This paper explores relational issues of the nation, collective belonging and its interiorization of its external other, “Europe”, in the study of policy and school reform. Grek (2020) and her colleagues explored this relation as different institutional and political agents that connect as nodules and connections. My concern relates to this but differs by giving attention to the social epistemologies that travel and insect with the nation; that is, with the systems of reason that order and classify the phenomena of education at the interstices of European and international spaces. The trope of Europe is not meant as an originary site, but is about the episteme of uneven historical lines with no single origin. “Europe” is a symbolic marker of an exteriority of multiple practices that fold into the interiority of national policy and educational research in Eastern and Western Europe. Europe or the European Union, then, is not the origin of the calculative reasoning that folds into national policies. Rather Europe is a space in which patterns of recognition and expectations of experience are generated external to the nation but settles in policy and educational practices of difference in nations as a global homeless, location-less knowledge. The notion of “Europe” as the external Other is explored as indigenous foreigners or historical practices projected as global and universal (which they are not!) that settle in and appear as indigenous, affectively attached as principles of national salvation and redemption in national policies. These settlements are studied as: (1) the non-polemic language of management, (2) numbers and statistics are cultural artifacts, (3) the alchemy that reterritoralizes disciplinary knowledges into the pedagogical knowledge of children’s literacy and the school curriculum, and (4) the comparative reasoning of policy and research that excludes and abjects as equality. The significance of “Europe” in the infrastructures of policy and science is to generate new phenomena as objects of “the will to know” or desires; and as phantasmagrams that “act” as analogous to the magic lanterns of the 17th century to create illusions about the real. The strategy of the paper is to move from the formal categories of the state, its welfare institutions, and human actors as the sole originary sites of importance. My interest in knowledge is directed to the politics of schooling; the principles ordering and comparing who people are, should be, and who does “not fit” into the spaces of normalcy, excluded and abjected.

*Grek, S. (2018). OECD as a site of co-production. The European education governance and the new politics of ‘policy mobilization. S. Lindblad, D. Pettersson, & T. Popkewitz, T. (Eds.). (2018) Education by the numbers and the making of society. The expertise of international assessments. (pp. 185-200). New York: Routledge. *Popkewitz, T. (in press) Infrastructures And Phantasmagrams Of Inclusions That Exclude: International Student Assessments. The International Journal of Inclusive Education).