The Effect of the ERASMUS Programme on European Higher Education: The Visible Hand of Europe

For the last few decades, European higher education has gone through significant transformation which has been driven by broad global developments, such as massification of higher education, a global competition, and economic benefits of education (Maassen & Stensaker, forthcoming). The direct and indirect influence of the European dimension is another force that gradually changes the nature of higher education in Europe. The pace of change has accelerated since the 1990s, particularly with the Sorbonne Declaration (1998), the Bologna Declaration (1999), and the Lisbon Strategy (2000). The first two have led to a process to make study programmes more compatible and transparent across Europe as well as to the outside world. The Lisbon process seeks to reform the continent’s still fragmented national systems into a more powerful and more integrated knowledge-based economy in which higher education is regarded one of the key drivers of innovative capacity. Subsequent communications from European policy makers have strengthened the belief that higher education institutions will be crucial to Europe’s future well-being and that stronger cooperation between countries and universities in this endeavour is a necessary condition for success.