‘Europe/Asia’ Regionalism, Higher Education and the Production of World Order

Abstract

From the early 1990s onwards, various European Union (EU) reports have commented on the low level of European exports and foreign direct investment (FDI) in the Asian region, and the invisibility of Europe in the Asian imagination in comparison with the United States. To overcome this problem, a series of policy and programme initiatives have been launched that include higher education as a platform, that are funded by the EU's development agency EuropeAid, and that use the inter-regional institutional structures of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) and the Asia–Europe Meeting (ASEM). Initially, the focus for higher education was on generating European visibility and Asian capacity through the creation of networks and curricular initiatives. However, since 2000 the higher education initiatives in the successive Asia–Europe inter-regional policies have been reoriented towards realising the Lisbon 2000 Agenda of developing a globally competitive European knowledge-based economy. Asia–Europe inter-regionalism is now being used to facilitate an explicit competitiveness agenda for Europe through (i) prioritising the development of a European market in higher education that is attractive to Asian students; (ii) synchronising Asian higher education structures with those that have developed in Europe as a result of the Bologna Process; (iii) recruiting ‘talent’ from within the Asian region; and (iv) the development of research collaborations, such as funded research institutes. Whilst funded by the EU's development agency EuropeAid, these initiatives have as their target not the very low-income countries in ASEAN and ASEM, but China and India. This generates tensions in the foreign-policy mix of education, trade and development, making the EU vulnerable to charges of imperialism and neo-colonialism, whilst the inter-regional structures themselves carry their own politics which in turn shape the terrain of higher education.

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