Still looking for a partnership? EU-Russia cooperation in the field of higher education

Abstract

ABSTRACT The article analyses how Russian and European scholars have studied EU-Russia cooperation in the field of higher education. Cooperation in this field occupies a small share of scholarship on EU-Russia cooperation but has been evaluated as ‘the least conflicting’ among all areas of cooperation and the least affected by crises in EU-Russia relations. We first review the phases of cooperation and argue that cooperation has transformed from technical aid in the 1990s towards a more equal partnership since the mid-2000s. We present our analysis of previous studies in this field by looking at how scholars, often practitioners of cooperation themselves, have presented the objectives, results and challenges of cooperation and its future prospects. In particular, we are interested in whether cooperation has been presented as something between equal partners or as an asymmetrical relationship, and the binaries ‘donor-recipient’ or ‘master–pupil’ applied. We argue that these roles given by different actors are relevant to understanding the past and current of EU-Russia relations. Our findings confirm that the shared objective of the nature of cooperation is that of being between equal partners. Cooperation is also viewed as beneficial to both Russia and EU member states at the national/supranational, institutional and individual levels.