The purpose of the article is to problematize the relationship between the Nordic democratic public higher education tradition and transnational market driven knowledge economy policies. The article illustrates this development with two cases -- quality assurance and internationalisation policies -- where external demands, based mostly on market ideologies, have been introduced with apparently transnational incentives but having national implementations. These transnational pressures are related to a kind of soft governance of higher education policy, characterized by networked decision making and use of expert consultants, which possibly promotes flexible decision-making and efficiency, but may simultaneously produce adverse outcomes to transparent and democratic decision-making.