Russia’s war in Ukraine has drawn Western European attention to the interrelationship between Eastern, Central, and Western Europe and raised questions about realignments within Europe that might see a shift of geopolitical concerns more towards Central and Eastern European (CEE) states. Even before the war Emil Brix and Erhard Busek proposed that the future of Europe lies in the dynamics of policy and practice in Central Europe. This argument can be extended to include Eastern Europe. The war and various debates around it ask us all to consider the question of Europe not from its traditional centres in Western and Northwest Europe, but from Central and Eastern Europe and reflect on the questions and central concerns this presents.

The challenge posed by the symposium is, what might European higher education policy options look like when conceptualised through the historical experiences of CEE. This reverses the usual flow of policy trajectories and forces us to consider that the future of European higher education might be organised around different policy logics or scholarly concerns.

Research performativity (rankings, citation indexes, etc.) have been critiqued for producing distorting effects in academic practice and knowledge including the underrepresentation of the arts, humanities and some areas of the social sciences, and the relative invisibility of non-English language publications, in rankings and publication metrics , the encouragement of instrumental behaviours whereby scoring high against research performance indicators becomes an objective in its own right, influencing choice of research topic, what to write, and where to publish , and the impact on modes of knowledge, theories, and intellectual traditions in the non-core regions of Europe . These contribute to asymmetries in terms of academic collaboration, recognition, circulation of ideas as well as the economic and linguistic hindrances for non-core researchers and their institutions to gain greater visibility and acknowledgement internationally.

Normative higher education policy and policy scholarship frames the development of CEE in terms of policy emanating from the centres of global higher education and CEE aligning with these. In this framing CEE higher education is seen as modernising through an alignment with the centres of global higher education. This suggests an asymmetrical relationship between the two regions. For instance, scholars from CEE have argued that when viewed from Central and Eastern Europe the process of system harmonization driven by the Bologna process looks different. In CEE states Bologna was more than a process of system standardisation, being part of a broader economic and political transformation in the region, interacting with new ideas of national identity and the creation/recreation of nation-states, and highlighted the economic and infrastructural disparity between CEE and Western Europe. Therefore, looking at the project of system harmonization as it is experienced from Europe’s eastern boundaries provides a different way of understanding what harmonization might mean.

The symposium therefore discusses,

• The way CEE became a particular kind of object of inquiry for higher education policy research, flattening the differences between the systems of higher education in the varied political contexts of Central and Eastern Europe (Monika Orechova)
• How ‘European’ internationalisation of research confronts the particular conditions of higher education institutions in CEE states and how they vary due to different foci, policy approaches and historical legacies (Liudvika Leisyte), and
• What a different kind of higher education policy research approach can offer that responds positively to listening to CEE experiences (Simon Warren).

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