I had been noodling for a couple of weeks about how nation states use higher education as a soft power tool, when all of a sudden last Saturday morning stuff starts popping up in my feed about how Canada and India have just announced a joint “Talent Strategy” as part of Prime Minister Carney’s visit to India over the weekend. This announcement was so weak and superficial, I thought I should write a little bit about it, just to show how other countries use higher education as a part of their diplomacy. Keep in mind as you are reading that nearly all the examples I am citing here have happened just in the last six weeks.
There are lots of ways that international co-operation occurs in higher education. By far the bulk of it is just individual scholars meeting with one another and working together individually with no institutional involvement. Other times, you get individual institutions making one-off-MOUs with one another for purposes of joint research, student exchange and whatnot. Dozens of these get signed every day around the world.
Where it starts to shade over into actual “diplomacy” is when you get gangs of universities heading to the same country at the same time, as many Canadian universities did in India last month (delegations from Spain and Australia were through Delhi at about the same time). If you get enough university Presidents in a room, meetings tend to get elevated and Ministers tend to get invited, as happened to all three delegations that visited India. Once you get politicians and government officials involved, you’re starting to get into something approaching real diplomacy.
Where it gets to be a bigger deal is when you start to see government-to-government commitments on education. Often, these are just neighbourly affairs. Just in the past few weeks, we have seen meetings between the governments of Syria and Jordan and Somalia and Djibouti to cement local co-operation in education and research. I doubt either agreement ever amounts to much, but it’s a nice gesture. More consequential, presumably are things like Vietnam opening a university in Laos or Romania opening a branch of its National Academy in Chisinau (which I think is pretty significant in the context of growing chatter about Moldovan-Romanian reunification).
(Of course sometimes, you get one-off inters-state agreements which are not neighbourly and have no obvious geopolitical pay-off, like the one signed two weeks ago between Morocco and Azerbaijan. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯)
And then there are the games the big countries play, which usually involve not just “co-operation” but a lot of scholarships to encourage top students to attend university in the hist countries. The Fulbright program in the United States is an obvious example. China is very big in this game, too, especially in Africa, where it announced 60,000 scholarships for the continent at this 2024 conference.
But the absolute master at this game is Russia. Using education co-operation to underpin strong diplomatic relations is a tradition that goes back to Soviet times. The old Communist government created a purpose-built university for international students to come and study in the heart of socialism, called Patrice Lumumba University. Since the (second) invasion of Ukraine, the government has increased the number of scholarships it hands out to students from “friendly” countries from 14,000 to 23,000 and then to 30,000 in an attempt to build diplomatic clout. But Russia doesn’t just spend on scholarships: it also finds ways to create centres for exchange and co-operation in places like Kenya and Congo.
Russia invests. And it does so for the long term.
And you know who is copying this strategy really well? Hungary. Just in the last six week, the country has been sending teams abroad to sign co-operation agreements, including Bulgaria, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Thailand and the Dominican Republic. It also hands out 5000 full-ride scholarships for foreign students each year through a program called the Stipendicum Hungarium. Hungary hustles and it invests. I mean, it kind of has to because, like Russia, its government is pretty objectionable, but the point is that scholarship diplomacy actually works.
So now let’s look at what Canada did on the weekend. This isn’t all that easy because the way the Canadian and Indian governments characterized what was agreed to was somewhat different, and also there are some differences in the ways the Prime Minister’s Office and Global Affairs says was agreed. On the narrowest interpretation, the “talent initiative” consists of i) 13 institution-to-institution agreements which were actually agreed to during the Universities Canada trip last month (i.e. had nothing to do with Government of Canada whatsoever…though for some reason the Indian announcement says it is 24), ii) and announcement that 85 researchers and graduate students will travel to India through the Indo-Pacific Scholarships program (something which as far as I can tell was in the works anyway, this is a bit like going to a university to “announce” SSHRC or NSERC winners) and iii) an MoU between All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE) and Mitacs, Canada for 300 research internships per year, which seems genuinely new. I’m told that maybe some more things will be announced in the weeks ahead, but for now, this is what was actually in the “strategy”: a bunch of stuff that was already happening plus some Mitacs internships.
I.e.….this is really not something to get all that excited about.
It’s not that Canada doesn’t do some of the basics of international educational diplomacy. We do have scholarships – we just have chosen not to do them at any real scale or be particularly strategic about the way we use them (though to be fair the Indo-Pacific scholarships are a promising step in that direction). But it’s fairly uni-dimensional. And it’s small ball.
Nothing that got announced in India changes that. Every indication is that this was more about “announceables” than it was about strategy and that where foreign policy is concerned, the Carney government views higher education as a prop rather than a tool. I wish it were otherwise, but as a great man once said, oh about six weeks ago now, “live the truth”.
I’d love to be proved wrong about with some follow-up announcements, but I am not holding my breath.
