Higher education differs from one country to another, as it reflects the relation between the university and society. However, homogenization of higher education seems to be the primary trend in the European education space shaped by the Bologna Process, and it accompanies the universalization of knowledge, the possibilities of studies, and the establishment of criteria for what knowledge is, as well as increased mobility. However, there is no single way to move toward these goals, and there are opinions opposed to the homogenization of higher education. The main focus of this article is to scrutinize the critical voices behind the Bologna Process that have arisen since its inception in Turkey. This article relies on primary sources (Bologna documents,Footnote 1 higher education acts and regulations in Turkey), interviews with different stake-holders in higher education (experts, rectors, academics, international office staff, and students), and secondary literature. The method of triangulation is employed; that is to say, data have been collected from interviews, legal documents, reports, and other relevant secondary literature. The article employs the methodological toolkit of process tracing in trying to explain how the Bologna Process evolved at the EU level and its impact at the national level as well as on universities. The focus is on how the discourse of change is framed by experts within the national framework, and how it is critically viewed by various stake-holders in higher education in Turkey.
In the course of the fieldwork—conducted within an EU-funded FP7 project (Identities and Modernities in Europe)Footnote 2—30 different stake-holders in the higher education system have been interviewed, comprising six professors, two former rectors, four international office staff of various universities, four members of relevant civil society organizations, and fourteen university students from different scientific disciplines enrolled at various public and private (foundation)Footnote 3 universities in and around İstanbul. The interviewees will be indicated by capital letters—A, B, C, etc.—as the interviews were conducted under condition of anonymity. İstanbul was selected as the city in which to conduct the fieldwork because it hosts the highest number of universities in Turkey.Footnote 4 Another reason for limiting the fieldwork to İstanbul is that the city hosts a diverse group of students coming from all around the country. However, I cannot claim to provide the reader here with a representative work, but rather only with an illustrative work.
Table 1 Number of public (blue) and private (orange) universities (total number in gray) since 1933.
Source: The Council of Higher Education [YÖK], http://www.yok.gov.tr). Note that the figure given for 2014 is predicted in accordance with the number of five new university proposals (1 public and 4 private) made to the YÖK.
In selecting the rectors and professors, those highly engaged in the Bologna Process were chosen.Footnote 5 Students were selected on the basis of a quota sampling to ensure a diverse set of students with regard to ethnic, religious, and educational background. The students who participated in the fieldwork were predominantly of middle-class or working-class background. The staff members of the international offices were selected through snowball sampling from both public and private universities. Finally, leading members of certain relevant civil society organizations—such as the Education Reform Initiative (Eğitim Reformu Girişimi, ERG)Footnote 6 and the Women Entrepreneurs’ Association of Turkey (Türkiye Kadın Girişimciler Derneği, KAGİDER)Footnote 7—were interviewed with regard to their perspectives on the changing role of higher education in contemporary Turkey. The interviews lasted between 50 and 90 minutes. All interviews were recorded with the interlocutors’ consent, and the recordings were transcribed. These interviews were then analyzed using the discourse analysis method, with specific emphasis on the concepts of Europeanization and higher education.Footnote 8 Going through the transcribed interviews, I looked for the main argumentation strategies, or the main discursive topoi,Footnote 9 which enable us to understand how individuals’ discourse of the Bologna Process is constructed and articulated. Although the main unit of analysis of this article is the interlocutors and their interpretation of the Bologna Process, the article seeks to critically analyze the Bologna documents in order to study the ways in which the neo-liberal discourse on Europeanization and European higher education space has evolved.
The Europeanization of higher education
In the literature of European studies, there are various approaches to the processes of Europeanization in different social, political, legal, economic, and cultural contexts. As the main focus of this article is not the Europeanization of higher education in Turkey, I will only briefly touch upon the most relevant theories of Europeanization. According to the traditional rationalist outlook, Europe is largely conceived as an emerging political opportunity structure, which offers certain actors additional legal and political resources to exert influence while constraining others to pursue their goals.Footnote 10 This definition makes sense for the Turkish experience in policy areas where pressure from the EU is more direct, especially between 2002 and 2005, when the government of the Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi, AKP) enacted reforms regarding the removal of capital punishment, the termination of military tutelage, and the extension of minority rights.Footnote 11 Corresponding to a “logic of consequentialism,” this approach takes interests, identities, and norms as externally given. Actors engage in strategic interactions using their resources to maximize their utilities on the basis of given, fixed, and ordered preferences.Footnote 12 Thus, Europeanization is perceived as a process that gives rise to a distinct opportunity structure, which empowers, or disempowers, different actors.
The sociological-institutionalist approach, on the other hand, assumes that Europeanization is a process generating a “logic of appropriateness,” which is defined by Tania Börzel as collectively shared understandings of what constitutes proper socially accepted behavior.Footnote 13 Accordingly, these collective understandings and intersubjective meaning structures strongly influence how actors set their goals and what they perceive as rational action. Rather than maximizing their subjective desires, actors strive to fulfil social expectations in a given situation.Footnote 14 According to this approach, actors are socialized into new norms and rules of appropriateness through processes of persuasion and social learning, and they redefine their interests and identities accordingly.Footnote 15 One could use this approach to explain more conveniently the ways in which both state actors and civil society actors institutionally transform themselves into more democratic, transparent, and accountable stake-holders collaborating with each other as well as with their European stake-holders.
