ABSTRACT
The European Universities Initiative (EUI) has given rise to much discourse about the vision of European higher education that has permeated the international, national and institutional settings. Acknowledging that discourse stemming from the EU can have a meaningful role in shaping actors’ preferences and in instigating policy change, this chapter analyses three levels of ideas in the official EUI policy documents (the worldview level, the programmatic level and the policy level) in order to sketch out an image of the vision of European higher education that EU institutions are propagating in their discourse. The analysis reveals that while the current EU discourse does not fully move away from the previously predominant goals of economic prosperity and global competitiveness, it engulfs economic concerns with concerns of a more social and political nature. At the same time, it takes for granted that internationalisation of universities is the instrument through which the desired goals will be achieved. And finally, it endorses concrete policy instruments which all require some form of facilitation from the side of the EU. The discourse therefore legitimises the role of the EU in enabling further internationalisation of universities and ultimately in furthering “Europeanisation” of national policies in higher education.
