Ever-Morphing Relations Between the Global, Supranational and the National in Schooling Policy : A Reflection on Some European Cases

This chapter proffers a response to the introductory chapter by the collection’s editors. It also provides responses to the granular case studies of ever-changing relations between pressures for alignment between EU member nations’ schooling systems and the schooling policies of three German language Northern European school systems, three Romanic Southern European systems, those of four post-Communist Slavic language nations, along with the devolved systems of England, Scotland and Wales in post Brexit UK. The chapter also focuses on the morphing relations between global policy pressures post the end of the Cold War and developments in the EU in relation to education policy in member nations, evidenced in the helpful policy histories documented throughout. These analyses are set against considerations of the recent rise of right-wing populist ethnonationalist backlashes opposed to supranationalism as manifested in the EU. The chapter provides commentary on these tensions between education policy alignments in EU member nations and recent nationalistic contestations of these as documented throughout the collection. These tensions result in vernacular Europeanization and also demonstrate the necessity to go beyond accounts of both Europeanization and globalization that only stress top-down unidimensional converging effects in member and other nations. Additionally, while it is argued the collection makes a significant contribution to comparative policy sociology in education, the chapters together also unequivocally demonstrate that we need to go beyond the binary of methodological nationalism and methodological globalism, while also emphasising the empirical and path dependency in such policy sociology.

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