Abstract
This article examines the national and European policy contexts that shaped the Swedish internationalisation agenda in higher education since 2000, the policy ideas that were mobilised to promote it, and the national priorities that steered higher education debates. The analysis highlights how domestic and European policy priorities, as well as discourses around increasing global economic reach and building solidarity across the world, have produced an internationalisation strategy that is distinctly ‘national’. Drawing on the analysis of the most recent internationalisation strategies we argue that the particular Swedish approach to internationalisation has its ideational foundations in viewing higher education as a political instrument to promote social mobility and justice, as well as a means to develop economic competitiveness and employability capacity. In addition, internationalisation has been used to legitimise national reform goals, but also as a policy objective on its own with the ambition to position Sweden as a competitive knowledge nation in a global context.
Highlights
More than any other education sector, higher education (HE) reflects complexity and rapid change
We suggest that policy ideas around HE internationalisation provide meaning for political action: First, in legitimating such action by attaching value to it – what Schmidt (2008) refers to as normative ideas, and second, through a cognitive set of ideas that ‘provide guidelines and maps for political action’ that justify particular policies and policy programmes (p. 306)
Internationalisation comprises a set of ideas that we find in the global education policy field, whereby university education is conceptualised as part of a politics of knowledge promoted by international and transnational organisations (Buckner, 2019; Robson and Wihlborg, 2019)
Summary
More than any other education sector, higher education (HE) reflects complexity and rapid change. The 2018 inquiry commission, moves the emphasis to further strengthen knowledge around sustainability and development (in the areas of health, economics, social justice, the environment and social welfare), build on solidarity with countries around the world, and to integrate these dimensions to all activities of teaching and research as part of a highquality sector This multiplication of goals and functions for internationalisation compared to the 2005 Strategy does extend the links between university operations and the international context, and makes horizontal connections between different national areas of policy, such as trade, foreign aid, development and migration. This justifies the claim that international perspectives should be mainstreamed in the evaluation and management of all HE institutions (SOU 2018:3: 8), discursively strengthening the potential of these ideas for their institutionalisation in university policies and practices
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