The first fundamental principle of the Magna Charta Universitatum (1988) states that universities are autonomous institutions that produce, examine, appraise and hand down culture through research and teaching. This principle defines universities as autonomous in creating and organizing study programmes and scientific research, among other things, and the laws and regulations of the countries involved in the Bologna Declaration only regulate cooperation between higher education institutions and state institutions in order to harmonize university autonomy with the interests of society and the state. The existing cooperation determined the willingness of the authors of this study to identify the main trends in the development of the digitalization of higher education institutions in normative documents, which were analysed using qualitative data analysis methods such as a graphical organizer and inductive qualitative content analysis. At present, digitalization is rapidly transforming both the physical and social environments and has also exerted significant pressure in the sphere of higher education. Many scholars, including the European University Association (EUA), conclude that digitalization of higher education is a major aspect of development, which should be addressed at a national level to develop appropriate digitalization strategies for all European higher education institutions. This article presents the first results of the cooperative research project OSMOZE between France and Latvia: "The gap between political development documents and real practice of digitalization of higher education".