Searching for the Sub-Plot Between the Lines of Bologna

The Bologna declaration, signed by official representatives of 29 governments, explicitly set out the agenda for the adoption and development of a “European system of higher education” (Declaration 1999) within the enlarged Union of the first decade of the third millennium. The declaration clearly aimed to provide political legitimacy to a process of integration of the “European Higher Education Area” that had been on its way through multilateral agreements and EC regulations for almost two decades. By focusing emphatically on the “adoption of a system of easily readable and comparable degrees” and on measures to overcome “obstacles to the effective exercise of free movement”, the signatory ministers paved the political way to a harmonisation of degree tracks along measures aiming at increasing the mobility of the labour force, rather than a standardisation of disparate national systems of teaching and research. They therefore left untouched the national modes of organisation of research, the systems of appointment and promotion of academics, and more broadly the national idiosyncrasies which continue to define “academic communities” and upon which academic achievement remains primarily measured.