Table Of ContentFABRICATING EUROPE
Fabricating Europe
The Formation of an Education Space
Edited by
António Nóvoa
and
Martin Lawn
KLUWER ACADEMIC PUBLISHERS
NEW YORK, BOSTON, DORDRECHT, LONDON, MOSCOW
eBookISBN: 0-306-47561-8
Print ISBN: 1-4020-0801-5
©2002 Kluwer Academic Publishers
NewYork, Boston, Dordrecht, London, Moscow
Print ©2002 Kluwer Academic Publishers
Dordrecht
All rights reserved
No part of this eBook maybe reproducedor transmitted inanyform or byanymeans,electronic,
mechanical, recording, or otherwise, without written consent from the Publisher
Created in the United States of America
Visit Kluwer Online at: http://kluweronline.com
and Kluwer's eBookstore at: http://ebooks.kluweronline.com
TABLE OF CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION: Fabricating Europe: The Formation of an Education Space 1
AntónioNóvoa and Martin Lawn
FOREWORD: Space and Learning 15
GoranTherborn
CHAPTER 1: Borderless Education:
Imagining a European Education Space in a Time of Brands and Networks 19
Martin Lawn
IMAGINING SPACE
CHAPTER 2: Education and the European Space of Flows 35
David Coulby
CHAPTER 3: Notes towards the Definition of a European Educational Space 47
Franco Ferrarotti
CHAPTER 4: Locating European Identity in Education 55
Yasemin Soysal
GLOBALIZING SPACE
CHAPTER 5: Reterritorializing Educational Import:
Explorations into the Politics of Educational Borrowing 69
Gita Steiner-Khamsi
CHAPTER 6: Returning to Europe: The Use of External References
in Reconceptualizing Minority Education in Post-Soviet Latvia 87
Iveta Silova
CHAPTER 7: Quality Education and Training for Tomorrow’s Europe:
A Contrapuntal Reading of European Commission Documents 109
Ronald Sultana
CHAPTER 8: Ways of Thinking about Education in Europe 131
António Nóvoa
CHAPTER 9: Coda: Europe, Social Space and the Politics of Knowledge 157
Terri Seddon
Index 163
INTRODUCTION
FABRICATING EUROPE
The Formation of an Education Space
1. INVITATION TO ENGAGE
This book emerged out of an invitational seminar, which took place in Lisbon,
supported by the Gulbenkian Foundation. The purpose of the meeting was to create
a discussion between invited participants on the possibility of a European public
space for education/public spaces interweaved with education: the novel situation
for educators in Europe, which, it was felt, needed a careful exploration. Members
of the meeting were invited because of the critical contribution they had made to an
exploratory theoretical understanding of the current situation which educators and
citizens in Europe were finding themselves in.
Expressed in the invitation to the Lisbon meeting was a core idea, an ambiguous
and fuzzy idea, of a European educational space, created by transnational
governance, networks, cultural and economic projects. This is a new idea, recording
the emergence of particular discourses and practices, but it is not clear what it is,
even as it is being formed. It is being produced by national state collaboration,
European Union (EU) guidelines and products, academic networks, social
movements, business links and sites, city “states,” virtual connections and through
this book, ourselves. Yet, the apparent creation of this contemporary space of
European policy-making and networking was not a subject of study. As usual, it
appeared as a footnote to the normative approach in which an examination of
education as a system is strongly bounded by the traditions, laws and practices of the
nation state boundaries in which it is seen as existing. National and professional
identity, political organization, policy formation and public/private markets are all
viewed as contained within the borders of the state. Our concern here is with the
new possibilities to be imagined and discerned in the European public and
institutional spaces and the lack of impetus within the broad area of educational
studies to meet the task of creating analyses and responses.
There is no significant literature within the broad area of the social sciences about
the new ways in which education, seen in its widest sense, is being formed in
Europe, apart from the emergence of cultural, even anthropological, studies of
Europeanization and its effects (Therborn 1995; Shore, 2000; Bellier & Wilson,
2000). Gradually, articles and sometimes books focusing on particular education
areas, such as the European dimension in the curriculum, teacher education or
1
A. Nóvoa and M. Lawn (eds.), Fabricating Europe, 1-13.
© 2002 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.
