International cooperation in higher education is not new, but gained new urgency in recent years with the expansion of the knowledge economy, the easy flow of communications and the emulation created by international rankings. In the European Union's countries, international competition and the process of political and economic unification required national higher education institutions to give priority to international cooperation, while large countries such as Russia, China, Brazil and South Africa intensified their effort to modernise their institutions and link them to the international flow of science, technology and talent, leading similar trends in other countries in their regions. These global trends are shaped by the national culture and institutions of each country, and the existing national and international cooperation policies and instruments on all sides. In Building Higher Education Cooperation with the EU: Challenges and Opportunities from Four Continents, the authors look at how these interactions occur from the perspectives of the European Union and the countries involved and make recommendations on policies that could make international cooperation more fluid and beneficial to all parties involved.