There is a third approach to explain the process of Europeanization: the policy transfer model. This model is more helpful in understanding the processes of Europeanization taking place in policy areas where pressure from the EU is less direct, such as educational policy. Claudio M. Radaelli defines Europeanization as 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 EU policy process and then incorporated into the “logic of domestic discourse” and into identities, political structures, and public policies.Footnote 16 This approach is more useful in understanding the ways in which educational policies are being transformed in Turkey within the framework of the Bologna Process, as in Turkey there is no direct incentive or pressure.Footnote 17 The policy transfer was at work when Turkey’s Council of Higher Education (Yükseköğretim Kurulu, YÖK), the supreme authority regulating higher education since 1981, decided to adopt a research-based higher education system underlining the need for elite universities, centers of excellence, and project-based funding.
One could also find such mimetic effects very much in the new draft law prepared by the YÖK in 2013, which was later shelved.Footnote 18 In addition to the YÖK, there are certain other state institutions transferring European policies on science and research through the implementation of various research schemes, such as the Framework Projects (now Horizon 2020) and the Marie Curie Projects. For instance, the Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey (Türkiye Bilimsel ve Teknolojik Araştırma Kurumu, TÜBİTAK) has generated several different programs to attract qualified researchers, scientists, and Ph.D. students of Turkish origin to conduct their research facilities in Turkey by providing them with financial resources for their research activities under the project named Target Turkey (Hedef Türkiye).Footnote 19 The Turkish Academy of Sciences (Türkiye Bilimler Akademisi, TÜBA) has also recently become active in designing programs within the framework of newly established research schemes to attract researchers of Turkish origin to conduct their research in Turkey.Footnote 20 Similarly, the Turkish Research Space (Türkiye Araştırma Alanı, TARAL) was designed in 2004 to foster research and development facilities in the country. TARAL has radically increased the volume of expenses made on research and development activities.Footnote 21 Accordingly, I will, by and large, rely on this kind of definition of Europeanization throughout the article in order to scrutinize the ways in which the Bologna Process has impacted the higher education system of Turkey.
There are only a few existing academic studies regarding the Europeanization of Turkish higher education. To cite a few of these, Bülent Tarman examines the Europeanization of Turkish educational policy by focusing on the Turkish history and social sciences curriculum.Footnote 22 He looks at the impact on Turkish higher education of the Council of Europe (CoE) programs and related EU initiatives. Maja Stolle concentrates on the Erasmus program’s impact on five Turkish universities.Footnote 23 There are also the works of Fatma Mızıkacı, which dwell on the impact of European educational policy on mobility and quality systems in Turkey.Footnote 24 A study by Nevzat Evrim Önal brings a new dimension to the debate on the Bologna Process in Turkey by compiling the works of various authors who analyze and criticize the process from a socialist perspective.Footnote 25 Finally, the most comprehensive work on the Europeanization of Turkish higher education and the Bologna Process is Özge Onursal’s unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, which focuses on the European educational space and the diffusion of its norms into Turkey.Footnote 26 She eloquently outlines how the agents of change in Turkey construct and shape the policy diffusion process by means of the policy transfer model.
The Bologna Process and the Lisbon Strategy
The Bologna Process was launched after 29 education ministers signed a declaration in Bologna in June 1999Footnote 27 to reform and harmonize the structures of their higher education systems. Each signatory country committed itself to reform its own higher education system in order to create overall convergence at the European level by 2010. The objectives adopted included a common framework of readable and comparable university degrees; the introduction of two cycles of degrees at the undergraduate and postgraduate levels in all countries, with the first degrees no shorter than three years; equipping universities with the instruments to respond to the needs of the labor market; and providing universities with possibilities of mobility for students, academics, and administrative staff. The declaration also referred to the creation of a European Credit Transfer System (ECTS). The goal is to render higher education throughout Europe more compact, comparable, and compatible, and to increase student mobility.Footnote 28
The process originated from the recognition that, in spite of their “valuable differences,” European higher education systems face common internal and external challenges related to the diversification of higher education, the employability of graduates, and the expansion of private and transnational education. The Bologna Process has thus urged member states to respond to the growth of today’s challenging knowledge society and the impacts of globalization by rendering the “Europe of Knowledge” more internationally competitive. In practical terms, the process refers to the harmonization of cycle degrees and to the creation of a common credit transfer system and evaluative criteria that enables students to address demanding labor market needs and the impact of globalization.
