The emergence of European educational structures has received considerable attention in the last decades in the education policy literature, such as the case of the construction of the European Education Area (Nóvoa & Lawn, 2002), the European Higher Education Area (Powell, Bernhard & Graf, 2012), or policies and programmes to foster mobility (Yuval & Yemini, 2017). Yet considerably less attention has been paid to how the funding of policy instruments for the European Research Area (see Beerkens, 2008; Nedeva & Wedlin, 2015) has shaped European educational research. The European Union Framework Programme (EUFP) is the most institutionalised form of supranational thematic programming in the world and the centrepiece of European Union research policy (1984-2020). Since 1994, the EUFP has also funded collaborative research projects in the social sciences. Surprisingly, little attention has been paid to its genesis, development, and effects in shaping the development of European science, especially examined by discipline or multidisciplinary fields. The EUFP is thus analysed here through an instruments-as-institutions (Lascoumes & Le Galès, 2007, 2012) approach that conceptualises the EUFP as an institution (Scott, 2013). Content analysis of the official documents of each funding cycle (n=5) and a sample of European educational research projects (n=122) were analysed in conducting this research. The results show incremental ideational change of the EUFP’s guiding ideas: from knowledge as an instrument to knowledge as a resource; within-the-EU to outside-the-EU internationalisation; and cooperation to an integration rationale of Europeanisation from the EUFP4 and EUFP5 (1994-2002) to the EUFP6 onwards (2002-2020). European educational research contents are shaped by such representations of what is expected of European research. If the policy instrument steers European educational research, ideas more than regulatory features significantly – though incrementally – change the direction of European science.

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