Major components of German cultural and educational foreign policy are the Goethe-Institutes and the German Schools Abroad. They serve within the German foreign policy as part of the third element (i.e. foreign cultural policy) next to foreign policy and foreign-trade policy. Thus, they earn their credentials by being diplomatic representatives of Germany. As so called “mediators”, a particular German way of organizing foreign policy, they actively promote cultural exchange and international understanding. Thus, culture becomes a vehicle of cooperation and partnership.

The Goethe-Institute is the cultural institute of the Federal Republic of Germany and provides access to German language, culture and society and promotes international cultural cooperation. It has 149 Institutes and 10 Liason Offices in 92 countries. The German schools abroad have a world-wide network. There are currently 140 German schools abroad in 70 countries with approximately 20.000 German-students and 58.000 non-German students. They are designed as ”contact” institutions in order to provide German families abroad with a German school education.

According to the national paradigm of education, educational systems are predominantly operated and controlled by national agencies (i.e. Departments of Education. Thus, consistent with the paradigm, the Goethe-Institutes and the German Schools Abroad define a German educational space. However, due to their international location, both institutions are placed in a worldwide educational and cultural community. They meet the challenge by transforming themselves into cross-border educational organizations, showing a continuing trend away from the national paradigm by understanding themselves as globally oriented cultural institutions. For example, the Goethe-Institute runs various language courses that are recognized worldwide. The examination levels correspond to the Common European Reference Framework for Languages. Likewise, the German schools abroad teach a mixture of national German curricula as well as the curricula of the host countries. What is more, many of the schools disengage themselves from the national paradigm altogether and offer the International Baccalaureate (IB) as the means for global educational objectives.

Thus, an international educational space has developed. In educational research this new space has been recently recognized and described with the concept of internationalization of education, which includes the notion of transnationalization. Adick has developed a model of national, international and transnational educational spaces and proclaims that these leads to an increasing number of cross-border providers of education who operate under private law. As a result there are new forms of control and legitimization that regulate these institutions such as market mechanisms (e.g. competition) or public-private-partnership regulations. These, in turn, create shifts in the legitimization of these organizations as for instance competitiveness among each other, the idea of education as a commodity as well as entrepreneurialism.

In this paper we intend to detect transnational features displayed by the aforementioned institutions. In order to do that, we want to look at their field of action in terms of distribution, cooperation and partnerships in Mexico. For this purpose, we focus on cultural institutes and foreign schools of other countries and question whether the field of action is characterized either by competition or readiness for cooperation.

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