The contribution argues that policy oriented higher education studies (HES) would benefit from a transnational historical approach that decentres or parochializes the idea of Europe. HES largely reflects the global structure of knowledge production in that it is dominated by the research concerns and analytical interests of Western European and North American academia. CEE scholars often feel required to publish in internationally prestigious journals, and therefore publish in English, to frame analysis in line with dominant Euro/American theories and find that local or regional concerns are constructed as parochial and marginal. HES can often work with form of Eurocentrism that construes Western Europe as the pinnacle of modernisation in contrast to the backward and tradition-constrained East. Policy scholarship can therefore suggest that CEE higher education needs to ‘modernise’ by aligning with models that reflect the global centres of knowledge production. The modern scientific system does not simply emanate from the centres of global knowledge production in the UK, Western Europe, or America and diffuse voluntaristically to the rest of the world simply because of its inherent superiority, but is linked to historically constituted structures of power, empire, and epistemological dominance that produce spatial distributions of knowledge production and consumption globally and within Europe. The paper explores a number of strategies for reconfiguring HES that can alter the epistemic relationship between Western Europe and CEE. Transnational theme: Use transnational themes from global higher education discourses such as student mobility, internationalization, university rankings; Situate these in transnational themes drawn from transnational historical or social scientific scholarship such as processes of nation or empire building. Transnational space: Situate the research in regional constellations; Geopolitical spaces such as empires or the Cold War. Parochializing Europe: Foregrounding issues of power, empire/colonialism, and geopolitics; Defining transnational spaces, units of analysis, or periodization to enable new perspectives on phenomenon. Periodization: Defining the temporal span to explore the generation of policy ideas, strategies, and rationales as well as rejected alternatives; Working with multiple or layered temporalities and examine how they converge at certain historical moments to create the conditions for specific policy options. Unit of analysis and methodological nationalism: Recognize that spatial/political categories (nation/state) are categories of practice that sustain particular power relations The presentation will illustrate this framework with examples drawn from peripheralized zones of Europe, specifically system harmonisation related to Eastern Europe and student mobility in Southern Europe.

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