Working paper · In progress
Bologna Compliance and the Formalism Inheritance in Ukraine and Türkiye
Benjamin Kutsyuruba, Osman Gültekin and M. A. Saadan Qasmani
Abstract
Ukraine and Turkiye are both peripheral adopters of the Bologna Process, and both display near-complete formal compliance: three-cycle structures, credit transfer, diploma supplements, qualifications frameworks and national quality assurance agencies. Both also display persistent gaps between instrument and function, including credit recognition that does not travel, learning outcomes generated retrospectively, and quality assurance that audits documentation rather than provision. This article asks why two systems with dissimilar institutional histories converge on the same pattern of hollow adoption. Drawing on policy borrowing scholarship and on the literature on trust and moral agency in educational institutions, we argue that each system carries a distinct inheritance of administrative formalism: in the Turkish case, a Tanzimat-era pattern in which the importation of European institutional form is treated as the acquisition of the institution itself; in the Ukrainian case, a post-Soviet reporting culture in which the produced record substitutes for the activity reported. Using national implementation reports, quality assurance agency documentation, legislative texts and mobility and recognition data, supplemented by expert interviews in both countries, we trace how each inheritance shapes which Bologna instruments are activated and which remain ceremonial. We introduce instrument activation as a diagnostic and formalism inheritance as an explanatory construct. We argue that the principal cost of hollow compliance is not administrative inefficiency but the erosion of institutional trust, and that this erosion is self-reinforcing: once academics and students learn to read institutional documents as performances, subsequent substantive reform arrives already discredited.
Keywords
- Bologna Process
- Ukraine
- Türkiye
- policy formalism
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