This presentation will introduce the most recent discussions about Europe as an agential space for education and how to study it from a comparative perspective in the case of NextGenerationEU (NGEU). National recovery plans (NRP) put us in front of theoretical and methodological problems. Despite the common “addressee” (the European Commission giving money and imposing certain conditions of acceptance) making NRPs comparatively accessible, the temporal and spatial views problematise such accessibility. NGEU changed its legitimisation of why Europe should be recovered in time, from Covid, the energy crisis, to war’s threat to democracy. It changes also its scale in terms of financial means provided. Consequently, also national “answers” to this changing initiative change. As is evident from a pre-study of NRPs involved in this broader project, all have more or less publicly changed in terms again time schedules and scale of implementation. The advance in Europeanisation studies in education brought to the fore the danger of uncritical acceptance of administrative maps of both the EU and nation-states (Popkewitz, 2023), and decontextualization character of standardised comparisons common in education (Landri, 2018). NGEU seems to provide just the next Europeanised educational normative. However, although we know much about the translation of these normatives in local settings of given countries (Grimaldi & Serpieri, 2012; Kascak, 2017; Neumann, 2011; Sifakakis et al., 2016; Viseu & Carvalho, 2018; Wirthová, 2022) the elusive nature of the current initiative to recover Europe poses significant comparative challenges. We would like to deal with them through a topological approach, which stresses the possibility of objects being the same while changing the relations among its components. In that sense, both RF and NRP are objects in mutation, not of replication, as they repeat in time and space (Allen, 2016) and we can focus on these changed relations. Helping us with the philosophy of comparison, we acknowledge that the construction of "tertium comparationis" – the third of comparison between cases to be compared (different NRPs) – is actually a conceptual practice and not comparative practice – determining this third is pre-comparative and acknowledges ontological consequences (Weber, 2014). This sensitives us to the politics of education and digitalisation we want to scrutinise, to ways how current nationalism offers a diverse Europeanisation, another spatialisation, and to our own ontological commitments that go with our tertium. Thus, we can compare a recovery effect in a broader richness of its variability than in mainstream numerical and standardised comparisons.

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