Europeanization qua Institutionalization of World Culture: Examples from Post-1989 Romanian Education

Abstract:

Inspired by World Society scholarship, I use examples from the Romanian educational sphere to examine Europeanization in relation with worldwide developments. Instead of seeing Europeanization broadly as the process of becoming more ‘European’ (an approach that encounters the difficulty of defining ‘Europe’), or narrowly as a process of ‘EU-ization’ (an approach that suffers from EU-centric blindness to the rest of the world), I propose to define Europeanization as a process of institutionalization of world culture that is particularly visible in post-socialist contexts characterized by an emergence from relative totalitarian isolation. The main finding presented here is an increasing cosmopolitanization of the nation emerging from the way in which the category ‘Europe’ permeates schooled content: the nation is tamed down through discursive association with Europe (a significant other) rather than through elimination or discreditation. By expressing educational scripts that legitimize it as a nation-state in the post-1945 redefined sense of the term, Romania's compulsory education displays signs of becoming more like the rest of the world rather than more like ‘Europe’. Europeanization, in this sense, exemplifies less the goal of catching up with Europe or of joining the EU and more the means to insert Romania into world society.