Although European interest in higher education (HE) is not novel, in the last 15 years a European governance layer emerged. Although some elements of these European initiatives have been exported to other parts of the world their impact on national HE policies is seen to have been comparatively stronger in Europe than elsewhere. The proposed paper will look beyond this perceived success by focusing on three distinct roles of European initiatives: providing a model highlighting top-down dynamics, providing a communication platform for horizontal policy transfer, or providing a legitimizing label for domestic preferences. The empirical focus will be on the role European initiatives played in HE policy changes in Croatia, Flanders, Serbia and the Netherlands from the early 1990s onwards, ensuring a suitable mixture of similarities and differences in terms of participation in European integration, uploading capacity, and cross-national communication platforms other than those established through European initiatives.