2 INTRODUCTION
vocational training, reflecting long-time priorities of the EU, are being published.
Yet, as a subject of study in itself, there has been surprisingly little produced on the
gradual emergence of a new space of cultural communication, policy creation and
implementation, levels of networking and professional and governmental relations.
However, within the other fields of study, education may appear: for example,
within political studies; within discussions on regionalism; within network theory;
within cultural analyses of city links and economic development and within studies
of governance and citizenship. Within these areas, “education” becomes a site of
study in terms of wider agendas. The area of “education” may be viewed as an arena
for the construction of fresh European educational identities, significant cross-
national organizations, new professional affinities and innovative conduits for
mutuality. It may provide the opportunity for a legitimation of inequality, for neo-
liberal solutions, for national or race-based opposition and a strengthening of official
nationalist cultures. Europe may be a site of opposition to globalization and a home
for new civic spaces. It may not.
The problematic explored within this book is threefold. There is a focus on
educational studies, on new forms of theorizing about education and upon the
reconnection of education/social science work on education.
Education, as a field of study, appears to be showing signs of disconnection from
the broadly defined area of the social sciences, a relation that was always struggled
for in the universities. It is making a recast appearance within business studies,
social policy, vocational formation and national policy discourse, loosened from its
classical humanist, theoretical and creative spaces of the past. This is not uniform
but a discernible trend is appearing.
2. BACKGROUND
The emergence of an interest in the area of education came slowly to politicians
primarily involved in an economic and trading agreement, and clearly emerged out
of Council of Europe and cultural agreements. By the early 1960s, a combination of
meetings by groups of education ministers and their officials had created a forum of
discussion and action around common issues between states on education and
related topics (youth and sport, higher education, research etc.)
By 1971, using a movable description within the 1957 Treaty of Rome regarding
cooperation within the field of education and a focus on vocational training, a
meeting of education ministers proposed to give attention to education as a field of
cultural construction in the new Europe, congruent with the processes of integration.
In other words, a cultural and education strategy was produced which would begin
the task of constructing Europe as a common space, and the role of education in this
task was seen as a necessary step. The legal basis was important, as it was not clear
if one existed for this important initiative. Gradually, the pace and scope of
educational actions grew, overcoming problems of mandate, so by the late 1970s,
they included support for study meetings, the European dimension of education,
mobility of students, bilingualism and the compilation of statistics. Involving a “vast
number of pilot projects, meetings, seminars, and the like” and an “extensive
FABRICATING EUROPE 3
involvement of administrators of educational systems” (Beukel, 2001, p. 129), these
activities began to merge into each other, even if “in practice it has been very
difficult to make clear distinctions among vocational, professional, and university
training, continuing education, and primary and secondary education” (Sprokkereef,
1995, p. 341).
By the time of the Maastricht Treaty in 1992, “education” was formally
recognized as a major responsibility of the EU and not just the member states,
although not without unease: “The Community shall contribute to the development
of quality education by encouraging cooperation between member states, and if
necessary, by supporting and supplementing their action, while fully respecting the
responsibility of the member states for the content of teaching and the organization
of education systems and their cultural and linguistic diversity” (article 126).
This was followed by a major reorganization of the EU education programmes,
which were getting larger and wider. Diversity and subsidiarity were still the key
descriptors of the education area of the EU but the relentless move forward into a
lifelong learning zone, an educational space, and a place for quality education, was
taken a step further in the Lisbon European Council in 2000. A knowledge-based
economy was seen as demanding a timetable for goal achievement, indicators of
best practice and national adoption of European guidelines into actions.
The Lisbon conclusions implicitly give the Union the mandate to develop a common
interest approach in education going beyond national diversities as can already be seen
in the demand to Ministers of Education to debate common objectives of educational
systems. This mandate will lead to an increase in the European dimension of national
educational policies. (Hingel, 2001, pp. 15 & 19)
The Lisbon assembly began an annual series of meetings in which progress on
achieving a dynamic economy was evaluated and a detailed work programme
instituted.
However, a reliance on policy adaptation and political study, using beliefs and
norms, policy paradigms and policy elites, is not very useful in the education area.
