Post-Brexit Cooperation in Higher Education and Research: The Changing EU-UK Relationship

The free circulation of knowledge and actors of knowledge is an ambition that long predates the EU and could be considered inherently beneficial for all concerned. As such, it is regrettable that—as this Chapter shows—the post-Brexit situation reveals a great number of impediments to EU-UK mobility in the area of higher education and research. Especially the UK’s non-participation in the Erasmus+ programme and issues concerning its association to Horizon Europe have drastic effects on the mobility of individual students, academics and researchers—a situation compounded by the loss of mobility rights of academic actors in their capacity as student, researcher, teacher or academic institution under EU primary and secondary free movement law. This drastically curtails academic opportunity, with all the attendant consequences. It should, nevertheless, be pointed out that there are various options to improve the situation, since the UK may associate with EU higher education instruments specifically (as a third country, or through membership of the European Economic Area), and—more fundamentally—with the internal market more generally (through membership of the European Economic Area). Such association, however, means that the UK will participate in these policy/legal frameworks as a policy-taker rather than a policy-maker, which may explain why it has not enthusiastically pursued this avenue. In any event, Brexit’s costly exchange of external power for internal sovereignty will continue to mark the UK-EU relationship in all areas for time to come, and the area of European higher education and research is no exception.