ABSTRACT
This chapter traces the development of and the way in which it has been used in an attempt to promote neoliberal marketization in the field of education policy. Critical political economy (CPE), claim has tended to view European integration as a means by which the neoliberal agenda has been imposed upon the sphere of education. This includes the more general process of welfare retrenchment and fiscal discipline associated with the EU's approach to the welfare state. CPE scholars have noted the way in which the rise of post-Fordist skill-based strategies of capital accumulation has coincided with an increasingly active role for European institutions in public education. The key pillar of this development was the so-called Bologna Process. In addition, the Bologna Process aims to produce neoliberal subjectivity and a neoliberal rationality of governance. There have been a range of anti-Bologna protests and anti-reform student protests across Europe.
