For a long time, whatever came out of Europe in terms of big higher education ideas made waves overseas. The Bologna Process was widely imitated, or at least name-dropped as something that it would be good to do (I remember people talking about a Canadian Bologna Process, even though we were already a common higher education area). Erasmus, diploma supplements, the Tuning Process have all also have their moments in the sun. But, over the last four years, there has been one big new initiative which has passed with virtually no comment outside the continent. And that is the system of University Alliances.

The University Alliances have an interesting history, much of which has to do with the complicated politics of the European Union (a subject we’ll be turning to in a forthcoming podcast with the European University Association’s Thomas Jorgenson). Basically: there is a significant tendency for the Commission in Brussels to amass more power over time, at the expense of member governments. For a very long time, Education has been a portfolio of very little consequence in Brussels, because national authorities have jealously guarded their prerogatives. Even things like the Bologna process and the creation of a European Higher Education Area didn’t really change things.

Then in 2017, Emmanuel Macron gave a speech at Sorbonne University on European integration entitled “A New Initiative for Europe.” In fact, the speech was a rambling list of many new universities, among which was the following proposal: We must create European universities, networks of universities which allow students to study abroad and follow classes in at least two languages.

That was it; that was all. But the Commission took this initiative and ran with it. A chance to ingratiate itself with one of the Union’s most powerful leaders while at the same time extending its powers a bit? Win-win! By 2020, the Commission had created a framework through which it could select and fund various European Alliances. The idea was that institutions from across the continent could come together and form alliances which were i) based around a common theme and ii) proposed various joint activities in terms of teaching, research, and innovation.

Since that time, based on three rounds of competitive bids, no fewer than fifty of these alliances have been brought into existence, encompassing 430 universities across 35 countries (all EU member states and Iceland, Norway, Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, North Macedonia, Serbia, and Turkey.). Most link together between five and ten institutions from across different parts of Europe, and many of them build on inter-institutional relationships which existed prior to the introduction of the initiative. The funding for these networks is not huge—roughly 5 million euros over three years—but the idea of turning themselves into federated super-institutions seems attractive enough to many universities to make even these small sums attractive.

Some alliances, like Circle U, and 4EUplus, are pretty much straight up alliances of research-intensive universities that like hanging out with other research-intensive universities. Aurora is perhaps a bit more focused on social engagement The University Network for Innovate, Technology and Engineering (UNITE!) is an interesting group of Universities of Technology and Polytechnics with a much more IT and innovation /commercialization focus. FilmEU is, as you might expect, a mission-driven set of Arts and Media schools. You get the idea. A full list of Alliances is available here. And, inevitably, a Forum of Alliances has also been founded.

The project is of course a work in project. It takes time for things like inter-institutional co-operation to pay dividends and doesn’t sound quite as sexy as Bologna’s “degrees are now full portable” tagline. And even if that weren’t true, the program is having teething troubles. Program funding is limited and, in the view of many, too inflexible. The European Universities Alliance produced a report noting a number of areas where the alliances were having teething troubles because national laws on universities are actually incompatible with one another, thus making co-operation much more difficult than it needs to be.

And so, inevitably, we now have another round of policy innovation, mainly to fix the problems of the last round. This new initiative focuses on the problem of getting institutions in multiple countries to offer join degree, which it solves by creating something called “A European Degree”, which is basically a label to cover over the fact that national governments are useless at harmonizing their respective pieces of higher education legislation. It’s being touted as “the new Erasmus” program, but realistically it’s probably not nearly as significant in the long term.

What can the rest of the world learn from this? Hard to tell because the European context is so specific. Obviously, we are seeing increasing university co-operation across the continent and particularly over the East-West divide (a large number of Ukrainian universities were in the last round of expansion), which has some obvious geo-political ramifications. It probably would have been cool, back when NAFTA was signed, if there had been funding for three-way partnerships between American-Mexican-Canadian universities rather than the scrawny and anemic individual mobility scheme that was actually put in pace. An APEC equivalent would be pretty cool.

The problem is that to achieve something like this you need governments that think that i) universities are strategic actors, ii) multilingualism and multilateralism is good, and iii) institutions working together at an institutional level are more than the sum of their parts. In Canada, governments believe in i), but only with respect to research, but not in either ii) or iii). I would probably argue that public policy and narrow institutional interests are partly to blame:  too many universities have put more of an emphasis on competition rather than collaboration over the last couple of decades for the Alliance framework to easily take hold.

But regardless of the exportability, the Alliances strategy is likely to generate a lot of interesting observations about the real benefits of institutional partnerships. It deserves a lot more global attention than it has received to date.