The power of ambiguity: what the ‘Europe of Knowledge’ taught me about ideas

On the occasion of the EUI flagship event EUIdeas, which shares this platform’s name, we asked EUI academics: What is the most powerful piece of knowledge you have encountered, and how has it transformed your research?

Here, the personal story of Marina Cino Pagliarello:

The first time I encountered the expression "Europe of Knowledge" was not in an academic setting, but in my early professional experience working on European education and training policies in the 2000s, at a time when the Lisbon Strategy was redefining the direction of the European Union.

The ambition was clear and widely shared: to make Europe "the most competitive and dynamic knowledge-based economy in the world". Education and training were placed at the centre of this agenda, increasingly framed as key drivers of growth, employment, and innovation. New forms of coordination were introduced, bringing together European institutions, national ministries, and networks of experts around common objectives, benchmarks, and indicators. The language of "knowledge" was everywhere, structuring discussions across policy areas and actors.

In practice, this meant sitting in meetings where the same expression would be used with a sense of shared purpose, while pointing in different directions. Representatives from ministries, European institutions, and expert networks would all invoke the "Europe of Knowledge" as a common objective, each connecting it to their own priorities: skills and employability, social inclusion, innovation, or institutional cooperation. For some, it referred primarily to competitiveness and human capital; for others, to broader social goals like inclusion and citizenship; in other contexts, to research or the construction of a European educational space. The language was shared; the meanings were not.

What was striking was not simply this variation, but the fact that it did not appear to generate disagreement. On the contrary, the expression seemed to facilitate convergence. Actors with distinct priorities, institutional roles, and policy traditions were able to align around a shared agenda, even when their underlying interpretations diverged.

At the time, this felt like a tension, if not a conceptual weakness. How could such an open and flexible idea support a coherent policy direction? Why did its ambiguity not undermine coordination, but seem instead to enable it? The paradox was too striking to ignore.

These questions stayed with me long after those early experiences and would become the starting point of my research.

It was only later, when I returned to this question in my doctoral research - Constructing the Europe of Knowledge? Ideas and European education policy (1975–2010) - that I began to understand what I had observed in practice. But the concept that helped clarify it came from an unexpected source.

Reading Star and Griesemer's 1989 study of the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology at Berkeley, a work rooted in science studies and far removed from anything I would have considered "my" literature, I encountered the notion of boundary objects: concepts or discourses that hold multiple meanings across social worlds, but solid enough to be recognisable and to enable collaboration. The concept had been developed to explain how scientists, collectors, and museum administrators could each pursue their own distinct objectives while still working within a shared framework - not because they agreed on a common project, but because the objects they worked with were flexible enough to accommodate varied interpretations and robust enough to hold them together. It described, with striking precision, what I had observed in those policy meetings years earlier. I had not expected to find the answer in a museum. What Star and Griesemer showed is that shared language can sustain collaboration precisely because it does not foreclose interpretation.

Through this lens, it became clear that the "Europe of Knowledge" had never been a single, clearly defined project. It could refer to economic competitiveness, to social inclusion, to education and skills, or to research and innovation. These meanings did not replace one another; they coexisted.

What I had initially perceived as inconsistency began to appear as something more structured. The idea worked not because it imposed a single coherent vision, but because actors could recognise their own priorities within it, which helped explain how the EU, despite limited formal competences in education, was able to play an increasingly active role in shaping the field. Without imposing formal obligations, the idea provided the language that made coordination acceptable and meaningful, enabling forms of authority to be exercised beyond its formal mandate.

This is what I came to understand as the polysemy of policy ideas: the capacity of a concept to hold multiple related meanings and, in doing so, to bring together actors who might otherwise struggle to agree. The "Europe of Knowledge" was not unique in this respect. Across the Commission, Member States, and European institutions, its ambiguity had become a political resource, the very condition that made collaboration possible.

In complex political systems like the European Union, characterised by multiple actors, overlapping competences, and the absence of clear authority, ideas rarely function because they are precise or universally agreed upon. What this taught me, and what I had not expected to find when I first sat in those meeting rooms, is that ambiguity is not simply a lack of clarity. It is a feature. It enables coordination under conditions of uncertainty, sustains continuity in policy direction, and makes it possible to act where full consensus is out of reach. The "Europe of Knowledge" worked not in spite of its ambiguity, but because of it.

Seen in this light, knowledge is not only about producing evidence or expertise. It is also about the language through which actors understand problems and make collective action possible. Polysemic ideas are not a weakness of political discourse; they are one of its most powerful resources.

Looking back, what I first encountered as a puzzle in the Lisbon years reveals something more enduring about the European project: the power of knowledge lies not in fixing meaning, but in holding together difference and making collective action possible.

Marina Cino Pagliarello is Research Fellow at the European University Institute. Her work examines how ideas shape European governance, theorising the polysemy of policy concepts as a mechanism for coordination across actors and institutions. She also studies universities as emerging political and diplomatic actors in Europe and beyond.

Notable recent publications include:

• The polysemy of skills: exploring country-specific approaches in the knowledge economy, with M. Thies, T. Tubatovic and D. Nunes, Regulation and Governance, 2025
• Policy change and the persuasive potential of polysemic ideas: What explains coalition-building success?, with T. Tubatovic, International Review of Public Policy, 2025
• Constructing the “Europe of Knowledge”? Ideas and European education policy (1973-2020). Palgrave MacMillan, 2022

This EUIdeas essay is a contribution to the conversations of the EUIdeas flagship event themed The Power of Knowledge, an occasion to celebrate the EUI’s 50^th anniversary. The event aims to reimagine Europe by showing how universities can deploy knowledge to illuminate challenges, inform public debate, and contribute intellectually to the future of our societies.