Regionalization of Higher Education in South America, the best strategy to internationalize

MERCEDES ANDRES

Brasil y Latinoamérica. Investigación acerca de la historia y el desarrollo

WUHAN UNIVERSITY PRESS

Lugar: WUHAN; Año: 2017; p. 274 - 295

In the present work we are going to analyse regionalization of the Higher Education (HE) as one of the ways it positively adopted internationalization in South America (SA), understanding why is better to cooperate rather tan not doing it. Historically, internationalization and regionalization are directly related to economic globalization. In the South American region this globalization has been implemented with adverse results in its economies transcending the social, political, educational and cultural spheres. Its implementation was carried out within a neoliberal process with disastrous consequences for the southern cone economies (Gomes, A.M., Robertson, S.L. and Dale, R. (2012): 2). In educational terms, Educative MERCOSUR (EM) was created as soon as it was decided to form the Regional Economic Bloc MERCOSUR in 1991. We will approach the concept of internationalization of HE from a dominant and hegemonic perspective (Perrota, D. 2015). For this we will understand the international system in Realist terms, and we will discuss the possibility of cooperation, as presented within the debate realism (classical and structural) vs. Institutionalism (liberalism in international relations), to understand the motivation to cooperate in HE and to explain what kind of profits South American States are looking for according to the choice of their best strategy. The focus will be on regionalization and South American cooperation in HE as a distinctive form of internationalization. For this we have developed a game board that goes from the international to the regional, and within that board we locate the states as rational players who, according to the internationalization characteristics of their HE must choose one or another strategy of playing to obtain benefits, stating that there is a rational choice for the South American States. The board, as said, is divided into two levels: global and regional. The global scenario is internationalization, which involves competition for "absolute gains", defined as reputation, soft power and economic profits. In the regional scenario, the strategy is to cooperate and the benefits are "relative gains" (Grieco, J. (1988) that are defined in each particular cooperative process. Our example to understand the regionalization in HE in SA will be the Educative MERCOSUR.