The Yerevan Communiqué represents a possible high-point in European responses to the 2015 ‘refugee crisis’ and the role of higher education (HE) in building an inclusive Europe.  If that is so, then the post-2015 period can be seen as a retreat from the moral stance taken in the Communiqué.  This paper takes a different perspective and argues that the post-2015 period reveals tensions at the heart of the European project and the role of higher education in this.  Specifically, the paper argues that the rise of a nativist politics of belonging in Europe and its manifestation in European HE is imminent in the European project itself, in the historical formation of European HE, and intensified by the neoliberal reformation of nation-states.  The paper pursues this argument in the following way:

1.     The paper briefly outlines the Yerevan Communiqué and the context of the 2015 ‘refugee crisis', specifically its call for HE to play an active role in migrant integration, the development of inclusive teaching and learning, and to counter the rise of nativist politics of belonging.  This section reviews the range of initiatives developed in response to this noting their limited, uneven, and politically oriented nature (Brooks, 2019; Claeys-Kulik & Jørgensen, 2018).

2.     The paper then highlights three trends following Yerevan,

a.     The rise of a nativist politics of belonging across Europe producing environments hostile to migrants and ethnic minorities (Brubaker, 2019).

b.    Targeting of academics using the coded anti-Semitic language of cultural Marxism, opening up HE to political control of knowledge production and dissemination (Paternotte & Verloo, 2021; Verloo, 2018).

c.     Emergence of a nativist politics of belonging taking hold in European HE.  Examples include the UK post-Brexit as well as the securitization of UK campuses, but also that of Denmark’s attempts to restrict EU citizens' access to Danish HE (Gearon, 2019).

3.     Why should nativism arise, and why should it arise now? The answer to these questions is provided by showing how nativist politics of belonging was already imminent in the formation of the European project and the historical constitution of European HE.  

a.     The founding myth of the European project is challenged by engaging with scholarship that argues that European integration was a response to the collapse of European maritime and land empires, offering sustainable futures for the post-empire nation-states in a context of embedded liberalism and geopolitics of the Cold War (Garavini, 2012; Hansen & Jonsson, 2012; Ludlow, 2009; Snyder, 2015).

b.    Secondly, the links between HE, Empire, and nation-building is discussed in order to highlight how European HE has always been implicated in projects of imperial design, supporting nation-building in wake of imperial decline, and HEs role in building human capital for competitive national economies (Crosbie, 2009; Jansen, Krige, & Wang, 2019; Nigam, 2019).

c.     Thirdly, integration into the EU and the neoliberal world order are seen as posing significant challenges to the concept of the ‘national’ – both entail ceding authority to multilevel governance structures and non-governmental agencies, and the free flow of capital/goods/services/labour. This intensifies the imminent nativism (Joppke, 2021).

These elements are seen to converge in the post-financial crisis period to produce conditions favourable to the emergence of nativist tendencies already imminent in the European project.

Methodologically, the paper adopts a Gramscian informed conjunctural analysis seeking to identify the historically specific conditions for the emergence of a nativist politics of belonging and the particular forms it takes in European HE (Clarke, 2014; Spielman, 2018). Conjunctural analysis encourages a methodological disposition sensitizing the researcher to economic, political, and social elements and how they articulate with each other to give rise to such an emergence: that is, to answer the questions “why should nativism arise in the European context, why should it arise in the context of European HE, and why should it arise now?”. This introduces an historical dimension to the study of HE. Specifically, it traces the different temporalities of European integration, HE formation in relation to imperial and national designs and their transformations, and neoliberal reformation to tease out the imminence or otherwise of nativist politics and sensibilities. Policy documents, political speech, media reporting, and relevant scholarship (historical, political scientific, sociological) are drawn upon for the analysis. Key concepts such as higher education, nation-state, European integration, nationalism are viewed as categories of practice rather than analytical categories (Brubaker, 2013). Consequently, they are not viewed as substantive concepts but in terms of enactments, focusing on what they do. The analysis seeks to identify specific political rationalities and discursive formations and their policy effects over time. This involves deconstructing received understandings about both the historical formation of the European project and that of HE in the context of European imperial and nation-state histories rather than focus on the present in an a-historical fashion.

The paper makes six main claims: 1. To understand how nativist politics of belonging can take over European HE we need to view this historically and transnationally, 2. Instead of the European project being conceived primarily as a response to inter-state conflict, it needs to be understood as a response to failing European empires. The European project becomes the means by which marine and land empires in decline secured their futures as nation-states within an integrated European framework, 3. HE always had a role in imperial design and knowledge. HE was not just part of the process of nation-building but in justifying imperial designs and colonialism, through racialised science, supporting empire through the development of imperial agents and imperial knowledge, 4. In the post-1945 period HE was conceived as public goods in the broad context of embedded liberalism, the Cold War, and socialist empire; and where the ‘public’ was often conceived as a national ethnos that would lay the basis for forms of welfare chauvinism and ethnic exclusion, 5. This national grounding was to experience difficulties following the emergence of neoliberal hegemony and globalisation-as-migration – the ceding of national fiscal and monetary authority, multilevel governance, financialisation, and global flows of capital/goods/services/labour, 6. This would see HE caught up in contradictory moves – where integration into the EHEA requires mobility (EU or international students as well as knowledge and academic labour), where global competition stimulates the use of English as a medium of education and academic production, where there are calls for restricted access to ‘national’ HE whilst also being open to globalization of research performativity, and where anti-immigrant enactments sit alongside privileging the access to HE of economically high-value international students.

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