Higher Education Co-operation between EEC and Non-EEC Institutions in the Perspective of Post-1992 Europe

Abstract

The completion of the European Single Market by the end of 1992 obviously involves major changes in the social expectations of institutions of higher education. Increased competition across national frontiers will significantly alter the framework under which institutions operate. Community programmes in both research and teaching are giving an unprecedented boost to inter-institutional co-operation between universities in Member States. It would seem only logical if institutions of higher education were now to focus their international co-operation policy on these developments on the Community level which are discussed in other papers for this Workshop. There is considerable, and to some extent legitimate, pressure on the universities to adapt to the new conditions set by the Single Market. But exclusive attention to intra-EEC developments might also produce the risk of having too narrow an approach to higher education co-operation. Is there not a danger of enlarging co-operation quantitatively but restricting it geographically? It is the purpose of this paper to discuss such risks and make some proposals on ways to avoid them. The objective of the European Community is an economic and (in the long run, perhaps) a political union of its Member States. The purpose of science and scholarship differs from, although does not contradict, these goals. Universities have not, in the past, defined their role primarily in relation to their respective national markets. They cannot do so in the future, with exclusive reference to the internal market of the Twelve. For most of the post-war period, the EEC has played virtually no role in European cultural co-operation and a very limited one in research co-operation and student exchange. The Council of Europe has, in fact, long seemed to be a more 'natural' framework for such co-operation. It was under the auspices of the Council of Europe that the one university association on a European scale, the CRE, was founded. Most CRE members are located in CoE Member States, although most Yugoslavian and some Polish universities have also joined the association. Yugoslavia has recently adhered to the European Cultural Convention too, and universities in the other socialist countries of Eastern Europe are now in the process of joining the CRE. These developments show an increasing consciousness of the common cultural and academic heritage of all European countries, not only beyond the external frontier of the EEC, but also across the East-West divide. In fact, several EEC Member States have traditional cultural and linguistic links