The Bologna Process (BP) is an international higher education project which started in 1998 and currently involves 47 countries (the European Union and some neighboring states). Through the implementation of a number of action lines, the project aims to create the European Higher Education Area (EHEA) with comparable degrees and opportunities for academic and job mobility (EHEA, 2018).
Literature review about the BP demonstrated that the EHEA operates in the neoliberalist framework (Lundbye-Cone, 2018). Neoliberal politics, which promotes individual competition, brings inclusion or social justice agenda, focused on support, paternalism and cooperation, into question (Cameron and Billington, 2017). Prior research into inclusion in the BP is limited. The theme of inclusion in the BP can be traced in research about lifelong learning (e.g., Han, 2017), student-centred learning (e.g., Sin, 2017) and the social dimension (e.g., Jungblut, 2017); however, these are mainly implementation studies which do not focus on the meaning of inclusion in the BP. A separate body of literature on inclusion in the area of education suggests that it is a nuanced phenomenon as it is about overcoming the marginalization of people in education based on their certain characteristics, such as race, ethnicity, culture, gender, age, sexuality, social class, special education needs, etc. (Booth and Ainscow, 1998; Hodkinson, 2010). Similarly to Opotow (2018), the terms ‘inclusion’ and ‘social justice’ are used synonymously in this paper.
Evidently, the overall meaning of inclusion in the BP is an under-researched area which yields the need to ask the following research question: What is the meaning of ‘inclusion’ in the BP, and how has this meaning evolved since 1998 in key international policy documents?
The analysis of the answers that are sought to the research question above is guided by an original theoretical framework which is constructed in this paper to recognize that they may be two side of the same coin. Neoliberalism and inclusion are usually presented in the literature as polar and conflicting forces. The title of Liasidou and Symeou’s (2018) article provides an excellent illustration of such a vision: ‘Neoliberal versus social justice reforms in education policy and practice…’. These scholars conclude that neoliberal imperatives force out the discourse about inclusion from education policy. A plethora of other scholars echo this argument in their work, stating that neoliberalism makes it difficult for inclusive policies to stand because the latter ones do not promote individual competition which is the prerogative of neoliberalism (Hardy and Woodcock, 2015; Mladenov, 2015; Cameron and Billington, 2017). This paper adopts a different perspective by recognizing that neoliberalism and inclusion should not necessarily be always seen as pulling education agenda in opposite directions. My stance on this matter is perhaps the closest to Cameron and Billington’s (2017) suggestion proposition that neoliberalism penetrates into the inclusion discourse and neoliberalises it. I propose to push this idea further and anticipate a more harmonious co-exitence of the two, so to say, ideologies – neoliberalism and inclusion – in one phenomenon the name for which is yet to be found. This phenomenon may combine a mutually shaping relationship between neoliberalism and inclusion which reveals the neoliberalisation of inclusion as much as a growing inclusivity of neoliberalism.