The Bologna Declaration: Some of the Historic Dilemmas Posed by the Reconstruction of the Community in Europe’s Systems of Higher Education

This article examines the Bologna Process to explore some of issues that Euroland faces in its bid to construct the European Higher Education Area. However, the author’s purpose lies elsewhere—namely, to lay bare some of the assumptions beneath the various major systems of higher education in Western Europe. The article examines some of the tensions certain assumptions have created in the ongoing saga of reconstruction, particularly those that relate to one of the basic issues in higher education: namely, the community to which the university is answerable and how it is answerable. Finally, this article examines changes between higher education and its referential community in Western Europe in terms of the Bologna Declaration. In place of the monolithic, territorially defined referential community—the nation-state—that evolved over the past 190 years or more, the power both of a superordinate community and of subnational units is growing.