Even quite recently, it could be stated that:
A European education policy does not exist. A fully fledged EC [European Community]
education policy was not foreseen by the EC’s founding fathers and most would argue
that there is no need for it. (Sprokkereef [1989] 1995, p. 345)
All indications are that the stimulating and supportive role the EC has played in
education over the last decades is being institutionalised, while any scope for future
expansion into this field has been effectively removed. (Sprokkereef [1989] 1995, p.
346)
This is a reasonable point if the protestations of national politicians and the sparse
evidence of EU regulation is taken into account, but two points have made this
analysis redundant. Firstly, the pace of reform, that is, of EU effectiveness and
integration, is rapidly increasing, especially since the late 1990s and the Lisbon
European Council in 2000. Two commentators, working together in Directorate A,
DG Education and Culture in the Commission, in the policy unit, published papers
in 2001 which pointed out the significance of the Lisbon context to education:
4 INTRODUCTION
it is a sign of the progress made in the European Union context that we have arguably
gone further than ever in international cooperation on core aspects of educational
policy. (Massangioli, 2001, p. 6)
But the combined effect of this collective process of advancing on a broad front will
surely be the gradual emergence over time of a “European educational area” in which
knowledge and lifelong learning play a central role and in which ideas will be able to
circulate as easily as goods and capital. (Massangioli, 2001, pp. 6–7)
What is presently happening in co-operation in the field of education tells us, that not
only is a European Space of Education in its making, common principles of education
are being agreed upon between Member States, leading logically to a European Model
of Education. (Hingel, 2001, p. 4)
So, the first point is about the speed of change today. The second point is just as
significant, however. A different kind of analysis would have allowed other
important features of the European education policy area to be revealed earlier, and
its depth and significance recognized. Education is viewed in EU-based policy
analyses as a minor area of policy, much less significant than the key areas of
integration and trade, like law and economic studies. But from a cultural point of
view, which recognizes the majorshifts and problems of transnational governance,
education has a new prominence as the arena in which identity and legitimacy can
be created. It is to this approach that we now turn.
3. FABRICATING EUROPEAN EDUCATIONAL SPACE
The tendency in European political studies has been to view “Europeanization” as a
distinct process, produced by central institutions, which becomes incorporated into
local contexts in the following ways:
processes of construction, diffusion and institutionalization of formal and informal
rules, procedures, policy paradigms, styles, ways of doing things, and shared beliefs and
norms which are first defined and consolidated in the making of EU decisions and then
incorporated in the logic of domestic discourse, identities, political structures and public
policies. (Radaelli, 2000, p. 4)
In this view, the emphasis is on forms of integration, on incorporation, adaptation
and occasional diversity, with a focus on the mediating actors who move between
centre and locality. We extend this version of Europeanization to approach the
concept as linking social structures, networks and actors at the local, national and
European levels. As a consequence, the concept of “Europeanization” will be used
to describe and explore the formation of new European identities within emergent
policy networks, leading to the emergence of the European education space, a fuzzy
but significant concept in education policy.
3.1 Governing “European Education”
These emergent policy networks seek to manage the tensions created by
marketization, while seeking to modernize educational processes and systems. The
FABRICATING EUROPE 5
concept of the policy network is an explanatory device to understand the links
between state and society in the enactment of policy. The idea reflects the increasing
complexity of governance, involving a range of partners from state and civil society,
in informal and interdependent relations, exchanging resources and knowledge
cooperatively. As centralized, hierarchical organizations failed to shift with the
changes in communications and complexity, so networks became useful as a
description of emergent processes, as an analytical tool and as indicative of a
profound alteration in the structure of the polity. In this sense, policy networks are
the key policy form and their mapping is critical to the analysis of changing
educational governance. The EU has itself been characterized as a “network of
networks” (Leonard, 1998, p. 7).
