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ABSTRACT
This paper discusses Finnish-Russian relations from the perspective of cooperation in higher education, and particularly Finnish-Russian double degree programmes prior to 2022. It asks how internal stakeholders, in double degree programmes perceived the role of their cooperation from the point of view of interstate relations, and how cooperation had changed (if at all) after the political crisis intensified between the EU and Russia in 2014. The paper draws on research on EU-Russia relations, and on the link between higher education (collaboration) and international politics. The empirical part of the paper is based on a case study of double degree programmes between Finnish and Russian universities. Semi-structured interviews with internal stakeholders such as administrative and academic heads/coordinators of these programmes serve as the main source of primary materials. The study reveals that even though internal stakeholders explicitly wanted to depoliticise higher education cooperation and denied that interstate (or EU-Russia) relations would have had any impact on their collaboration, many of them still hoped that HE cooperation would help in improving the given relations. Accordingly, they argued for education diplomacy in the sense of ‘higher education for diplomacy’, but denied it in the sense of ‘diplomacy for higher education’.
Acknowledgements
I wish to thank the interviewees in Finnish and Russian universities who were willing to participate in our research. I am grateful to three anonymous reviewers for their suggestions on how to improve the article. I would also like to thank Katarzyna (Kasia) Kaczmarska, Marco Siddi, Vladimir Gel’man, Svetlana Shenderova, Dmitry Lanko, Gleb Yarovoy, and Iuliia Gataulina for their valuable comments on earlier drafts of this article, and Juha Ketolainen for helping me to find missing statistics for the Finnish-Russian student mobility.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 The research for this paper was mainly conducted in 2017–2021. The paper was submitted for review before 24 February 2022, but during the peer-review process the Introduction, Discussion and Concluding remarks were partly revised in order to reflect the situation in spring 2022.
2 The nature of their political systems is taken for granted here due to space constraints. Please see e.g. Gel’man, Vladimir (Citation2015) for the Russian political system, or for the Finnish political system: Niemi (Citation2017). On the impact of the strengthening authoritarian regime on university autonomy and academic freedom in Russia, see e.g. Chirikov (Citation2021).
3 For example, Ruffini (Citation2020) has criticised this classification of science diplomacy, and particularly its emphasis on the cooperative function. Instead, he recognises its dual nature: collaborative and competitive.
4 The third role, ‘HE in diplomacy’, is more difficult to imagine in contrast to ‘science in diplomacy’, which means ‘informing foreign policy objectives with scientific advice’ (Royal Society Citation2010, vi).
5 I.e. politics linked to legislative and executive power, and actors such as political parties, ministers, and presidents.
6 Due to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Russia was suspended from the European Higher Education Area, and it also made the decision to stop following the Bologna Process and to build its own system instead.
7 There is no such comparative data for the post-2014 situation.
8 Towards Good Neighbourliness with Higher Education Cooperation (EDUneighbours) is a project in which the author of the paper is principal investigator. The selection of cases was made under the leadership of the PI after careful analysis of the websites of Finnish universities and other public data.
9 I was one of the two interviewers in all interviews conducted in Finnish universities, and in six interviews conducted in Russian universities. The rest were carried out by other team members, following the structure of the interviews agreed upon. In their research, the team members focus on different sections of the interview data, and thus conduct their analysis independently.
10 The idea of Finland being a special case also found support in the analysis of the strategic communication of the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs 2012–2021, in which Finland was presented in a more positive light than other Nordic countries (Lavikainen et al. Citation2022).