ABSTRACT
In this essay, I present an argument that we need an internationalist perspective on internationalisation, which is otherwise no more than a set of organizational devices to create a superficial mixing of ideas, people and disciplines from various countries and academic traditions. Whereas education systems have been used hitherto to promote a nationalist ideology, i.e. an interpretation of the world, including academe, which places the nation and the state at the centre, internationalism has a moral dimension which rejects ethnocentricity and puts in its place a set of liberal values by which to order our lives, including the academic. This is all the more important in view of the instrumental view of education - and the concomitant commodification of higher education - which is reductive in effect and needs to be complemented by an educationist ideology (Bildung) in which students become agents of change in society.
Internationalism; internationalisation; Higher Education; nationalism; cosmopolitanism
