The initiation of the Bologna Process in 1999 was accompanied by a radical transition of governance in higher education throughout Europe. This paper argues that the rise of the Bologna Process – one of the most extensive examples of policy transfer in higher education (Dale & Robertson, 2012; Steiner-Khamsi, 2012) – was connected to the need to subtly circumvent the EU’s subsidiarity principle, since education during the 1990s became an increasingly important policy area to govern in its own right (due to the rise of the knowledge economy) but was out of the EU’s legislative reach.

The dislocation of the governing of education from the EU to the voluntary intergovernmental Bologna Process prompted a shift in the design of governing from (‘hard’) government to (‘soft’) governance. Governance is a system of rule that use mobilizing techniques and persuasive incentive structures drawing actors (other than those of the state) to co-opt themselves into the process and thereby actively involve themselves in the distribution of (hegemonic) power which capacitates ‘governing at a distance’ (Lawn, 2011; Rosenau, 1992).

The governing mode of the Bologna Process can be seen as ‘monitored coordination’, also known as the Open Method of Coordination (OMC). The OMC is not to be mistaken for a specific policy in itself. Instead, it must be seen as something accounting for the ‘quality’/constitution of the ways in which policies work; a ‘policy ontology’ (Dale, 2009). The OMC presents the ambition to harmonize the European higher education system through intergovernmental collaboration and extensive standardization as a main technology to govern performance. Standardization is a form of ‘steering and governing’ that gets things done without the legal competence to command that they be done (Brunsson & Jacobsson, 2000; Timmermans & Epstein, 2010).

Standards, such as the outcomes-based modular curriculum, do not spread because they are powerful but become powerful (and naturalized as universal, objective and correct) as they spread. The paper argues that the new education standards spread by being circulated through the Bologna Process’ follow-up mechanisms that work as a material-affective infrastructure of the policy ontology (Brøgger & Staunæs, 2015). Infrastructure is that upon which something else works – a type of ‘path-dependence´ (Busch, 2011; Star & Bowker, 2006); in this case paths through which the new standards are circulated. In the OMC the circulation happens through comparisons of national performance data in, for example the Bologna Stocktaking Scorecards. The (in)famous multicolored scorecards use powerful color-coded visuals to compare the progress of implementation of the Bologna standards between member states. The paper argues that the scorecards are affectively wired and work as “a podium where badges of honor and shame are awarded” (Gornitzka, 2005: 7). The scorecards color coding (spanning from green for excellent performance to red for poor performance) works as an alert system that seems to mobilize and modulate certain affective registers making agents want to move from the reddish ‘alert colors’ to the successful green colors (Massumi, 2005; Wetherell, 2012)  In this way, the monitoring contributes to an affective politics of naming, shaming and faming that propels the implementation of standards by igniting a competitive, mimetic desire in which the subject desires the object only because it is desired by a rivaling peer who is both admired and despised as an ideal of and a barrier to the desired object: (Girard, 1966; Lingard & Sellar, 2013; Ravinet, 2008). Desire turns into the mimesis of another’s desire. Educational agents – such as higher education top-managers – strive to perform because this is what everybody else does. The competitive, mimetic desire for ‘better performance’ makes the Bologna mode of governance feasible.

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