Monika Orechova (Vilnius University)
The proposed paper presents the results of the research on the development of the concept of higher education internationalisation in Eastern Europe from 1990 to 2000. The semantic field of internationalization from the period shows that there is a high level of conceptuality in the higher education discourse of the time, with discussions on concepts such as autonomy, democracy, transition, all of which carry complex semantic loads of their own. This study shows how the discourses of modernization and democratization of the 1990s influenced the development of the concept of internationalization in the region; it places the historical development of the concept of internationalization in a wider context of social and political change and ties conceptualizations developed in two Lithuanian and Estonian universities to wider discourses which were dominant in the field.
The discourses of aspiration towards ‘greater Europe’ prevalent throughout the 1990s perceived education and, in particular, higher education as one of the primary areas for ‘modernization’. The market-based understanding of higher education, already developing in the West, buoyed by the market-induced modernization theory in Eastern Europe, found a particularly fertile ground in Eastern European higher education systems. its historical development shows that internationalization in Eastern Europe is not merely a higher education trend. It encompasses the sediments of meanings which link it to internal aspirations and external expectations that by losing its ‘Eastness’, Eastern Europe will progress into what some called ‘the greater Europe’.