The European Social Summit on 17 November 2017, in Gothenburg, Sweden, reasserted the EU’s social dimension and a common European identity based on ‘unity in diversity’ and a commitment to democratic institutions (EC, 2017b).  This social cohesion agenda was to be achieved through a reiteration of strategic commitments already agreed to, specifically investment in human capital in pursuit of a competitive but inclusive European economy, the promotion of innovation in the face of key existential challenges including climate change, migration, and social polarisation, and the modernisation of higher education including both flexible qualification pathways as well as the internationalisation of research and university rankings (EC, 2017a).  The background for this renewed commitment to the social dimension and cohesion through education was the changing demographic profile of Europe due to migration and the ‘refugee crisis’, a skills gap, growing distrust in both democratic institutions and scientifically agreed truth, and the rise of xenophobic politics.  The European project, to which the summit invited partners to re-commit, was facing its own existential challenges. Less than a year later, in September 2018, Sweden, the host of the summit, saw a general election dominated by the neo-fascist Swedish Democrats party and their anti-immigration platform. On December 3, 2018, the Central European University (CEU) declared that it would relocate the majority of its operations out of Hungary to Vienna following pressure from the right-wing government of Viktor Orbán (Karáth, 2018; Wilson, 2018). Not only was this seen as an attack on academic freedom, but the campaign against CEU took on strong anti-Semitic tones, and attacks on ‘gender studies’ and cultural Marxism which are often understood as coded anti-Semitic language. Simultaneously, the Hungarian government has implemented aggressive anti-refugee policies.  These examples highlight the ways national(ist) mobilisation sits awkwardly with other policy drivers. Yet, EU and institutional strategies present the combination of human capital formation and status competition as contributing to stability and inclusion when in fact they can be destabilising, produce their own exclusionary outcomes, and can be easily articulated through nationalist discourse.

This symposium examines the articulation and tensions between three dominant political rationalities organising European higher education – human capital formation, status competition, and nationalist sentiment.  This will be explored through four nation-state case studies that highlight the diverse policy formations constituted by and through these articulations and tensions: Poland, Greece, Slovenia, and Denmark.

Across Europe, we see increasing tension between three political rationalities: economic, status competition, nationalist.  The articulation of these within local contexts produce hybrid policy formations, and thus subjectivities and power relations. Over-general discussions of higher education policy risk misunderstanding how these three rationalities articulate and produce new kinds of policy formation.  We see how strategies of human capital development through higher education articulate with nationalist discourses to produce new restrictive policy formations whilst retaining the idea of human capital formation for a competitive capitalist economy as a core purpose of higher education.  Similarly, we see how the mobilisation of nationalist sentiment struggles with the internationalisation of research, simultaneously guiding research activity towards the demands of global higher education competition and against it.  The papers in this symposium examine these in detail.

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