Teacher education and professional formation has always been a symbolically significant field of state education policy, which reflects the dominant political culture regarding the relationship between education, the state and the civil society. Whilst in the past state control has been the most common model of teachers' formation, today the teaching profession in Europe is apparently constructed through less visible forms of state steering which are mainly based on accreditation and assessment. Many of these steering mechanisms are related to global influences and particularly those related to the EU Policies. Procedures as those of the Bologna and Prague declarations or the GATT agreement as well as the education policy discourse and practices of the EU institutions tend to influence European education systems and teacher formation in particular. This paper attempts to argue that if the control over teachers' identity has been the sole preserve of the state in the past, in the context of the global education market on one hand, and of the knowledge economy discourse on the other, teachers' formation is being dramatically transformed. Emerging transnational forms of governance tend to develop criteria for harmonisation and standardisation. However, the question whether this implies the gradual marginalisation of the state in the control of the European education systems needs to be further examined.