The governance of Europe has specific problems and forms. It can be
conceptualized as a multilevel system of governance where private and public actors
at the transnational, national and local level deal with problems of a lack of central
authority and a dispersal of resources. To create and manage policy, a range of
partners, at different levels of government, has to be negotiated with; they exist
within complex networks, which span intergovernmental, producer, professional and
expert forms. They may represent highly organized industry or voluntary sector
groups or loose, but important, specialist academic associations. Increasingly, it
appears that these networks, woven into sets of linked relations, represent a form of
governance unique in Europe, crossing state boundaries, old government divisions
and traditions of work and administration. The informality of their organization, the
complexity of their knowledge relations and exchanges, the hybridity of their
institutional association, combine with their overall interdependence to produce a
distinctive form of governance in Europe.
This form of governance in education cannot be understood as simply
instrumental in transmitting policy or in mediating it. Policy is made in this process,
within the web of its decentred and plural forms (Mayntz, 1994, p. 5}. We suggest
that Europeanization of education is an outcome of this multifaceted form of
governance, and that its purposes are pedagogic: through its processes it builds a
Europeanized policy in education. The project of defining and expanding a new
public space in Europe is also one of building a new cultural space, a process which
is largely ignored by many of its architects and critics because of their focus on the
political and economic forms the “New Europe” will take (Bellier & Wilson, 2000,
p. 6). These policy actors can be taken to epitomize the new global contexts of
policy-making; with their transformed identities, they appear as cultural hybrids and
pioneers without territory (see Hannerz, 1996; Featherstone, 1990; Shore, 2000).
Within the broad field of Europeanization, and the specific field of EU integration,
they act as “agents of European consciousness” (Shore, 2000, p. 26). The new
education policy space can be treated as more than a regulatory arena—as a space in
which new European meanings in education are constructed.
6 INTRODUCTION
3.2 Fabricating Identities
This collection of articles represents different aspects of an innovative approach to
the European policy area in education, growing out of early papers offering critical
analyses of aspects of European education policy as an area of study (Coulby &
Jones, 1995; Sultana, 1995, 1996; Nóvoa, 1996, 2000; Coulby, 2000). They
represent a determined and cumulative attempt to begin work on a cultural politics
of education in Europe, which is characterized by a concern for governance and
culture as a socially structured practice.
Culture is a key concept in the way the book approaches the study of educational
policy. It is studied through the way in which the concept exerts a key function in
the Europeanizing process: policy documents are threaded through with the
“culture” used as the distinguishing feature of the civilizing European process, as a
procedure for the creation of an innovative European organizational model, as a core
symbolic element of a modern European identity and as a shared consciousness.
Apart from the formation of the European economic zone and common market,
cultural symbolism and production is the hub of the new Europe.
A crucial legitimating factor in the governance of Europe, the transnational stage
in which the nation states have produced, is the formation of new categories of
European, sharing a narrative of the past and an obsession with the future, a
replication of the nineteenth-century processes of nationhood. This new
categorization takes place in a number of ways, via the school curriculum, Eurostat
statistics and exemplar texts. The construction of an imagined community of Europe
(Anderson, 1983) is managed by the plethora of cultural statements which emerge
from Brussels, national governments and European pressure groups and are
sometimes opposed by newspapers and other agents, with alternative narratives
invoked. Education is the key means by which new identities or missions or spatial
locations are assigned or produced. Distinctions between groups and nations are
rapidly formed or dissolved, a task which education also takes part in through
restructured curricula or textbooks. These modernizing cultural narratives produce
an imagined space, a Europe newlycreated, with a mission, and incorporating older,
national artefacts and symbols in a new form. Europe than becomes a place and a
project through which the “citizens” of transnational governance emerge.
Forgetfulness, silences and exclusion are the handmaidens of this process as well,
but they have to be searched for.
A cultural politics of this process would not only analyze the use of these
arguments of the “new Europe” but the methods of their production and distribution,
their differential relations to audiences, their contestation and promotion. The
creation of collective forms of social consciousness about Europe, “our state,” is a
direct result of this historical context in which transnational governance has to be
produced. The carriers and mediators of Europeanization, the policy professionals,
are a focus for this approach as well: they translate, integrate, obscure, disregard,
promote and benefit from the multifaceted aspects of this policy process. The
movement of European regulation and trade policies into local and national
discourse so that the global appears in the vernacular is a sleight of hand of the
mediating policy professional, a process which can be seen clearly in “peripheral” or