The Bologna Process and the Lisbon Strategy have been designed in parallel by the member states of the European Union in order to come to terms with the economic challenges of the globalizing world. These two policy processes have provided new opportunities for the commission to become more involved in the higher education policy field. By financing a range of research initiatives, such as Framework Programs 6 and 7 (now Horizon 2020) and the Bologna reform projects, the commission has become directly involved with numerous “grassroots” activities to increase the EU’s visibility and significance for universities.Footnote 29 The EU heads of state and government, meeting in Lisbon for the EU’s Spring Council of 2000, pledged to work toward making the EU the most “dynamic knowledge-based economy in the world” by 2010.Footnote 30
In the official discursive topoi of the Bologna Process, one can trace the repetition of the concepts of flexibility, credibility, rationalization, efficiency, and openness, along with references to the topoi of employability, interdisciplinarity, economic competitiveness, and the internationalization of student programs aimed at enabling national education systems to respond to current global labor market challenges as well as to the Lisbon Strategy by incorporating best practices from other European experiences.Footnote 31 The Lisbon Strategy focuses on five main areas, as sketched out by Wim Kok: the knowledge society, the internal market, the business climate, the labor market, and environmental sustainability.Footnote 32 The popularity of this kind of neo-liberal discourse was also evident in preceding official documents of the EU produced in the late 1990s and early 2000s. A critical discourse analysis of these documents reveals that the EU was giving priority to such terms as skills, market, efficiency, competitiveness, internationalization, and the global market in order to be able to show its determination to catch up with leading world economic powers like the United States of America and Japan.Footnote 33
The early days of the construction of the Bologna Process coincided with a set of neo-liberal efforts dedicated to the extension of traditional European values that in fact constitute European identity narratives. For instance, the Lisbon Strategy forms part of the official discursive construction of European identity narratives, securing and legitimizing the standardization and the implementation of new policies on the one hand and a new value set on the other hand.Footnote 34 Such a discourse-historical analysis explains why the Bologna Process, as well as many other attempts in other policy areas seeking to standardize policies in all nation-states, cause so much tension: national identity constructions collide with transnational strategies and aims in a way that leads to hegemonic struggles over values, discourses, and social practices, as well as to nationally context-dependent recontextualization and policies of implementation.
However, one should note that the Bologna Process is a learning process. As is clearly seen in the official documents of the process, the ministers of education of the member states to the Bologna Process are keen on taking critics into account when making projections for the future. For instance, in the official Budapest-Vienna Declaration of the European Higher Education Area (March 2010), it is openly stated that the ministers have taken note of the independent assessment and the stake-holders’ reports, and that they welcome their affirmation that institutions of higher education, staff, and students increasingly identify with the goals of the Bologna Process. They also reflect upon the recent protests taking place in some countries vis-à-vis the Bologna Process. As will be claimed in the following sections of this article, they also argue that these developments and measures are not necessarily related to the Bologna Process, and that some of the Bologna aims and reforms have not been properly implemented and explained in the member countries. The willingness of the Bologna team to acknowledge and to listen to critical voices raised among staff and students should be certified here.Footnote 35 A critical analysis of recent official documents and declarations also indicate that the decision makers of the Bologna Process, primarily the ministers, are sensitive about changing their discourse from a market-oriented neo-liberalism to a more social-oriented classical liberalism.Footnote 36
Higher education as a neo-liberal form of governmentality
Several critical scholars have made interventions with regard to the growing neo-liberal aspects of higher education in Europe. James Wickham eloquently argues that the origins of the Bologna Process actually lie in the attempt to use the European education system as a tool for the creation of “European identity.”Footnote 37 What excites university authorities across Europe is a different aspect of the so-called knowledge-based society; namely, an attempt to emulate American “excellence” in university research. The new European Research Council (ERC) was established to fund a small number of elite researchers, while national governments promote the idea of a small number of elite universities within their mass third-level systems.Footnote 38 Indeed, as Nikolas Rose and Peter Miller observed long ago, introducing the principles of economy and finance into the management of social conduct is one of the hallmarks of advanced liberal government,Footnote 39 or “neo-liberal forms of governmentality.”Footnote 40 Cris Shore and Mira Taitza argue that much of this restructuring in higher education has been based on ideas from new institutional economics that were originally confined to a small number of countries characterized by the so-called “Anglo-Saxon” model of capitalism.Footnote 41 These neo-liberal principles and practices have now become widely disseminated throughout Europe and beyond via such international policy forums as the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and, more recently, through the EU’s Lisbon Strategy and Bologna Process.Footnote 42
The insertion of economic and financial tenets into higher education has radically transformed universities, which were previously perceived by the public as places of advanced learning and critical thinking. Accordingly, in the former understanding of the university, higher education was regarded as a “public good” whose social mission was to reproduce national culture, decrease social inequalities, and serve the public interest in the form of civic education. However, this kind of Humboldtian universalist understanding of higher education has now been replaced by the narrower instrumental view of university knowledge as a personal investment and form of training.Footnote 43 Within this new knowledge-economy paradigm, students have been recast as “rational, self-interested, choosers and consumers,” while education itself is increasingly being reframed “as a commodity: something to be sold, traded and consumed.”Footnote 44 Furthermore, in a global neo-liberal environment, universities are seen as key drivers in the knowledge economy and, as a consequence, higher education institutions have been encouraged to develop links with industry and business in a series of new venture partnerships.Footnote 45
