ABSTRACT
In recent years, there has been a growing recognition that reliable knowledge in higher education “cannot be produced in local isolation but can only be obtained by an open and honest inquiry that is international in its scope” (Miller, Mateeva & Nekrassova, 2011). The internationalization of higher education does, however, vary significantly between different countries and cultures across the globe. In fact, we witness an emphasis on a “world of (academic) centers and peripheries” (Altbach, 2004) with respect to the globalization and internationalization of higher education, whereby academic centers are usually located in larger and wealthier countries and tend to attract flows of academic talent from the peripheries, while peripheries increasingly struggle in this regard (Altbach, 2004; Scott, 2015). Additionally, we see a dominance of Anglophone institutions in attracting international talent (Hughes, 2008; Scott, 2015). In this context, small countries on the periphery-especially in countries with low levels of English language proficiency-are disadvantaged and need to invest more heavily in internationalization (Loonurm, 2014). Lithuania (with a population of 2.9 million) and Estonia (with 1.3 million inhabitants) and their higher education systems are interesting cases in this regard. Both countries have been members of the European Union (EU) since 2004, but had formerly been part of the Soviet Union for 50 years until the early 1990s, and their higher education systems have undergone significant transitions, including the first attempts to internationalize.
