The purpose of the Bologna process (or Bologna accords) is to create the European higher education area by making academic degree standards and quality assurance standards more comparable and compatible throughout Europe
This is supposed to improve mobility of students across Europe by harmonising the degree and qualifications frameworks, but if other aspects of civil life are hindered, a European Higher Education Area by itself won't make a great deal of difference. Ad astra per aspera
Translating on the fly:
The very first directives on the subject, dating back to the 1970s, set the goal of harmonising degrees throughout the Union. <...> ...the original ambitions have been considerably downscaled. They collided with the principle of competence of member states concerning education, and with the even older principle of the independence of universities: universities were born in Europe, they were born free, and they mean to remain so. In a second phase, the harmonisation goal was dropped and replaced by that of correspondence between degrees: the idea was to put together a big table making automatic mutual recognition easier. Fresh failure. New downscaling. If general recognition isn't possible, let's at least try to ensure transparency, which will facilitate direct agreements between fully autonomous universities.
...the original ambitions have been considerably downscaled. They collided with the principle of competence of member states concerning education, and with the even older principle of the independence of universities: universities were born in Europe, they were born free, and they mean to remain so. In a second phase, the harmonisation goal was dropped and replaced by that of correspondence between degrees: the idea was to put together a big table making automatic mutual recognition easier. Fresh failure. New downscaling. If general recognition isn't possible, let's at least try to ensure transparency, which will facilitate direct agreements between fully autonomous universities.
But here too, Lamassoure notes, the results are not up to expectations. He cites the example of French universities that will accept work done at a foreign university under Erasmus as course credits, but may not recognize the degree obtained by the same Erasmus student in that foreign university.
On the Bologna Process, Lamassoure says it was ambitious and a solemn political commitment, followed by a common organisation of university degrees on the Bachelor-Master-Doctor plan, but that it still hasn't solved the problem of mutual recognition of degrees, and the complications and administrative constraints are still considerable.
That in itself makes mobility of students and transferability of qualifications problematic. Trying to force such huge change to me seems unfeasible. Attempting to create transparency so that comparisons can be made, seems more likely to be achieved imo. Ad astra per aspera
some other parts of the world
Um, English-speaking parts?
But in fact the B-M-D structure has been largely adopted. The problem seems to be that there's no guarantee that my university will recognize that your university's Master's is equivalent to mine, and vice versa.
[T]he reasoning was that the changes envisioned would also make the new European standard more in line with some other parts of the world