The state of higher education reforms in Turkey
University reforms in Turkey can be perceived as systematic attempts to model the educational system in line with the topoi of the “democratization,” “Westernization,” and “secularization” of education. According to Ayşe Öncü,Footnote 46 the educational reforms implemented in 1933 (Law No. 2252), 1946 (Law No. 4936), 1981 (Law No. 2547), and 1991Footnote 47 coincided with the changes seen in national political dynamics, though the primary objective continued to be modernization, Westernization, and secularization.Footnote 48 In 1981, the Council of Higher Education (Yükseköğretim Kurulu, YÖK) was established as an autonomous body in accordance with Articles 130 and 131 of the Constitution of the Republic of Turkey and Higher Education Law No. 2547. Primary academic appointments and promotions—starting with the selection of rectors, deans, and professors—became contingent upon the approval of the YÖK. As the 1980 military coup had been legitimized on the grounds of halting the social and political cleavages that had become very visible in the public space, the YÖK was also designed in such a way as to contribute to this objective by means of depoliticizing universities and equipping university students with Kemalist principles.Footnote 49
In accordance with the 1991 regulations governing foundation universities, the number of private universities has increased significantly over the years: 1 in 1984, 3 in 1993, 8 in 1996, 15 in 1997, 20 in 1999, 30 in 2007, 54 in 2010, and 71 in 2013.Footnote 50 Nevertheless, there is a visible inequality in the distribution of students, with private university students registered at the following four universities: Yeditepe (İstanbul), Bilkent (Ankara), Başkent (Ankara), and İstanbul Bilgi University (İstanbul). While in some private universities the ratio of teaching staff per student is closer to that of the public universities, the overall difference in the ratio between public and private universities is explanatory of why some private universities are preferred by applicant students.
Despite the fact that the domestic and international contexts significantly differed during the times of these reforms, they all shared one crucial common denominator: they have all been legitimized on the basis of “Western models.” To put it differently, the political choices have always been made among both academics and politicians using the impartial language of alternative “Western models.”Footnote 51 The same discourse of Westernization is also visible in the educational reforms that took place in the 2000s and introduced the Bologna Process.Footnote 52 Hence, the construction and reconstruction of an ideal Western-type university has always been the core element of the discourse of academic reforms throughout the republican era.
Turkey and the Bologna Process
Turkey officially joined the Bologna Process in 2001. However, Turkey did not perform very well in complying with the Process’ regulations until 2004. It was only after that year that the National Agency (Ulusal Ajans), which was established within the jurisdiction of the State Planning Organization (Devlet Planlama Teşkilatı, DPT), made some attempts to create an awareness in higher education institutions regarding different aspects of the Bologna Process, such as the introduction of the European Credit Transfer System (ECTS) and Socrates-Erasmus academic exchange programs. The YÖK only became actively involved in the Bologna Process after 2008, when it started to impose itself on higher education institutions so as to harmonize them with the European Higher Education Area. Accordingly, on February 13, 2011, an addendum was made to Article 44 of the Law on Higher Education (Law No. 2547) to prompt universities to make the required changes in their administrative and academic structures regarding the introduction of ECTS, learning outcomes, course descriptions, student workloads, and diploma supplements.Footnote 53 Since then, the Bologna Process has had a considerable impact on higher education policy in Turkey and on the course and program structures of both state and private universities. The Bologna Process is generally accredited by the Turkish universities, but the associated implementation instruments are not sufficiently supported at the national level. It can be seen that, in private universities, the implementation and adaptation of the Bologna Process followed rather quickly, while state-funded universities first had to take advantage of the opportunity to open up new revenue streams through, for instance, cooperative programmatic and research activities.Footnote 54 The mobility factor also considerably affects higher education.Footnote 55
The ways in which the Bologna Process has been accommodated, negotiated, debated, or rejected in Turkey reveal that there are certain societal and political tensions regarding the question of whether the Process should be perceived as an expression of internationalization, Americanization, or Europeanization. Another source of tension springing from the interpretation of the Bologna Process concerns the standardization and commercialization led by the transformation of the European higher education area. Euroskepticism is another source of tension, one which is used differently by various stake-holders in higher education. Sometimes it manifests itself through the voice of dissident students, who use a Euroskeptic discourse to express their opposition to the Bologna Process. And sometimes Euroskepticism becomes something to be criticized by those stake-holders who are outspokenly critical of the governing Justice and Development Party’s (AKP’s) growing Euroskeptic and Islamist discourse. The ways in which the Bologna Process has been perceived by some stake-holders, such as left-wing student groups, also indicate that the process is sometimes utilized by stake-holders as a source of resilience against the AKP government, which is perceived as the perpetrator of the process. Finally, geographical mobility seems to attract most of the stake-holders, as it is believed to be an opportunity for cultural exchange and linguistic competence. In what follows, these tensions will be revealed through in-depth interviews.
