This paper will address the symposium’s general issue of the influence of politics on the HE policy-making through the analysis of different policies of the HE internationalization in the post-soviet countries. Since the beginning of 1990, all of these countries faced the challenge of the internationalization but they responded to it in a rather different ways. While in the Baltic countries the choice of the HE policies was closely linked to the EU membership, the external incentives were less obvious in other post-soviet countries even if Bologna process and the creation of the EHEA had a certain impact far outside the EU borders. In some of these countries the authorities easily opened their HE systems to a large set of international actors, as for example in Moldova or Kyrgyzstan. On the contrary, for political reasons the isolation was chosen in Turkmenistan while Belarusian authorities tried to preserve the inherited HE soviet model and followed a “sinuous” path of internationalization. Such countries as Russia or Kazakhstan put the internationalization as one of the priorities on their HE reforms’ agenda following broader foreign policy and economic considerations. This paper will provide a comparison and analysis of the different policy tools aiming to the internationalization of HE systems in several post-soviet countries and it will pay a particular attention to the issue of students’ mobility as an important element of the internationalization. The preliminary findings of the project give us the possibility to examine the hypothesis that the HE systems in some post-soviet countries became oversized for the national needs and this situation contributes to the reinforcement of the internalization dimension of the HE policies in order to attract foreign students and maintain the existing HE systems. This competition for the candidates coming mainly from the neighbor post-soviet countries seems to become an important incentive for the further internationalization of the HE in the region.

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