The European Higher Education Area was designed by its national government sponsors to produce an area in which national systems would be compatible and comparable by 2010. But as various studies have shown, the EHEA is not converging on a single model of a HE system. This cannot be explained simply by variation in terms of a take-up of the Bologna instruments within national higher education sectors (Witte 2006, Dobbins/Knill 2009). The policy and politics of UK higher education in the Bologna Process decade (1999-2009) can shed light on this research puzzle. The UK (England) government went into the Bologna Process convinced that it would not have to change its system, because the majority of European participants in the Bologna process would conform to the UK (England) model. The most important action plank was seen to be the predominant English degree structure of three-year undergraduate and one year masters. Why did the British expect to provide the universal model and why has this proven not to be the case? And what do the outcomes tell us about processes of Europeanisation? This paper examines the policy history of interaction between European and UK domestic platforms in terms of an agenda-setting model (Kingdon 1995). The claims for the paper are that it contributes to the theorisation of Europeanisation in terms which go beyond the simpler models of earlier scholarship on Europeanisation as either a top down or bottom up process, in anchoring generalisations within an institutional and processual framework (Barzelay and Gallego 2006); and in addition provides an original account of UK (England) policy-making in higher education in the period 1999-2009.