Tensions between Americanization, Internationalization, and Europeanization
The Bologna Process is an important reflection of the processes of liberalization and globalization in the field of Turkish higher education. On the structural level, Turkey has been efficient in fulfilling the requirements of the process. In that regard, the director of a center working on equal access to education, who is also the former rector of a prominent public university, emphasized that, in his personal experiences with the implementation of the structural reforms, he has not come across challenges, but has rather observed supplementary additions to the existing structure.Footnote 56 He attributed the lack of challenges to the “American model,” which has been implemented in Turkey since the 1950s.Footnote 57 In that regard, he also noted that the educational system in Europe utilizes the “American model” as a benchmark, and is thus complementary to the institutional structure in place in Turkish universities. The American legacy also explains the insertion of the term “competition” into Turkish higher education long before the introduction of the Bologna Process. As such, various aspects of the Bologna Process—such as competitiveness, employability, and efficiency—had already been introduced into Turkish higher education. However, the approach to research had always been lacking in Turkey before being introduced via the implementation of various European-based research schemes, such as FP6, FP7, and now Erasmus.
It is possible to observe that modern education and/or the modernization of education is often discussed in reference to the United States by interlocutors in the 20–45 age bracket. As previously indicated, such references appear to be both positive and negative. Nonetheless, the American model introduced in the 1950s still constitutes an important element in individuals’ opinions of the higher education system in Turkey. I argue that the way in which the Bologna Process, as the most comprehensive and recent attempt to Europeanize the system, is framed as “internationalization” contributes to the lack of information on the impact of the European Union vis-à-vis modernity in Turkey. In that regard, while Westernization and Europeanization can be used interchangeably to refer to the modernization of Turkey, it is found that market-driven “Americanization” as a source of standardization is also an important element of the Turkish education system.
Maja Stolle has revealed in a study that the idea of Europeanization triggered a wide range of mobility initiatives in Turkish universities, forcing them to professionalize the organization of student mobility.Footnote 58 Nevertheless, the motives behind the Bologna Process have been called into question in Turkey. Most significantly, the rise of Euroskepticism in the second half of the 2000s has encouraged policy makers to frame the Bologna Process in terms of globalization and internationalization rather than of Europeanization. Özge Onursal has drawn attention to the discursive shift in Turkish higher education circles with regard to the promotion of the Bologna Process, due both to rising Euroskepticism and to the expansion of the Bologna space.Footnote 59 She states that the term “Europeanization” has now been hijacked by the term “internationalization,” and that rectors prefer to use a discourse underlining that “the Bologna Process is designed to create world citizens,” rather than “European citizens.”Footnote 60 The idea of decoupling the policy transfer from the EU and the accession process seems to have an intentional motive.Footnote 61 The stake-holders have been careful not to link the process of policy transfer to the EU due to Euroskeptical sentiments in Turkey. As Onursal captures very well in her fieldwork with the relevant stake-holders, “the fear was that if the universities see the Bologna reforms as part of the accession process, the situation might become politicised.”Footnote 62 This could have become a major impediment for the reforms, as there might have emerged a backlash against “another imposition” from the EU.
There are arguments that underline how the Bologna Process is based on neo-liberal motivations and is, in fact, market-driven, thereby leading to concerns regarding the quality of education, in parallel with the critics of James Wickham, as stated above.Footnote 63 In order to understand the significance of the Euroskeptic terminology, one should note that, under the AKP, Turkey has become more active in establishing relations with regional actors, while a growing emphasis has also been placed on multilateral relations with actors from the Middle East, Africa, the Caucasus, the Central Asian republics, and Russia. Consequently, one can observe that the EU is no longer perceived by the ruling government as the sole anchor.Footnote 64 Therefore, the term “internationalization” has come to be preferred over “Europeanization,” since the latter implies an attachment to one particular region. Nevertheless, concerns over the outcomes of the process, such as the quality of education and market orientation, have been eclipsed by concerns over the structural requirements, as well as over social and economic problems that prevent students’ participation in the process.
Despite growing Euroskepticism in the state bureaucracy and the AKP government, many of the interlocutors defined the Bologna Process as an attempt to Europeanize higher education in Turkey. One of the former rectors interviewed indicated that the process is indeed a process of Europeanization, a statement differing from those of many acting rectors, who have recently generated a politicized discourse in line with the AKP government.Footnote 65 Similarly, J, a program officer in a civil society organization specializing on social, political, and economic policy issues as well as a columnist, observed the following:
The process is in line with the EU’s raison d’être. The most important element of the process is to encourage mobility among students and academics as well as administrative staff. It is a reasonable process in terms of the requirements of the new global economy.Footnote 66
A discourse analysis of the interlocutors underlining the element of Europeanization along with the Bologna Process indicates that their primary motivation in referring to Europeanization results from their resistance to AKP rule, which since 2005 has gradually become more Euroskeptic, Islamist, and neo-Ottoman.
