This proposal focuses on the enactment of Europe through the topological relating of actors and educational claims participating in the European Recovery Plan. I ask what Europe is enacted through such participation? Where is it in terms of distance to other elements needed for its enactment, which actors does it entail? Answers try to understand the Czech case and relate it to the enactment of Europe in contemporary process of Europeanisation of education.

In May 2020, the EU introduced a Recovery plan for Europe: "[…] for the Europe where we want to live” (europa.eu. 2021)[1]. Here, Europe means both an economic and value progress bearer which seems to reproduce the European project of modernisation (Chakrabarty, 2000; Popkewitz, 2001). Many national governments took part in this Plan and prepared their own National Plans, while the boundaries of “education chapter” among other “chapters” as health, economy, environment, depended on category-work with the Plan’s aims to “be a greener, more digital and more resilient Europe“[2]. In the Czech National Plan, education is a part of “Education and the job market” and “Research and Innovation” (Ministry of Industry and Trade, 2021).6

However, in the Czech educational replies to this agenda, Europe envisioned by Plan and enacted through National Plan is different. The industrial language of these plans in the face of human catastrophe made more visible the long-non-resolved contradiction of humanised language of problems and industrial and market solutions in education (Bertsou & Caramani, 2020; Biesta, 2015; Davies & Mehta, 2018). Notably, in the language of the Czech National Plan, Europe was present and presented as a context in which some actions are possible only in technicised managerialised frames, while other frames of the European Plan, such as democracy, justice and values talk was not translated. These two things: European values and EU’s solutions seemed to be two completely different things; although, they are intertwined in value talk of EU’s Recovery Plan.

To understand this strange enacting of Europe, we need to consider two kinds of literature that concern the problem of the transition of “Europe” in ECE. The first, post-communist transformation studies, from the perspective of the topographical geopolitics, tries to understand what has become of European project when transported into ECE countries (Arnason, 2005; Offe, 2004). Despite its focus on the change of ideas and its ontological conditions, this perspective rests couched in unquestioned geographical boundaries, which prevent asking the ontological question – what Europe is enacted. Rather, through the concept of deficit, it focuses on “troubles” in driving to Europe (Krastev, 2017; Silova, 2010). The second strand, Europeanisation of governance studies, from the topological perspective of policy, tries to understand how Europeanisation is enacted through policies tied to standardisation, evaluation, and organizational strategies (Lawn, 2011; Saari, 2012). Despite its focus on governance change and its relational conditions, it is tied to the policy as a significant empirical site while some other space-making may be covered (Barbousas & Seddon, 2018).

For answering the questions, I employ topological and relational ontology (Benjamin, 2015; Harvey, 2012), which can capture methodologically and theoretically the distance-making as an ontological work (Abbott, 1995; Seddon, 2014), together with a congruent philosophical understanding of Jan Patočka, a Czech thinker, who, in 70^th devoted his work to both “Czech Europe”, and “After-Europe” (Patočka, 2003b, 2018; Ricoeur, 1977; Tucker, 1996). This double orientation fits the aim to understand the Czech Europe enacted through one European project, which draws on observation, that European space is always enacted – it is not pre-given.

[1] https://europa.eu/next-generation-eu/index_en

[2] https://ec.europa.eu/info/strategy/recovery-plan-europe_en#introduction

To collect and approach my sources of research material, I followed the ecological approach to relational phenomena inspired by Andrew Abbott. He discerned the dimension of actors, locations, and relations – being the relational process prior to actors and locations (Abbott, 2016). To gain comparative topographical and topological material (Harvey, 2012), in the first steps, I follow the modern topographical idea of administratively clear division of actors and organisations covering education. It entails data divided according to the formal and taken-for-granted division between state and non-state organisations: ideas about Europe documented in public messages about European Recovery Plan in relation to Czech Recovery Plan to general audiences by a) relevant Ministries and the Premier, b) educational NGOs. I gathered this corpus predominantly from publicly available websites of the given organisations. However, in this data, it appeared clear that such easy topographical power demarcations (Allen, 2011) will not cover the whole case. As a second material source for locations, I have used media records related to the “Czech recovery Plan” independent of the author’s formal affiliation. I gathered this corpus via Newton Media Search. This helped me to limit who actually is reached by the ideas of the recovery plan, how they enacted Europe and through which technological and material means. It appeared that not only educational formal organisations and NGOs are reached and attracted. I use the previous two material sources for the third dimension – the process of connecting. I study this material through Allen’s notion of reach as a topological practice that creates distance or proximity in the sense of intension – which involves the question of the scope of reciprocity of such connections. Having two perspectives on what Europe can be and is: on the one hand about the reach of “some” actors to the Recovery Plan and the reach of Recovery Plan to various actors, I traced in these corpuses the practices of enacting Europe through creating distance-proximity as relevance-irrelevance of different aspects in terms of actors, knowledges and materiality. This leads to the answer on what is Europe and how it exists in the Czech participation in European Recovery Plan in education. These findings about Czech Europe will be discussed in terms of the implications and relations to Europe’s Europe, through the inspiration by Patočka’s idea of “After-Europe”.

The first versions of the National Recovery Plan were prepared under the governance of Czech populist party (ANO), which influenced its technocratic framing (Hloušek & Kopeček, 2020). By generating specific distances to actors and knowledges, Europe was enacted as a form without the specific content of European values. The education “chapter” was scattered over Ministries, topics (digitalisation, innovation, job market) and aims (digital, greener, resilient). The proximity of educational actors (teachers, students, officials) to such framed education was weakened. Europe, as a formalised structure of the ways of funding (individual projects), policymaking (policies for evaluation of the impact of policy – policies for policies), was reached by various often non-educational actors to take advantage of connecting to this structure. The European project in these topological proximities was rendered irrelevant. Interpreting the case in Patočka’s terms, this Europe is enacted as formalised assurance in the conditions of ideological and ontological uncertainty (Patočka, 1999, 2003a). While Czechs experience a similar crisis of insecurity as other countries (Krastev, 2017), their Europe is a form of certifying of reality through policy determinism, in which scattered educational policies was equated with educational reality. This is not deficit in European values. The dominant European utilitarianism attached to value talk is taking its full voice in Czech Europe; it follows the common trend of Europe as a form – standards, traceability – investing in the forms (Kornberger et al., 2019; Thévenot, 1984). For Patočka, these elements signal a huger crisis of Europe which is deprived of some new positive “after-European” content while form – technological, administrative, and political, is maintained. This may help us understand why policy determinism in education prevailed, why the educational policy is seen as the only cure for all societal problems, and why technological optimism in education is envisioned through effectivity and economic benefits.

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