Germany: Stepping up the Collaborative and Digital Game

This chapter traces how Brexit and the COVID-19 pandemic affected HE internationalisation in Germany during the period of 2016 until 2021. Given traditionally strong student mobility flows between the UK and Germany, Brexit represented a major disruption to longstanding practices and norms in HE internationalisation. Similarly, pandemic-induced lockdowns and travel restrictions challenged Germany’s internationalisation approach, which had centred on physical cross-border mobility. In the following, Brexit- and pandemic-related developments in the regulative, normative, and cultural-cognitive institutional dimensions of HE internationalisation are analysed. The country case study concludes with a table summarising the key developments and types of (non-)change associated with the two disruptions.