Challenges against standardization and commercialization
The harmonization efforts proposed by the Bologna Process are not just about Europe, but rather about Europe’s aim to become a stronger force in the process of globalization.Footnote 67 Due to enlargement and globalization, debates changed the focus of the integration process from uniting the peoples of Europe under a common destiny to finding urgent and joint responses to new challenges. According to Luce Pépin:
It was now more necessary than ever to create this “ever closer union among the people of Europe” which had been asserted since the beginning by successive treaties and could not be achieved by economic integration alone. The globalisation of trade and the information and communication technologies had an ever greater impact on how and where knowledge was transferred, education and training systems being at the top of the list.Footnote 68
Indeed, the 1994 White Paper with the title of Growth, Competitiveness, Employment: The Challenges and Ways Forward into the 21st Century supported the need to take action in the field of lifelong learning. In 1995, the White Paper Teaching and Learning: Towards the Learning Society began constructing the Europe of the future. Europe’s culture and civilization appeared as of less significance in this new official discourse: “Tomorrow’s society will be a society which invests in knowledge, a society of teaching and learning, in which each individual will build up his or her own qualifications. In other words, a learning society.”Footnote 69
Sotiria Grek eloquently exposes the discursive shift in the European Commission from defining the European identity by means of a common culture and civilization to depicting it by means of a process of learning governed by numbers, skills, qualifications, growth, and competitiveness, which are all indicators of what Nikolas Rose (1991) calls a neo-liberal form of governance.Footnote 70 In regards to the widely acknowledged debates on the neo-liberal nature of the Bologna Process, A (a former rector) stated: “I agree with the criticisms of the process with regard to neo-liberal motivations. If skill-based education is accentuated, then higher education will resemble occupational schools.”Footnote 71 Similarly, B (a sociologist), who referenced the importance of local characteristics, argued:
In terms of the arguments regarding the Bologna Process being skill-based, I think that if the mentality behind the process begins to obliterate local characteristics, then there might be a problem. Nevertheless, this process exists independent of the Bologna Process as well. Also, the things that we designate as skills change rapidly. For example, once we used to teach the IT students MS-DOS systems, which became obsolete upon their graduation. I think it’s more important to relay a more critical perspective.Footnote 72
On this issue, C, the former chairperson of a women’s association and a member of the Republican People’s Party (Cumhuriyet Halk Partisi, CHP), emphasized a very important aspect of skill-based education, one that is also a vulnerability of this system, when she stated:
It is often the case that [skill-based] education does not support a critical mind. In effect, skills are like Word or Excel, the philosophy is the Windows operating system. Without a philosophical foundation, the system will always send off an error. Actually, philosophy is a dimension that extends through everyone.Footnote 73
While the interlocutors were divided in terms of their reflections on the framework of the Bologna Process, standardization is often perceived to be problematic. When asked about the Process’ framework, B, a professor of the sociology of education in a private university in İstanbul, critically questioned the homogenizing effect of the Process on the national and local element of higher education. He argued that the level of standardization required by the Process and the establishment of a language of education should not surpass locality:
I think standardization, McDonaldization, and making everything modular should be criticized within the framework of the Bologna Process. When we look at Europe, we see that the differences in education, for instance in England, the Netherlands, and France, can be attributed to their experiences with migration and cultural diversity. If the use of one language is used as a way of standardization, then there might be problems with regard to locality. I believe that there won’t be any universality without locality.Footnote 74
B draws our attention to the fact that university education is raising students who comply with the status quo without ever trying to challenge and transform it. His response is similar to that of Paulo Freire, whose pedagogy is based on the assumption that modern education should promote participation and critical personal and social reflection among students.Footnote 75 Freire makes a critical analysis of modern education, which, he believes, turns young people into passive receivers:
The more students work at storing the deposits entrusted to them, the less they develop the critical consciousness which would result from their intervention in the world as transformers of that world. The more completely they accept the passive role imposed on them, the more they tend simply to adapt to the world as it is and to the fragmented view of reality deposited in them.Footnote 76
Accordingly, one could argue that the widespread student demonstrations that have occurred in Turkey since September 2007 have been an attempt to show that university students not only protest the process of commercialization of higher education in Turkey, but are also trying to transform society and politics as insurgent citizens.Footnote 77
Nevertheless, it is important to note that the majority of the interlocutors indicated that this process is not well known in Turkey. Those students critical of the process have mainly been engaged in left-wing social movements. D was one of them. She framed this process within the sphere of capitalist motivations and the interests of transnational companies, stating as follows:
I think this is about capitalism; they want a productive individual rather than a thinking one. It is all about profit. A sailor working on a boat knows more than I do. Our educational system is based on memorization, we don’t get to practice. I am an engineer but I have no practic[al experience].Footnote 78
There were also arguments criticizing the ways in which this process might hinder individuals’ outlooks on the world. These individuals were mainly graduates of the social sciences. E, for instance, stated:
I think an engineer with no understanding of the world is not a good engineer. Skill-based education is acceptable for vocational schools, but a person should be equipped to face the world when they graduate from a university.Footnote 79
The interlocutors indicated that they have a general distrust in the current higher education system due to the YÖK’s top-down approach and the reformation process. F, a faculty member in social sciences at a private university, argued that the system is “overwhelmed with reforms” and the “rationale” of the Bologna Process has been omitted in the relaying of the necessary reforms.Footnote 80 Nevertheless, in terms of the higher education system, my findings have not yielded information sufficient to be able to generalize private individuals’ perceptions of the notions of modernization in terms of the Bologna Process.
