In the last decade, an upsurge in new nationalisms and geopolitical shifts has amplified Eurosceptic sentiment and challenged the values of European integration. These transformations within the political sphere in which universities operate exert growing pressure on the openness of higher education and research. The (re)nationalization of higher education and politicization of research increasingly influence university politics, including autonomy and governance, academic freedom, open science and international engagement. Universities find themselves entangled in contrasting visions of Europe: between a vision of deeper political integration and openness and one where European nation-states (re)gain power as the locus of political sovereignty or where protectionist regionalism and security politics challenge open exchange with communities outside the EU.

When researching European higher education, the Maastricht Treaty can be seen as an ideological turning point (Mudde, 2007). By launching the European Single Market, the Treaty tightened the European integration process: a process that in many ways conditioned the development of European universities in subsequent decades. On the one hand, the Treaty prompted extensive higher education reforms, leading to the establishment of the European Higher Education Area in 2010, rooted in the need for mutual recognition of diplomas and certificates to support the free movement of persons and services. On the other hand, the Treaty became a breeding ground for new nationalisms opposing the European integration project and its strengthening of federal Europe (Brøgger, 2022). While the domain of higher education was not immune to this opposition, research into European higher education has centred on the sector’s extensive Europeanization and globalization, in part to remedy years of methodological nationalism in education research, and lack of attention to the politics of scale (Brøgger, 2019; Dale, 2009; Huisman, 2009; Lawn & Grek, 2012). The conceptions of scale – the global, the European, the regional, and the national – are often taken for granted. However, they are not merely pre-existing sites (Clarke, 2019; Papanastasiou, 2019). Rather, they seem to depend on and be embedded in social and political practices as well as scientific and academic practices. Therefore, the focus on the global scale, in particular, has to a certain degree come at the expense of scholarship (re)linking higher education and research to regional and national scales investigating recent shifts in the geopolitical landscape, the impact of nationalisms, national specificity and differences across various contexts (Robertson, 2018).

Against this backdrop and taking inspiration in an affirmative critique of the politics of scaling in education policy studies, this paper discusses how to move beyond the binary of methodological nationalism (Shahjahan & Kezar, 2013), where policies are treated as national phenomena enacted by nation-states and attached to a particular place and polity, and methodological globalism, where the emphasis is on global factors affecting national policymaking (Brøgger & Moscovitz, 2022; Clarke, 2019; Takayama & Lingard, 2021).

The paper draws inspiration from the idea of an affirmative critique that does not begin with a plea for a revolution, but, by ‘staying with the trouble’ (Foucault, 1997; Haraway, 2016), plants the seed for change. Affirming and encouraging something in that which it criticizes (Raffnsøe et al.,), affirmative critique does not condemn or distance itself from the criticized; rather, it commits itself to an ethics of engagement and entails self-transformation (Staunæs & Brøgger, 2020).

This paper draws on extant scholarship around higher education policy and relies on publicly available policy documents as well as archival sources related to the EU’s post Maastricht higher education policy, as well as 18 semi structured interviews conducted in 2022 with policy officials from the European Commission, and representatives from higher education and research interest organizations in Brussels. Data including EU treaties, memoranda, white papers, and strategies were collected through the EUR-Lex Access to European Union Law and the European Council’s online archives. Material relating to the Bologna Process, including declarations and communiqués, were harvested from the official European Higher Education Area website (www.ehea.eu). Scholarship around higher education policy will be analyzed through the lens of hegemonic academic practices of scalecraft (Papanastasiou, 2019). The paper explores how the research community has been moved in the direction of global and European scales by empirical data and by what became hegemonic practices within the community. At some point, the paper argues, it became almost impossible to distinguish between being moved by empirical data and actively contributing to this movement through research practice. Therefore, an affirmative critique inevitably entails self-transformation. Policy documents will be analyzed to identify the political scaling of the European education space, which is now being challenged by rising new nationalisms and geo-political shifts, being addressed in the qualitative interviews. Building on the conceptualization of affirmative critique, the paper methodologically reflects on the limitations of the epistemological horizon of the practices of methodological globalism that characterizes recent decades’ higher education research. With the upsurge in new nationalisms and recent geopolitical shifts, the empirical reality is transforming and research must be able to provide comprehensive analysis. This prompts an affirmative critique, including a critique of the hegemonic academic practices of scalecraft that cement the use and taken-for-grantedness of particular scales within research communities. The purpose of the paper is not to dismiss the use of global and European scales. These scales still hold explanatory power. Rather, the paper seeks to encourage the potential in existing research to move beyond the binary of methodological nationalism and globalism.

This paper argues that an upsurge in new nationalisms and geopolitical shifts affecting European higher education and research prompts a rethinking of the politics of scaling and an affirmative critique of the taken-for-granted practice of applying global and European scales in higher education research. Growing pressures on the openness of higher education and research at the national and European level prompt a rethinking of the nexus between global, European and national higher education and research that considers shifts in the geopolitical landscape, national specificity and the influence of new and emerging nationalisms. Affected by the common dependency on methodological nationalism in social sciences (Chernilo, 2006; Malešević, 2013), for many years, higher education research seldom engaged with topics, people, organizations and processes outside ‘the national container’ (Shahjahan & Kezar, 2013). Meanwhile, hegemonic practices of scalecraft as a political and academic dynamic have since led to a taken-for-granted practice of applying global and European scales in higher education research (Papanastasiou, 2019), thereby creating a new methodological challenge in the attempt to overcome another. Discussing the limitations of the epistemological horizon of methodological globalism in higher education research, the paper contributes to scholarship on the politics of scaling. The paper suggests to relinquish, the global, the European and national as geometrical nesting, a geometrical concern of size and thereby challenge the exclusive interpretation of these phenomena as scale, primarily connoting size. The paper further reflects on the global, the European and national as topological matters, produced through one another through political, social, scientific and academic practices. An intersection, rather than spaces in their own right widening previous conceptions of scale with understandings of reach, connoting topological concerns of connectivity.

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