The rise of extreme right-wing, nationalist and racist movements is a phenomenon that we have seen across the world.  Within Europe this has witnessed Brexit, the election of xeno-nationalist governments in Hungary, Poland, Italy, and Austria, and the increase in electoral support for racist or neo-fascist parties in almost all European countries.  The conventional story explaining this is that this reflects a reaction of those excluded by neoliberal globalisation, who are mobilised by populist rhetoric of the ‘people’ against elites, and Christian civilisational antagonism against migrants and Islam in particular.¹  But how does this analysis work when applied to apparently successful globalised economies such as Denmark with high rates of employment, relatively low levels of immigration, and high degrees of political consensus around a coordinated market economy alongside generous welfare support?  And why would higher education become a focus for right-wing or welfare chauvinist reaction? 

I am proposing that higher education (HE) policy formation in Denmark is caught up in a tension between three dominant rationalities,

• human capital formation (human capitalisation)
• status competition (status capitalisation)
• nationalism and white supremacy (national(ist)isation of higher education).

The paper focuses specifically on Danish government restrictions on both financial support for EU international students and English-medium education programmes (EMI).  These are policy moves enacted by both the right and left.  This move has been described as ‘de-internationalisation’.² While largely agreeing with this characterisation, this paper proposes an analysis that brings together a historical perspective, international political economy (historical institutionalism and growth regimes), and the politics of belonging.

Compared to higher education studies (HES) there is a large literature on right-wing populism.  HES has mostly examined the impact of and tension between human and status capitalisation or has discussed these rationalities through the prism of neoliberalism.³ But what about higher education and the phenomenon of political reaction?  Higher education has increasingly been characterised by forms of internationalisation and globalisation and tensions that have arisen as a consequence.  One form of this in the European context is the integration of higher education into regional strategies of global economic competitiveness and the global nature of status capitalisation.  This has witnessed, for example, internationalisation strategies and student mobility resulting in the growth of English medium education.⁴ But less has been written about the relation between globalised higher education and political reaction.  Some of the most explicit examples of what might be called the national(ist)isation of HE is that of Hungary. The question remains open as to the extent to which such examples are exemplary of the tension between the three rationalities outlined above, and that the emergence of national(ist)isation of HE can be explained primarily by reference to a reaction to globalisation or neoliberalism.  This paper seeks to address this issue empirically and methodologically.

Empirically the paper focuses on recent policy restrictions aimed at international students in Denmark which have been pursued by both left- and right-wing governments.  Denmark provides an interesting case of the national(ist)isation of HE since it has actively pursued institutional integration in line with the Bologna and Lisbon processes, and continues to promote status capitalisation. Rather than a victim of neoliberal globalisation, it has been viewed as a neoliberal success story.⁵ 

Methodologically the paper aims to foreground both a historical perspective, and interdisciplinary analysis to better understand the national(ist)isation of HE as a way of opening up possible higher education futures. 

Methodologically the paper utilises three perspectives: Historical perspective • Growth Regimes: this draws on developments within historical institutionalism and ideational theory in international relations. Specifically, it draws on arguments that relate the growth of populist movements to changes in political economy.6 This paper proposes two growth regimes to help explain the emergence of a particular politics of belonging related to Danish higher education: a neoliberal growth regime and the contemporary moment following the economic crisis that I refer to as an interregnum period; a period following the fragmentation of the neoliberal growth regime and its replacement by a yet unknown alternative model.7 The ideational approach within this argues that ideas, e.g. neoliberalism, construct policy in a dynamic way, working through policy actors and becoming institutionalised for instance in policies of welfare chauvinism and political programmes. The usual focus of HES on integration strategies within an imagined European Higher Education Area (now a European Education Area) is analysed within this historical framing. Politics of belonging This perspective draws largely on the work of Rogers Brubaker. • Politics of belonging8: this is used to explain the form that welfare chauvinism and national(ist)isation takes in Denmark through a discursive distinction between two categories of people: those who belong in and belong to the national polity, and to demonstrate how this predates the economic crisis but takes on new forms in the period of fragmentation. • Christian identitarianism9: this concept situates the analysis in a longer historical frame, connecting the formation of Denmark as a small mostly monolingual ethnically homogenous imperial state following the loss of its Norwegian and German territories with a cultural politics of belonging that overdetermines politics and HE policy formation. Interdisciplinary approach • While the paper speaks to mainstream HES it deliberately transcends HES through a sustained discussion with other intellectual traditions as articulated above. The proposition is that this enables a detailed examination of complex and dynamic processes that work simultaneously at different levels of abstraction – agency of policy actors, the generation and mobilisation of discourse, instantiation of ideas in the construction and enactment of institutions, working across different timeframes, and across both national, regional and international spaces.

