ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the European Centre for Higher Education as a place that is unique to the European continent, and which has oriented its activities towards an attempt to Europeanize higher education. Inaugurated in 1972, at a time when the dialogue on cooperation and security in Europe brought together European chancelleries, CEPES – as the French acronym is used – enabled higher education experts to work on this subject with their counterparts from all over the continent and thus to cross the “Iron Curtain”. This chapter analyzes the almost five years of debate (1967–1972), illustrating both the political vicissitudes and the optimism that CEPES, as a project, aroused among those concerned, before examining the first years of the center’s activities, up to 1989.
