Democrats, authoritarians and the Bologna process
- Judith Marquand, Cardiff University
The Bologna Process, initiated in 1999, was renamed ‘the European Higher Education Area’ in 2010. It includes 47 member countries of the Council of Europe. It now attracts worldwide interest.
Without sanctions, it has transformed its members’ higher education systems, enabling comparability of their outcomes. This entails adoption of learner-centred methods of teaching, quality assurance requirements and increased mobility of students and staff between member countries. It promotes the involvement of all stakeholders in quality assurance, lifelong learning. These are essentially democratic objectives and methods.
Despite growing authoritarianism in some member states, it may yet survive because of their strong motivation to pursue economic development through increased technological and innovative capacity.
After examining the central processes, four contrasting country case studies – Germany, Russia, England and Wales – illustrate some of the varying responses to this similar framework.
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Judith Marquand is an honorary professor at Cardiff University. She was educated at Oxford, Harvard and the Open University and lectured at Manchester University and LSE before joining the Government Economic Service, where she spent 25 years in departments including the Treasury, Environment, Trade and Industry, and the Manpower Services Commission. She left to head a Centre for Training Policy Studies at the University of Sheffield. Her books include Autonomy and Change: the Sources of Economic Growth (1989) and Development Aid in Russia: Lessons from Siberia (2009).