The Bologna Policy Forum: The Temptation to act on Non-European Higher Education Systems

This chapter analyses the genesis of the Bologna Policy Forum, as a new global actor in coordinating the higher education policies worldwide. It attempts to understand the current role played by the Bologna Policy Forum in the field of global higher education policies, through the Foucauldian concept of apparatus (Foucault, 1994). We argue that the “European higher education apparatus” (Croché, 2010), was created with the Bologna Process and controlled by the European Commission (EC), which seeks to impose it all over the world, has since 2009 reached its maximum effectiveness and has absorbed all that it could. Once it achieved the primary objectives, the apparatus progressively adopts new ones.