European higher education policy as a plastique palimpseste: understanding national visions for the European Universities Initiative

Abstract Since 2019, the European Union has set out on the endeavour to create ‘European Universities’ through its latest flagship higher education programme, the European Universities Initiative. These ‘European Universities’ are transnational university alliances that have been given the ambitious task to ‘transform the higher education landscape in the European Union’. European Union institutions, member states, and these ‘European Universities’ have different visions and understandings of what this transformation implies and what direction it could take. This paper offers a novel conceptual framework, plastique palimpsestes , to explore how different and entangled national institutional contexts, historical perspectives, and higher education policy priorities configure the development of the European Universities Initiative. This study investigates the first two pilot phases of the European Universities Initiative through the analysis of policy documents and 70 semi-structured interviews with key stakeholders at national and European level involved in the development of the initiative. This inquiry aims to provide an empirical and conceptual contribution to interdisciplinary scholarship in higher education, public policy, and European studies.