Higher education systems initially thought to be incommensurable all over Europe are made comparable by investing in education standards to develop both a common infrastructure of education and to increase the efficiency, efficacy, and the competitiveness of the higher education sector in Europe. Moreover, higher education in Europe is under pressure from a new regime of accountability aimed at putting under control its institutional performances. This new regime was well established before the global economic crisis of 2007/2008 and relies on a long-standing project of standardization that has been underway since the initial steps of the Bologna Process the inauguration of the European Higher Education Area (EHEA). By analysing the temporal development of this project, we argue that standardization does not in practice necessarily lead to the end of the heterogeneities within the EHEA. While education standards are ‘normative specifications for the steering of educational systems’ (Waldow 2014), standardization is a dynamic process based on the stability, but also on the malleability of standards. So we focus on the complex games of standardization of higher education within Europe, by considering education standards as epistemic objects (Mulcahy, 2011; Knorr-Cetina, 2001). This perspective considers standards incomplete, question-generating and unfolding (Miettinen 2005; Knorr-Cetina 2001) and invites us to look at how standards are enacted in practice. Empirically, we will rely on: a) a historiography of higher education policy in the European Union (EU) (Gale 2001) and b) on comparative reviews of the scorecard indicator frames included in reporting on the progress of Bologna Process. We will illustrate that standardization of European higher education in practice can be described more as a discovery than as an assessment of an a priori and once-and-for-all veritable accomplishment of stated benchmarks. As the harmonization of higher education is not driven by a ‘philosophy of uniformity', it rather allows an ordered differentiation in time of the European space, making Europeanization of higher education an ever completed fabrication.

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