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By Paolo Do and Gigi Roggero, translation by Sarah Potter. The Bologna Process is celebrating its tenth birthday – and it is certainly beginning to show its age. The Process was anticipated by the Sorbonne Declaration, signed on 25th May 1998 in Paris by the Education Ministers of France, Italy, the UK and Germany and then ratified and extended to a total of 29 countries in the Bologna Conference of 18th June 1999 (whence the name of the process), and was finally confirmed at the Prague Conference in 2001. With the aim of making academic degree standards throughout Europe more comparable and compatible and merging the work of different university reform styles, the key focus of the process is to make changes in the framework of university study by improving available training opportunities and introducing a credit system. Today, 45 countries are signatories of the process. Its objective is to create a unified education market on a continental scale, leading to the large-scale creation of an intellectual workforce that will make Europe a strong competitor in the global knowledge economy. Further to this, if the Bologna Process is considered alongside the Lisbon Strategy that followed a year later, a striking overlap between the education and labour markets can be seen, within which knowledge and assessment become a filter for discerning and regulating the value of the educated workforce. From this perspective, the introduction of the European Credit Transfer and Accumulation System tried to reduce knowledge to a unit of measurement temporarily defined in a purely artificial way, through which production of living knowledge is quantified and classified. This method of classification, which appears to be based on rather shaky foundations, has been the subject of many protests around Europe in recent years, which often stem – as was the case in Italy regarding the Moratti Law or last year with the victorious revolt in France against the CPE – not from a project for the reform of higher education, but from a labour law. The disqualification of knowledge, characteristic of reformed universities, immediately becomes a process of declassification – a common theme of the new subjective composition that has been constituted over the conflicts of recent years. The concept of university as a period of waiting and learning is over: from now on students are, to all intents and purposes, workers. Utilisation and crises of the Bologna Process If, as many have claimed, the Bologna Process is the result of a process of relaxation of the ties between universities and the nation state, the various countries entering into it have different motivations for doing so. In Italy even the think tank whose studies informed the Berlinguer-Zecchino university reforms recognises that the diligent work on a European level carried out by the two ministers – for whom these reforms were named – was above all intended to legitimise, accelerate and guarantee the realisation of the centre-left’s reform process. As a consequence of this, the impact of the changes was not mediated: compared with the trial period, there was a strong push to immediately bring the whole system up to speed, in fear that the reform process would be stopped or obstructed by the other “stakeholders” of the academic world. Berlinguer and Zecchino tried thus to adapt and apply the reforms all at once, whilst other European countries are still having to overcome uncertainty, doubts and sticky moments in the process for change. In the UK, for example, there is no particular interest in the agreements reached in Bologna: with the belief that the reform process will be based on the model of the Anglo-Saxon university system, the UK has just to wait for the rest of Europe to conform. Until recently, however, only 25% of universities in Germany operated according to the model laid out in the 1999 conference: German universities were given the opportunity to trial the old and the new routes simultaneously, so that in 2010 the states which advanced most will be rewarded. Elsewhere – as in Spain or Greece – the Bologna Process has been instituted through reforms against which significant protest movements have developed but, in reality, it has largely not been applied or, in any case, it has been difficult to apply. After all, the widespread protests and opposition mounted by students have precisely taken the reform plans to crisis points (if not pushing them over the brink towards failure), as is evidenced by the situation in Italy. Exporting the crisis and overturning the Process It is possible that the city for which the Process was named, also chosen because it was the seat of the oldest university in Europe, had already symbolically foreshadowed the difficulties to come: the failure of the Bologna Process is actually also the crisis of an attempt to create a new model for knowledge organisation among the rubble of the modern university. Tradition and innovation not only do not combine together, but one will always end up obstructing the other. Despite this failure, ten years on we can nevertheless see a paradoxical multiplication of analogous unification policies on a global scale: the Lusophone Higher Education Area in Africa, the so-called ALFA programmes in Latin America and the Melbourne Process and ASEAN+5 in Australia and Asia. And whilst in Europe they are trying to import and expand the debit system, the root cause of the global economic crisis, on the other side of the Atlantic they are about to launch new pilot schemes for reforming the curriculum in Utah, Minnesota and Indiana; schemes which are explicitly inspired, as with the other cases, by the Bologna Process model. The crisis has therefore not only become a permanent fixture in Europe, but also a commodity to be exported. In this way, the crisis of contemporary university is indissolubly interwoven with the global economic crisis: they are both indicative of the excess of living knowledge compared with the forms of capture and command imposed on society by cognitive capitalism. At the same time, the overlap between the education and labour markets provides space for the reformulation of citizenship, with the flexible proliferation of borders capable of controlling and segmenting students and short-term researchers - what various scholars have termed a process of “bottom-up internationalisation”. Precisely for this reason, the resistance to the Bologna Process can neither take a conservative standpoint, nor be tinged with nostalgia for the national concerning labour markets. This way of thinking will only fall prey to those traditions that, as we have seen, are just one side of the workings of the global university in its exhausted combination between public and private. The stake that is being laid down for student and temporary worker movements is directly on a constituent level: for the construction of a European space which incorporates the conflicts and stages of self-reform that are already designing a new university. On this level, “we won’t pay for your crisis”, the slogan of Italian university protestors, could become the chance for a radical reconsideration of the epistemological status of knowledge, beginning with the re-appropriation of the social wealth produced in communion with cognitive labour.