Introduction: Comparative perspectives on higher education, nation-building, and future imaginaries

Abstract

While holding a reputation as cosmopolitan or global institutions, universities have played a crucial role in shaping multifaceted conditions of social life and in the making of society in emerging nation-states. Throughout the course of Western nation-building since the start of the long 19 th century, university foundations and reforms aimed to accelerate progress in science and research for the cultural, intellectual, economic, technological, and military development of the nation-states. In that sense, universities and other higher education institutions have played a powerful role in the production and distribution of forms of national consciousness among the citizenry of the respective states. A case in point was the widespread university reform movement in Germany at the beginning of the 19th century, which positioned universities as defenders of the ideas and epistemologies of a future united German nation to come and aimed to foster and strengthen a shared national identity through the intertwined principles of Bildung and Kultur after the devastations of the Napoleonic wars (Readings, 1997; Rüegg, 2004). Distinct and nationally specific strategies of nation-building through higher education also characterised developments in France and in other nation-states in Europe. Throughout the 19 th and 20 th century, and after struggles for national independence, universities in the (former) colonies were transformed from instruments of colonial oppression and exploitation into vectors of prospective nation-building via social and technological development (Guzmán-Valenzuela, 2025; Van Haaften, 2025).

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