Abstract
In a knowledge-based economy, the field of higher education is in high demand. This is to ensure a strong production capacity for globally competitive innovations. This geo-economic context upsets educational issues by requiring citizens to raise their level of skills and knowledge in a logic of performance. This study tends to show how the European Union relies on curricula to transform the democratization of higher education into a process of selection of human capital. It tends to show that curricular fragmentation is a strategy that draws its legitimacy from the meritocratic fiction, favoring in the background a massification of qualified human resources in a soft power perspective of the European model of the knowledge society.