After the ‘refugee crisis’ and the Yerevan Communiqué: Nationalism and empire as the not-so-hidden heart of European higher education

Abstract

The Yerevan Communiqué represents a possible high-point in European responses to the 2015 ‘refugee crisis’ and the role of higher education in building an inclusive Europe. If that is so, then the post-2015 period can be seen as a retreat from the moral stance taken in the Communiqué. This paper takes a different perspective and argues that the post-2015 period reveals tensions at the heart of the European project and the role of higher education in this. Specifically, the paper argues that the rise of a nativist politics of belonging in Europe and its manifestation in European higher education is immanent in the European project itself as a post-imperial project, in the historical formation of European higher education amidst the legacies of imperial designs, intensified by the neoliberal reformation of nation/states, and the role of migration in the context of neoliberal globalisation and the problematic nature of ‘national’ borders.