Higher education, internationalisation, and the nation-state.

Publication: German Policy Studies

Publication Date: 01-JUL-02

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COPYRIGHT 2002 Southern Public Administration Education Foundation, Inc.

Abstract

'Internationalisation' became a key theme in the 1990s, both in higher education policy debates and in research on higher education. The process is accompanied by a European policy that seems to favour a de-nationalisation of higher education, a growing responsibility of individual institutions of higher education and an increasing popularity of managerialism. This paper addresses the traditional controversial role of higher education as regards internationalisation and the nation-state, comparing the mainland European and the Anglo-Saxon approach. Assessing the different impacts of internationalisation as a challenge to European and German higher education, it analyses the role of the European Union and the Bologna process, as well as the icebreaker function of internationalisation for higher education reform in Germany. A closer look at the complex and dynamic multi-level set-up of internationalisation in European higher education reveals that it not only means varying border-crossing activities that are on the rise, but rather substantial changes towards systematic policies and a growing awareness of international cooperation and competition in an increasingly global higher education market.

Introduction

Three major developments occurred in the higher education systems in Europe during the last two decades:

- Higher education institutions, but more specifically higher education systems at their institutional level, became more important actors. We can observe many initiatives and debates on institutional management in higher education, institutional evaluation, funding of universities and other related tools for institutional adaptation to changing environments.

- Secondly, we note a variety of changes, which can be termed 'internationalisation' of higher education. Two different types of phenomena are frequently referred to in this context: on the one hand, a growth of specific visible international, border-crossing cooperation and operations, such as student and staff mobility, foreign language teaching or cooperative research activities; and, on the other, a trend towards internationalisation, regionalisation or globalisation of the substance and structures of higher education, e.g., convergence of systems in terms of institutional patterns, study programmes or curricula.

- Last but not least, both developments--the emphasis on the institutional level, as well as on the international level of higher education--seem to reflect and to contribute to a loosening of traditional ties between the university and the nation-state that some may welcome as the new freedom of universities, while others may see the university in this context as capitalism's final frontier.

Thus, the restructuring of the nation-state and the rise of internationalisation run parallel to the reform and transformation of universities. A paper prepared for the meeting in Salamanca of European rectors and institutional managers responsible for higher education provides an example of this new secular religion of institutional autonomy as a tool for the empowering of universities in a competitive global order: "Universities need and want autonomy. In many countries in Europe, over-regulation inhibits progress and innovation and constitutes a serious handicap in the European and worldwide environment. Universities request the power to plan their own futures, striking the right balance between autonomy and responsibility and between diversity and organisation" (Convention of European Higher Education Institutions 2001: 7).

The Nationalisation of Higher Education: contrasting assumptions and significant differences

In talking about a trend towards internationalisation or de-nationalisation, we claim that higher education in the past has not been--or has been less--international than today, and more so in comparison with the anticipated future. A closer look, however, shows that higher education in the past can be described in a seemingly controversial and contradictory way.

The university has always been perceived as a very international institution compared to other major institutions in society. Grand notions of students going from Bologna to Paris to Oxford suggest that from its earliest times the university transcended national frontiers. These medieval memories are reinforced by images of the Renaissance, of Europe in the Age of the Enlightenment, and nowadays of academics as global players in contemporary societies. There always was great appreciation of cosmopolitan values in universities, pride was based on international recognition and reputation, international cooperation and mobility were not rare, and a universal dimension of knowledge dominated many disciplines and was not viewed as marginal in others. Thus, one could argue that the university always was and still is an international institution and that it has not only been a major force in the secularisation of modern societies, but also in their internationalisation.

But these memories and images may be a mystification if they are taken as a proof that the university always has been, and therefore, always will be, an international institution. The other side of the coin is the prominent historical role of universities in the process of nation-building and their dependence on the nation-state. In his essay about the modern university, Wittrock wrote that "universities form part and parcel of the very same process which manifests itself in the emergence of an industrial economic order and the nation-state as the most typical and most important form of political organisation" (Wittrock 1993: 305). This is what the 'nationalisation' of higher education is about. The contemporary university is born of the nation state, not of medieval civilisation, and it was in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries that universities acquired their identification with science and technology. Three-quarters of the universities, even in Europe, were established in the last century, half of them since 1945. Hence, their regulatory and funding context was (and still is) national, their contribution to national cultures was (and still is) significant, students tended to be (and still are) trained to become national functionaries, and universities played (and still play) a considerable role in what some have called the industrial-military-complex. In this perspective, they are very national institutions and therefore we continue to refer to national systems of higher education that are challenged by internationalisation. Paradoxically perhaps, before they became international institutions, universities had first to become national institutions--just as internationalisation presupposes the existence of nation-states.

As Guy Neave has shown in his very stimulating historical study of universities' responsibility to society, we could delve deeper into the traditional role of the university within the nation-state to understand the challenges that European higher education is facing in the light of internationalisation or globalisation. We observe contrasting assumptions and significant differences "beneath the political and social priorities which different referential systems of higher education assigned to the place of higher education in the social fabric" (Neave 2000: 15). The argument is based on a comparison between the continental European Humboldtian or Napoleonic approach of the role of the university in the nationalisation project of modernity and...

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