Quietly, without attracting too much attention from educational sociologists in Europe, a massive process has been underway for five years that is expected to revolutionize European higher education to an unprecedented extent. Launched by a number of European governments and subsequently taken over by the European Commission, the so-called Bologna Process is expected to boost European higher education to the top of the world higher education markets by 2010. This article looks at the history of the Process and its connections to the process of constructing the federal Europe, and analyses its three agendas: cultural, political and economic. In the final section the issue of institutionalizing the European higher education system is discussed and problematized. It concludes that the contribution European intellectuals have made to the project is both sociologically naive and intellectually irresponsible.