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This article traces the evolution of the European Commission’s discursive strategy in the domain of higher education. It seeks to explain if and how a neo-liberalized discourse is an asset in a sector with very limited formal EU jurisdiction. The article analyzes the initial discursive link between European higher education and market, and the way it has been shaped depending upon institutional conditions and political work of actors. In the current situation, the Commission has a much more clearly neo-liberal discourse, which nevertheless does not make the institution as powerful as often stated. The Commission currently has to deal with the Bologna process, or means of coordination of higher education policies that developed on the margins of the EU, and which has a slightly different ideological echo (i.e. less neo-liberal). The Bologna process has developed and institutionalized a specific identity and working culture of its own and, thus, the European Commission may not find the task of absorbing and controlling such an alternative system so easy.