This article shows how the European Commission cultivates policy shifts
toward a particular idea of a common European Higher Education Area by
using its considerable financial leverage. By making European Union (EU)
funding dependent on grant recipients meeting certain strategically
selected conditions, the Commission creates new incentive structures for
domestic actors, in this case higher education institutions (HEIs), with two
important consequences. First, the Commission turns universities into
agents for its policies: Universities lobby governments to pass legislation,
which would allow them to conform to Commission requirements. Second,
HEIs try to comply with the Commission’s requirements even in the
absence of compatible national frameworks, thereby leapfrogging policy
decisions on the national level. Describing this as a “soft” mechanism for
achieving convergence, as Open Method of Coordination accounts posit,
overlooks the fundamentally non-negotiable nature of the process from the
participants’ perspective and considerably underestimates the Commission’s
real influence. We examine this argument through a case study of an
EU-funded higher education program, Erasmus Mundus.
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