For ¢ve decades, Western Europe has been in political and economic turmoil. Closer cooperation between Western European countries started with France's and Germany's determination to prevent the advent of a third world war. The leaders of these countries decided to pool steel production by creating the European Coal and Steel Community. Later, with a few other countries they created a common atomic agency. Economic integration soon took the lead, spilling over to other domains. The Euro, shared by twelve European Union member-states, crowned this economic push, and is creating pressures to develop closer cooperation in other areas, such as military issues, foreign policy, and social policy.Political scientists have provided standard social scienti¢c approaches to this macro level transformation process. They have emphasized institutional and policy matters. To simplify a great deal, two models have dominated scholarly discussion. The state centric model emphasizes the role of nation-states in their attempts to augment their power. According to some proponents of this inter-governmentalist and neo-CHAPTER 11 317

The objective of this article is to study some of the intended and unintended effects on academe of the evolving global ranking game. I will start with some broader points on the global ranking game, the formal terms and economic interests it promotes, then continue with a presentation of the Shanghai ranking and its main rival the Times Higher Education. Through reversed engineering, I will bring out the main problems of the Shanghai ranking. I will finish with some of the key features of the demand side, the uses and effects of the tool: the psychosocial mechanisms that reproduce ranking and the lock-ins it creates.

This article examines the intensification, since the creation of the so‐called Shanghai list of world universities in June 2003, of a political struggle in which a variety of actors, universities, national governments, and, more recently, supranational institutions have sought to define global higher education. This competition over global higher education has highlighted issues such as the internationalization and denationalization of higher education, the international mobility of students, the role of English language as the language of science, and the privatization of higher education. In contrast to IPE or Marxist analyses, we analyze the symbolic logic of ranking lists in higher education, their uses, and the European Commission’s initiative to create an alternative world university classification (see World Social Science Report, UNESCO Publishing; Europa zwischen Fiktion und Realpolitik/L’Europe—Fictions et réalités politiques, Transcript for analysis). This initiative represents a political move in a process of rapid restructuration of higher education at the global level.

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