The academic and political discourse on education and Europeanisation is shaped by a specific vocabulary, ranging from governance and policy to government and globalisation. In this paper we will try to elaborate a different piste. One where governance is a process that emerges when one realizes that government is an impossibility: that this or that policy field is ‘organized without an organizer, coordinated without a coordinator’, and where governance rises from mutual adjustments, learning and local interactions in a (continuously) re-emerging order (Jessop 1997, Urry 2005). Governance is where governing has no top and no center. Confronted with this lack of clear actor or actors to lead the dance, how can one make sense of the process of europeanisation? We will try to provide this question with an answer by situating Europeanisation next to the more ample process of globalisation. We will argue that both act as quite distinct processes and even as competing semantics that run against one another when compared on topics like territory, identity or consensus.

Jessop, B. (1997). The governance of complexity and the complexity of governance: preliminary remarks on some problems and limits of economic guidance. Beyond market and hierarchy: interactive governance and social complexity, 95-128. Urry, J. (2005). The complexity turn. Theory Culture and Society, 22(5), 1.