The analysis is structured in two parts related to different growth regimes: • Integration (neoliberal growth regime) • Fragmentation (interregnum) Integration • Denmark exemplified the emergence of neoliberal nationalism pursued by social democratic political formations across Europe • In the context of the neoliberal growth regime Danish HE was reformed to more tightly couple academics’ and institutional missions to human and status capitalisation, though these processes were less pronounced than in the UK or Australia • Danish HE became more internationalised in response to the Bologna process witnessing a growth in both international students and EMI • While supportive of European integration sovereignty remained a strong political idea • A politics of belonging was organised around welfare chauvinism and restrictions on immigration, predating the economic crisis and saw the emergence of an electorally strong Christian identitarian politics that influenced the conservative right • In HE concerns were raised about the impact of status capitalisation in relation to a growing dominance of English but this was not articulated as a politics of belonging. Fragmentation • Although Denmark was relatively resilient in the face of the economic crisis there were growing internal economic disparities, but Denmark is still marked by a high degree of globalisation • The Social Democrats aligned themselves to a politics of belonging supporting and introducing highly restrictive anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim social policies • A politics of belonging moved into the HE arena with moves to restrict access by international students and reduce EMI, supported by left and right political formations • This is not a period of specifically of anti-globalisation or anti-neoliberalism as the economy is still strongly globalised and there remains a strong consensus around the Danish model of a coordinated market economy • But this period sees a sustained process of reformulation of public goods as national(ist) public goods framed by a politics of belonging.

1 De Burca, G. (2018). Is EU supranational governance a challenge to liberal constitutionalism? The University of Chicago Law Review, 85(2), 337-368.Hopkin J and Blyth M (2019) The Global Economics of European Populism: Growth Regimes and Party System Change in Europe (The Government and Opposition/Leonard Schapiro Lecture 2017). Government and opposition (London) 54(2): 193–225. 2 Private correspondence 3 See for instance Amaral A., Neave G., Musselin C., et al. (2009) European Integration and the Governance of Higher Education and Research. Dortrecht: Springe; Kristensen, J. E., Nørreklit, H., & Raffnsøe-Møller, M. (2011). University Performance Management: The Silent Managerial Revolution at Danish Universities Copenhagen: DJØF Publishing; Bottrell D and Manathunga C (2019) Resisting Neoliberalism in Higher Education Volume I: Seeing Through the Cracks. Cham: Springer International Publishing AG. 4 Brenn-White M and Rest E van (2012) English-Taught Master’s Programs in Europe: New Findings on Supply and Demand. New York; Airey J, Lauridsen KM, Räsänen A, et al. (2017) The expansion of English-medium instruction in the Nordic countries: Can top-down university language policies encourage bottom-up disciplinary literacy goals? Higher Education 73(4): 561–576. 5 Kim AB (2020) Denmark Is Not a Socialist Economic Nirvana. Available at: https://www.heritage.org/international-economies/commentary/denmark-not-socialist-economic-nirvana (accessed 14 January 2021). 6 Blyth M and Matthijs M (2017) Black Swans, Lame Ducks, and the mystery of IPE’s missing macroeconomy. Review of International Political Economy 24(2): 203–231; Hopkin J and Blyth M (2019) The Global Economics of European Populism: Growth Regimes and Party System Change in Europe (The Government and Opposition/Leonard Schapiro Lecture 2017). Government and opposition (London) 54(2). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press: 193–225. 7 Babic, M. (2020). Let's talk about the interregnum: Gramsci and the crisis of the liberal world order. International Affairs, 96(3), 767-786. 8 Brubaker R (2010) Migration, Membership, and the Modern Nation-State: Internal and External Dimensions of the Politics of Belonging. Journal of Interdisciplinary History 41(1): 61–78. 9 Brubaker R (2017) Between nationalism and civilizationism: the European populist moment in comparative perspective. Ethnic and Racial Studies 40(8): 1191–1226.