The process of building European university alliances: a rhizomatic analysis of the European Universities Initiative

In 2019, the European Commission launched the ‘European Universities Initiative’, its flagship higher education programme that seeks to transform the higher education landscape in the European Union through enhanced transnational cooperation. Since its initial launch, nearly 300 higher education institutions across the European Union have come together to create 41 alliances as part of the first two pilot phases of the initiative. This is an experiment in European and global higher education. These novel structures seek to facilitate the mobility of staff, students and researchers as well as the creation of joint programmes. These alliances vary in form, histories and degree of cooperation but all share the common ambitious objective to create the universities of the future in the European Union. We offer to examine this novel higher education phenomenon making use of a rhizomatic analysis. Beyond what we usually find in our own backyards, a rhizome is a philosophical entity developed by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. We creatively explore how rhizomes can be used in order to compare people, institutions, and spaces created as part of the initiative. We investigate how and for what purposes these university alliances are building a regional higher education space in the European Union, the governing processes and the instruments that support and constrain their development and how they are formed and function in practice.