The disciplinary backgrounds of interlocutors and students are influential factors in determining their perception of, and attitude toward, the Bologna Process and its emphasis on skills. Within this framework, the purpose of higher education is perceived either as the production of an efficient labor force, and for the interlocutors competition, or as the cultivation of the critical faculties of individuals. One could argue that those who have an educational or professional background in engineering (forestry, metallurgy, agriculture, and the like) have analyzed skill-based education as a positive feature. G, a female engineering student from a public university, argued that she perceived the process and market orientation as a positive, and she argued that, in general, the high level of unemployment in certain sectors is due to the graduates’ lack of skills. Like several other students in engineering and natural sciences, student G further noted that “theory and practice have to go hand in hand” to improve the graduates’ skills and thus their employability.Footnote 81
In comparison to the critical voices on the Bologna Process with regard to its market-oriented approaches, and in a similar fashion to those engineering students who praised the Bologna Process, H, the director of the international office of a private university in İstanbul, assessed the process in a positive manner in that it has contributed to the establishment of a platform for discussion on higher education and set an agenda with regards to the necessary reforms. Nevertheless, in terms of the discussions related to the market orientation of the process, she elaborated as follows:
Access to higher education is not an inherent right. The Turkish economy cannot accommodate the employment of all higher education graduates. Everyone acts as if a higher education is a “must,” but the economy also needs medium-ranged employees.Footnote 82
However, she also drew attention to the negative consequences of the “top-down approach” of the reformation process and indicated the following:
Turkey can reform the higher education system on its own, but we should carry out a reformation process in line with those in Europe and the world.Footnote 83
She also made statements confirming what was stated by the other interlocutors with regard to the lack of institutionalization of the Bologna Process in Turkey. The Bologna Process seems to be far from institutionalization, as it is still being undertaken by volunteering individuals who have internalized it. The Bologna offices at universities are often run by individuals who are very supportive of the process. However, their hard work is not accompanied by the institutionalization of the process.
Students opposing AKP rule
In the meantime, in Turkey certain societal tensions emerged and mobilization was carried out against the Bologna Process, which was interpreted by left-wing student organizations as market-driven and conforming to neo-liberal directives. Such dissenting voices were coupled with strong feelings of Euroskepticism and anti neo-liberalism. However, the protests failed to achieve the larger support of society and remained confined to the student body, despite students’ efforts to spread the protests out into the larger society. It is very likely that the Bologna Process became a frame of reference for left-wing student groupsFootnote 84 to express their opposition to the acting neo-liberal and conservative government of the AKP, which since the mid-2000s has been increasingly setting up a societal challenge against the secular and liberal segments of Turkish society in a way that re-Islamizes the public space.Footnote 85 The main motivations behind these protests—which took place at various public universities in İstanbul, Ankara, Eskişehir, and İzmir between 2010 and 2012—were partly similar to the motivations of university students who actively took part in the #Occupygezi movement in İstanbul and elsewhere in May and June 2013. To put it differently, the student protests that revolved around the claims that the Turkish higher education was becoming more and more commercialized, skill-based, and market-oriented as a result of the Bologna process were indeed the precursor of the massive protests. The protests began in late May 2013 as a response to the condescending discourse of then Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, who was attempting to shape social life through his Islamic references, the police brutality carried out against a handful of environmentalist protesters in Gezi Park in Taksim, and the new alcohol regulations of the AKP government that banned the sale of alcohol in off-license shops after 10 pm.Footnote 86
Bottom-up Europeanization: The mobility of university students
Despite the fact that the Bologna Process is far from being institutionalized in Turkey and operationalized by volunteering rectors, professors, and international office staff, there is one element of this process that has been very well received by students and other stake-holders; namely, student mobility. The OECD’s report on internationalization and student mobility reveals that the concentrations of incoming and outgoing students vary among countries as well as regions. It seems that Turkey sends students and academic staff off rather than taking them in.Footnote 87 The statistics show that, between 2004 and 2013, the total number of incoming Erasmus students amounted to 24,961, while the number of outgoing Erasmus students was 70,943. In terms of academic teacher and staff mobility, between 2004 and 2013, the total number of outgoing individuals was 15,794, while the number of incoming individuals was 10,321. In comparison with the student mobility figures, Turkey can thus still be considered a “sending” country (Table 2).
Table 2 Statistics on Erasmus Student and Teacher Mobility.
Source: Turkish National Agency (http://www.ua.gov.tr).
In line with the Bologna Process, Mızıkacı observes a shift from bilateral cooperation programs to multilateral cooperation programs owing to the European integration process.Footnote 88 In her research on Turkey’s status within OECD countries, she observes that Turkish students study mostly in Germany and the United States, followed by France, Austria, and the United Kingdom, where state and public funding is available for foreign students. Among OECD countries, most of the incoming foreign students in Turkey are from the Russian Federation, Jordan, and Greece.Footnote 89 It should also be noted that the Bologna Process Reports of 2005, 2007, and 2009 identify the issue of financial inequality as a problem at the national level as it pertains to the notion of equal access for students from different socioeconomic backgrounds, as well as at the international level, since students require scholarships to afford their tuition and living expenses for exchange programs.
