seen that scattered European elements and initiatives already existed in the early 1980s, but it was not until the last years of the decade that a new order was established. This discourse not only introduced new concepts into a local academic debate and understanding of the surrounding world but also helped to create a common direction for the universities. The new European discourse also gave concrete form to a more general internationalisation, as shown in the case of Lund.

The second internal consequence was a new geographical orientation for universities, researchers and students. Previously, individual European universities and countries had of course been on the map for the various universities, but what happened in the mid- and late 1980s was a more systematic focus on European cooperation. This was expressed in new collaborations and partners.

Thirdly, we can see how institutional change began to take place. So far, this was on a limited scale, but new structures and organisational elements were introduced to realise the European ambitions. New positions were created and people were hired to handle the more everyday processes and concerns of Europeanisation. International offices and grant offices were established. The university administration and management grew.

A fourth effect took the form of epistemic Europeanisation. This meant that the production and circulation of knowledge of Europe intensified and took on new forms. New educational programmes in European studies were launched. New research centres and networks were established. New journals and book series were published. New teaching positions and chairs (for instance Jean Monnet professorships) were introduced.

Societal effects

However, the Europeanisation of universities cannot be described solely in terms of internal changes within the institutions. As societal institutions, universities were both influenced by and contributed to the ideological and emotional mobilisation for Europe that characterised the late 1980s and early 1990s. The signing of the Magna Charta Universitatum in Bologna in 1988, attended by several representatives of the five universities we have studied, can be seen as an academic manifestation of a greater revival of the idea of Europe. This type of collective action probably helped to legitimise the concrete pan-European programmes launched at that time, such as Erasmus, which would grow in importance in the following years.

Universities also became very much part of the radical political changes in Europe around 1990. This is most obvious in the case of Humboldt University, where the fall of communism as a state ideology and the integration of East German universities into the Federal Republic had dramatic consequences. In our study of Humboldt University, we have also been able to show how its leaders embraced European partners and used Europe in the local power struggle with the Berlin Senate. Our other universities were more indirectly affected by the fall of the Berlin Wall and the upheavals in Eastern Europe. Aalborg and Lund were located in countries that were geographically close to the Eastern European countries and had many historical ties. This may explain why Danish and Swedish academics were actively involved in post-communist developments, not least for universities in the Baltic states and the former GDR, which may have contributed to shaping a general European commitment at these universities. The same does not seem to have been the case for Ghent and Valladolid, which were further away from the events in Eastern Europe.

The Europeanisation of the universities has most likely also had more long-term effects on European societies. These include, for example, the social, cultural and identity-related consequences of student mobility and exchange programmes. Admittedly, there are reasons to be cautious in our assessment – the vast majority of students only study at universities in their own country – but as higher education has grown in importance since the 1990s and more and more young people are graduating, a European dimension is directly or indirectly entering the lives of many during a formative stage. One sign of the wider significance of the Europeanisation of universities is, as we pointed out in the introduction, that right-wing populist parties have begun to protest against this development.

In our introduction, we emphasised that our special issue was intended to contribute to the broader development of university history as a scholarly field. We have done this by focussing on an important but largely unexplored period in the contemporary history of universities, namely the 1980s and 1990s. Future research could hopefully build on our studies and take them further. One possibility would be to expand the comparative approach even more and include other universities, for example from Eastern Europe or even from countries outside Europe that may have gone through similar changes without being part of the European Union. Another possibility is to broaden the thematic approach and examine in more detail how the internal life of universities – from courses and student activities to libraries and administration – changed as a result of the Europeanisation processes. A further possibility is to move even further ahead in time and analyse how the Europeanisation processes manifested themselves during the first two decades of the 21st century, when the European project underwent several crises while joint initiatives in research and higher education increased in importance.

Coming to an end, we cannot help but note in a brief methodological self-reflection that the entire project from which this special issue arises reflects both the internal and societal effects of academic Europeanisation. Behind the studies is a group of researchers with backgrounds in various European countries and experience of stays at a fairly large number of European universities, in many cases made possible through various exchange programmes and cooperation agreements. We have different mother tongues but our working language is none of these; instead, it is the lingua franca of today’s Europe. In order to carry out our research, we have visited archives, libraries and conferences across the continent, but we have also combined digital meetings with trips to the same geographical location for physical gatherings. Thus, both our scholarly and social practices have been shaped by the Europeanisation processes we have studied historically.