An Introduction: Internationalisation at Home in Context

THE BIRTH OF INTERNATIONALISATION AT HOME In the late 1990s, Bengt Nilsson was faced with a new challenge. Already at that time well-established as a brand name in European and international higher education cooperation, Nilsson left his post as the director of the International Relations Office of Lund University to become the vice president for international affairs at the newly founded university in Malmö, Sweden—a small step in terms of distance, a big one otherwise. Lund is one of Europe’s oldest and most established research universities. Malmö was a fledgling institution in statu nascendi when Bengt Nilsson arrived there. But precisely this lack of old traditions and structures also opened up new opportunities. One of them was internationalisation. In Lund, the focus of international activity had been on the mobility of persons. In Malmö, Nilsson decided to go down an altogether different avenue. He opted for internationalisation at home (IaH). There were two main reasons for this conceptual reorientation. First, it had become clear to Nilsson (and to many others in the international higher education business) that even the rather modest aim of the initial Erasmus Programme—to enable every 10th student to spend a study period in another European country—could not be attained. This failure called for a new approach: to “ internationalise” the education of that vast majority of higher education students who would never leave their home country. Second, the new university in Malmö was to cater to a regional target population, amongst other things. And the Malmö region has an immigrant rate of about one third. A sizeable part of the expected student population would therefore have cultural roots very different from those of the traditional Swedish student. As a consequence, intercultural studies and intercultural communication would have to play a strong role. This (unjustifiably) short history of Bengt Nilsson’s move contains, in a nutshell, the two pillars on which the concept of IaH rested from the begin-