In terms of internal mobility, Mızıkacı notes that with the rise of private universities, internal mobility has risen as well. She argues that private universities have been able to provide students with scholarships, further training abroad, and employment in associate companies, and that, due to their reputation and marketing strategies, they have been attracting students who would otherwise have preferred to study abroad.Footnote 90 Furthermore, the Erasmus student and academic mobility programs, as well as the Bologna Process, have considerably altered the university structure in Turkey. The scope of Europeanization embedded in these programs has emphasized the change of the institutional structure shaped by policy transfer, which has made student mobility and the transformation of curricula easier.Footnote 91 Recently, the Europeanization of the Turkish higher education system through the Bologna Process and the Erasmus exchange program has also produced something new with respect to student and teaching staff mobility within Turkey: the Farabi Exchange Program.Footnote 92 This program facilitates university students and teaching staff members continuing their education and training at an institution of higher education in Turkey other than their own for a period of one or two semesters.Footnote 93 It is evident that the mobility programs of the EU have so far contributed to the transformation of higher education institutions and students, and that Europeanization has underlined the processes of cultural exchange among students, academics, and administrative staff.
Conclusion
The policy transfer model put forward by Radaelli best explains the Europeanization of higher education in Turkey, ranging from the implementation of the Bologna Process that emphasizes the concepts of employability, efficiency, competition, skill-based education, and research to the harmonization of degrees in the European higher education area, or from the implementation of research schemes by TÜBİTAK to the formation of the Farabi Exchange Program. According to the new institutionalism, actors follow rules, shared interpretations, symbols, schemata, and meanings. Policy transfer, on the other hand, assumes that policy diffusion is a rational process wherein imitation, copying, and adaptation are the consequences of rational decisions by policy makers.Footnote 94 While one should not ignore the constitutive relationship between structure and agent, the policy transfer model seems to place more emphasis on agency.Footnote 95 Accordingly, many of the interlocutors who were interviewed were inclined to perceive the Europeanization of Turkish higher education as an expression of a process of marketization, because the Europeanization of higher education in Turkey does not mean the acquisition of values of a “social Europeanness,” inspired by European political and social achievements. Instead, the Europeanization of higher education in Turkey has meant the transfer of neo-liberal “best practices” that are being enforced through the European integration process.
It can be argued that Turkey’s education policy has been Europeanized to a large extent, with the misfits between the two levels of policy being brought to a minimum. Turkish universities have been actively engaged in the Bologna Process and are very supportive of the Erasmus exchange program. However, rising Euroskepticism in Turkey has also changed the process of Europeanization in universities. Now, activities undertaken within the framework of the Bologna Process are being presented by rectors as activities of internationalization, not of Europeanization. Furthermore, the discourse of raising Europeans is now being replaced by that of raising world citizens. While, for Europe, the Bologna Process has been a European response to internationalization, for Turkey it has been a process of internationalization. Europeanization can here be seen as both a “bastion against globalization” and a “manifestation of globalization.”Footnote 96 However, one cannot deny the fact that the Bologna Process has been an instrument for Turkey to integrate into the world system in the area of higher education. One should not also forget that some of the stake-holders tend to employ a Euroskeptical discourse to implicitly express their dissatisfaction about the liberalization and Europeanization of higher education in Turkey, as well as in other parts of the EU.
Discourse analysis of the interviews conducted with rectors, professors, and experts indicates that the relevant stake-holders in higher education interpret the Bologna Process in two different dimensions. First, the discourse in Turkey underlines that the Bologna Process has been undertaken in the name of much-needed domestic reforms so as to comply with the requirements of the new global economy. In other words, the Bologna Process was instrumentalized as a way to justify the legal changes being undertaken in Turkey. Secondly, it was often explicitly stressed that these changes already fit the Turkish higher education system due to the fact that it was closer to the American model.
It was also revealed that Europe and the related university reforms appear, to a certain extent, as modernization projects coming from abroad, beyond the nation and its citizens. At the same time, the Bologna Process was perceived as bringing forward a “new model” aiming at international competitiveness, while universities’ ability to “do good” for society was rather held back. Following the adoption of the Lisbon Strategy, externally defined standards and goals; demands for results that can be documented in numbers; flexibility; mobility; and external monitoring units—all have contributed to the dominance of the “knowledge economy” over the “knowledge society,” while reference to the construction of Europe as a political community and the social cohesion of European societies are absent in European and national state actors’ discourses on the Bologna Process.
Finally, the study has shown that the Bologna Process seems to be far from being institutionalized in Turkey, as it is still being implemented by volunteering individuals who have internalized it. The Bologna offices of each university are frequently run by individuals very supportive of the process, although their efforts have not been accompanied by an institutionalization of the process. On the other hand, the skill-based nature of the Bologna Process was criticized by the interlocutors, as it aims to create skilled individuals equipped to fulfill the requirements of the new global economy in a way that leads to a kind of dehumanization of individuals. Moreover, the interlocutors also addressed the negative aspects of the standardization and homogenization of higher education in Europe, leading to the disappearance of local motives.
