ABSTRACT
The last two decades have seen a flurry of studies exploring the spread of EMI in Europe (Block & Khan, 2020; Dimova, Hultgren, & Jensen, 2015; Doiz, Lasagabaster, & Sierra, 2013). This interest may be surprising, perhaps even overblown (Grin, 2014) considering the relatively small proportion of such programmes in most European countries (with an average of 5.9% according to the 2014 Wächter and Maiworm report). In our view, this interest can only be explained by the fact that it also involves broader issues concerning globalisation and internationalisation and their potentially negative effect such as standardisation, domain loss, damaging competition, and increasing inequalities. Of course, internationalisation is not a new concept in higher education (HE); it is consubstantial with the birth of the University itself in the middle-ages (Scot, 2006; Teichler, 2009). Yet its importance and centrality have changed over time as the University’s mission evolved. From being relatively church-dependent with a teaching mission up to the eighteenth century, it became increasingly subservient to the state, which it served by providing an educated class whose purpose was to participate in nation-building efforts, and/or simply to provide a well-trained, competent administration (Scot, 2006, p. 25; van Zanten & Maxwell, 2015). For some, this participation took place mainly in the economic sphere; as a result, some early twentieth-century critics such as Thorstein Veblen already complained that the University’s mission ‘was, in reality, submission to business power or to the industrial status quo, and faculty complained over business leaders’ involvement in their institutions’ (Scot, 2006, p. 24). For some scholars such as Anthony Giddens (1999), a major qualitative shift involving all institutions occurred at the turn of this century with the advent of globalisation. For Manuel Castells, this shift is marked by the fact that knowledge itself has become the basic resource in what he calls the informational society, a society in which it is not information itself that provides basic resources as was the case in the past, but rather ‘a specific form of social organization in which information generation, processing and transmission become the principal sources of productivity and power’ (2000, p. 21). Hence, knowledge transfer and mobility are essential to the survival of society itself, to its institutions, whether political, economic, social, or cultural. These are precisely the processes that European Union (EU) tried to set in motion through the Bologna process in 1999.
