Horizontal Europeanisation among mobile doctoral candidates in the context of the European Union and the European Research Area
Research output: Contribution to journal › Journal article › Research › peer-review
The processes of Europeanisation—meaning the deepening of European integration on various levels—have previously been discussed from the point of view of political science, economics, linguistics, and cultural studies, with a macro-perspective on states, institutions, and organisations. However, Europe and the European Union (EU) are populated by individuals, who are actors of European transnationalism, which this paper conceptualises as horizontal Europeanisation. Spatial mobility is also becoming more relevant for thriving academics, and the EU aims to close ranks in Europe in the field of higher education and research. Therefore, this paper asks how the process of horizontal Europeanisation among early-career academics manifests itself. This process is discussed against the background of the framework of the EU and the European Research Area (ERA), where academics make use of a common scientific market. The basis for the qualitative empirical analysis is 60 biographical interviews with intra-EU mobile doctoral candidates. The findings show that the EU and ERA contribute to the processes of horizontal Europeanisation and support it. However, many decisive factors for horizontal Europeanisation lie beyond the EU and the concept of ERA. The novelty of this article as a contribution to European studies is the explanation of horizontal Europeanisation among academics through spatial mobility patterns.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Journal | European Journal of Education |
| Volume | 56 |
| Issue number | 2 |
| Pages (from-to) | 279-291 |
| Number of pages | 13 |
| ISSN | 0141-8211 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - Jun 2021 |
| Externally published | Yes |
Bibliographical note
Funding Information:
For study participants, Europeanisation was initiated by experiences with the Erasmus programme, and was very much embedded in the infrastructure of the EU. Even for those who did not participate in Erasmus, the programme had an indirect influence on their decision to take up European mobility and therefore start their Europeanisation process. The interviewees’ Europeanisation process usually evolved further through deepening transnational social contacts and especially through widening their professional European network following their migration to another European country. Interpersonal relationships played a vital role in building and maintaining horizontal Europeanisation; friends from later stages of life were more mobile in Europe themselves and the social networks of our participants spread over Europe. These results are in agreement with prior research, which concludes that ‘[through] experiences abroad and through their social interaction, mobile students from EU states appropriate Europe as a personal project, in which the social predominates over the political’ (Van Mol, 2013 , p. 220). This process was supported by the EU‐infrastructure through the freedom of mobility, the harmonisation and recognition of national diplomas, smoothing transitions and EU‐wide social security measures. Although the common European infrastructure and its advantages for mobile academics were seldom pointed out in the interviews, the majority of interviewees moved within the framework and it was implicit in their narration. This omission indicates a processed Europeanisation that is taken for granted instead of being treated as something special or peculiar.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2021 The Authors. European Journal of Education published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
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