The presentation is based on analysis and reflections of experiences and readings of various EU projects, related to vocational education and training, HRD, relations between education/learning and work. It has two main aims. In the first place, the hegemonic conceptions of learning and their educational implications are discussed. Secondly, the functions of EU projects and the role of researchers in enabling certain political, economic and cultural programmes, are questioned. Neither of reflections aims at blaming the projects nor researchers, but at suggesting the dynamics and tendencies in the transformation of national economies, industries, occupational orders and educational programmes into new combinations and connections in emerging programmes of global markets, continental blocs and regions. Concerning the first theme: the applicability and success of hegemonic concepts of learning - lifelong learners, learning organisations, learning economies and societies - heavily lies in decontextualisation and universalisation of processes of learning, which however is based on generalisation from a careful selections of countries, fields of industry and types of organisations. On the one hand, this seems to be due to the basic assumptions that learning and learning organisations are fundamentally universal phenomena, and on the other hand, to the factual development of companies and production networks into globally functioning organisations. The discourses of learning, endemic or indicative to EU projects, are exemplary on the hegemonic disciplinary project of ending VET as education and economization of education in general, which takes place through reciprocal penetration of theories, concepts and interpretations of management, learning and economy. Like most of the "European VET research", also research on learning tends to describe itself as applied and multi-disciplinary. However, the papers circulating in "European projects" are rather pragmatic and uncritical collections of models, concepts and methods from different disciplinary and research areas, often backed by studies, surveys and consultancy materials. The lack of references from or discussions on previous forms and traditions of VET research in Europe enforces the non-critical and ahistorical nature of the discourse of learning. Despite the fact that few researchers in fact come from economics, the concepts of learning economy and innovation as well as organisational development and management originate from (business) economics. It is striking, that in EU project context, discourses from national context, also from economists (of education) are almost absent. What is researchers" role in manufacturing the view of nation-states and Europe as provisory states of the emerging global learning economy and organisations as substitutive platforms for political negotiation and identity formation processes.