If we are witnessing the fragmentation of the Liberal International Order¹, and if we can argue that global higher education is in large part an instantiation of neoliberal policy construction, then in what sense are recent EU policy responses an adequate response to this situation?

This paper brings together two discussions that, although related, are often conducted separately: the integration of European higher education, and university rankings.  This paper considers both of these together as components of what I call a neoliberal policy regime. A number of phenomena are often referred to as neoliberalism in higher education, including new public management, intensification or acceleration of academic work, introduction of aspects of marketisation and competition, the dominance of economic rationalities, as a form of political rationality, or as a historical moment². I define neoliberalism more specifically as an ideology that emphasises a transcendental world economy that operates above and beyond national borders and governments; that seeks to encase the world economy in what neoliberal intellectuals call an ‘economic constitution’ of binding laws and rules related to trade and capital mobility; that reconfigures the role of the state rather than diminish it, and conveys blindness to asymmetries of power ³.

The paper aims, then, to go beyond the rhetorical claim that higher education is captured by neoliberalism in order to detail more precisely what is the neoliberal character of contemporary global higher education.  Following a description of the EU’s strategic move to create an integrated European Education Area, and more specifically its funding of projects organised around the idea of a European university (European Universities Initiative), the paper outlines key rationales and structural elements of European integration related to higher education. This will present an argument that contrary to the popular understanding of the emergence of the EU as a strategy for peaceful coexistence following the horrors of two world wars and the Holocaust, the EU was a strategy of regional integration by post-imperial powers to secure a liberal economic order⁴.  The specifically higher education aspects of this order are articulated in terms of the neoliberal imaginary of neoliberal intellectuals and specifically the concept of an economic constitution.  This is followed by a similar treatment of the emergence of global university rankings and the UK’s Research Excellence Framework.  These are discussed in terms of the Hayekian concept of price signals.  The paper concludes by arguing that this analysis enables us to go beyond neoliberalism as a rhetorical claim in educational research.  The aim is to argue for a more precise and powerful descriptive and analytical conception of neoliberalism that enables distinctions between different phenomena.  The paper provides a series of critical questions that frame a possible response to the concept of an integrated European higher education space.

Empirical focus • The paper focuses specifically on the European Education Area and the European Universities Initiative • But also draws on academic discussions of European HE integration. Methodological focus • History of ideas: specifically, the paper draws on academic analyses of the intellectual history of neoliberalism and the concept of economic constitution 2&5, in particular o The EU as an instantiation of neoliberal multilevel governance has been a topic of debate in political science but much less so in higher education studies. Some key studies of neoliberalism demonstrate the direct influence neoliberal intellectuals had on the forming of the EEC and later the EU as well as the movement of neoliberal policy actors between the EU and other neoliberal institutions such as the WTO o European multilevel governance imagined as an economic constitution that seeks to safeguard the free trade in services and goods (including HE), the mobility of knowledge (as a commodity), and mobility of people (students and academics as either bearers of human capital or as economic citizens), and o The Hayekian argument that market prices act as signals that coordinate the activities of economic citizens. Indicators such as publication metrics, Nobel prize winners, esteem factors, international PhD students, etc. act as price signals, indicating to economic citizens (prospective students, academics, HEIs, research councils, governments) how to coordinate their behaviours. • International political economy is drawn upon in two ways o Ideational institutional theory 6: this proposes that ideas or discourses, though not sufficient, are necessary for explaining both policy stasis and change. This relates to the role of neoliberalism as an organising idea in the formation of the EU and the argument that its key conceptualisations are manifest in EU higher education policy o Neoliberal policy regime is offered as a descriptive concept drawing on constructivist institutionalism and the concept of growth regimes. This has been developed in order to explain the growth of left and illiberal populist movements and anti-EU mobilization organised in opposition to neoliberal globalization.

The integration of European higher education and global university rankings are considered as technologies of neoliberal order in the following ways: • Higher education institutions are construed as transcending the nation-states they are putatively part of, attracting valuable assets such as students and high value academics, • The Bologna and Lisbon agendas, ERASMUS, and the various European areas (higher education, research and now education) take on many of the characteristics of neoliberal institution building to encase the world economy, • Global university rankings, and research excellence exercises, act in a similar way to market prices acting as signals to coordinate the activity of economic agents. Coordination, in the sense of individual behaviours (where will I study; what university do I want to work at?) and national or regional policies (funding priorities, marketisation or privatisation strategies) is then a process of continual adjustment to market signals; and production of divisions of labour – specifically between the global North as the centre of knowledge production and Eastern Europe and the global South as primarily providers of resources (data, staff, students) or consumers of knowledge, • Governments, at the level of the nation, primarily aim to give up or share sovereignty in federal or multilevel systems of governance (e.g. the EU) that do not rely on democratic control; institute legislative frameworks that remove barriers to the free movement of services and goods, and sometimes labour; and adjust regulatory frameworks in response to the price signals of the global higher education market. The EEA appears to be a continuation of the form of neoliberal order seen to provoke illiberal political reaction 8. But can integration be conceptualised differently and what concepts can help do this? Can solidarity, rather than competition, become an organising concept?

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