Neoliberal governance towards the non-German-speaking world in Austria’s internationalization of higher education

1 Introduction

The largely unchecked growth of English throughout the world has been seen as enjoying a global free ride on the back of capitalism in which it holds high stakes and strong currency (e.g., O’Regan 2021). In the domain of an increasingly neoliberalized higher education (Piller and Cho 2013), such language shift from the societal language(s) of non-anglophone countries is evident, in part, through internationalization strategies and their monitoring by both the state and institutions, as well as supranational forces, promoting the mobility of teaching and research staff in addition to students (Nao et al. 2023). This often presupposes the use of English as a worldwide lingua franca in the sector (Björkman 2013; Jenkins 2013; Murata and Iino 2017). Such focus on English in internationalization, however, obscures from view other potential contenders, including pluricentric ones, resident at home and shared with regions and nation states elsewhere (Darquennes 2021).

In Austria, German is both a societal language and international contender; within Europe, some of its German speakership is to be found in the ideationally packaged same-language region of DACH to which it belongs – an abbreviation derived from the international licence codes for Germany (D), Austria (A), and Switzerland (CH: Confoederatio Helvetica). Given that German from the other countries of DACH may serve as a countervailing force to English of internationalization in Austria, we here invert the anglophone lens to uncover in novel ways the relevance of the pluricentric and hidden language dynamic of German, the societal default. In doing so, we conceive of DACH as an “imagined speech community” as we investigate sameness and distinction as part of a neoliberally driven (re)direction in governance in internationalization monitoring and strategy.

Austrian higher education presents a bilingual domain in which the societal and pluricentric language of German yet presides, while increasingly however making way for English, particularly in the curriculum, namely, through English as a medium of instruction (EMI). By rigorously scrutinizing relevant policy documentation and data, as part of an innovative use of process tracing methodology, we identify a separate collation of data on German-speaking DACH to that of other countries in Europe, including Germany as separate to the category of the EU, notwithstanding its membership. We follow up on this in interview to gain insights from among 20 key stakeholder participants in relevant university and ministerial roles. Our analysis of participant stance uncovers a dynamic of mobility inflow that indirectly favours English through a redirected focus away from DACH in the steering of internationalization strategies of Austrian higher education.

2 Neoliberalism as socio-economic principle and policy mechanism

Neoliberalism has been defined as a socio-economic principle that has come to undergird higher education and beyond in recent decades (Block 2018; Piller and Cho 2013). Linked primarily to the free market as an economic driver of human activity, it is assumed to economically permeate also the “international imperative” of higher education (Altbach 2013) as a form of academic capitalism (Slaughter and Rhoades 2004), in which English has played a central and often uncontested role to the point of default invisibility (Saarinen and Nikula 2013). As such, it has been taken to propel the growth of English on the higher education scene worldwide in a domain-specific language shift of immense proportions, historically rivalling that of Latin in Europe (Hultgren 2024). It has, in effect, served as a “covert language policy mechanism” (Piller and Cho 2013: 23). Despite its revival of a laissez-faire capitalism (Piller and Cho 2013), neoliberalism has further extended its reach as market logic beyond its economic instrumentality to penetrate more widely public and private life (Martín Rojo and Del Percio 2020).

While neoliberalism may be most discernible in the financial benefits of highly marketized tertiary education systems, as characterized by the recruitment of international students as clientele, or less favourably monikered cash cows (Cantwell 2015), it thus has many faces. European countries, and particularly those with relatively low tuition fees, can considerably diverge from such funding models. Nevertheless, gains may be had from attracting student and staff, who can themselves represent indicators upon which public funding is reliant; in this way, they can also serve as pawns in market rivalry among universities seeking competitive advantage through institutional profiling both at home and abroad (Hultgren and Wilkinson 2022).

As a modus operandi, neoliberalism has further permeated their very governance practices by means of legal reforms aimed at “modernizing” the sector that have swept throughout much of Europe (Pollitt and Bouckaert 2017). Intended to streamline state bureaucracy perceived to have become cost-ineffective (Pollitt and Bouckaert 2017), this European modernization agenda at the same time introduced measurements of performance and competition supporting a climate of neoliberalism, in which universities were in principle “freed” to undertake their own business, while steered at a distance by the state (Capano and Pritoni 2020; de Boer and File 2009). This was supported by a widespread move in educational reforms towards the autonomy of higher education institutions (Krüger et al. 2018). In the case of Austria, such legal status of public universities was embedded within the 2002 Universitätsgesetz (Stransky-Can 2019; UG 2002), implementing a framework of regulation by steering at a distance on the part of state ministries and universities (e.g., Bleiklie 2018; Kickert 1995). Through its practices of governance, neoliberalism has thus ironically cemented the very role of the nation state in managing public revenue and its redistribution (Hobsbawm 2012 [1990]).

With such steering-at-a-distance practices of neoliberal governance come incentivizations, including towards internationalization. The effects of nationally cohering internationalization strategies as part of a performance-based audit culture may further have spurred the advent and increasing domination of English (Gazzola 2012; Hultgren and Wilkinson 2022), in part through a similarly increasing number of international staff and students who use the lingua franca as a high-valued currency in and beyond academic life. Such trend has, however, arisen from within a multiscalarity of decision-making, involving both higher education institutions and system-level strategy of the state, as well as supranational forces of less direct but not negligible influence, such as EU mobility targets (Brooks 2018; Nao et al. 2023). The neoliberally governed drive towards internationalization is one through which a nation state ideationally defines itself also vis-à-vis supranational markets. And such definition involves an interplay and strategic negotiation between both English and its own language(s) – in the case of a pluricentric context, also shared with other nations.

3 Higher education internationalization in Austria

Internationalization is by no means a modern phenomenon of Austria’s universities, the more longstanding of which have historically served as illustrious hubs of learning, notably attracting scholars and students from throughout the Austro-Hungarian Empire, 1867–1918 (Surman 2018). Such composite further represented more widely the societies in which universities were situated, such as the city of Vienna, itself teeming with a multi-ethnically and multilingually diverse population (Newerkla 2022). Much of the incoming scholarly “talent” of the time thus hailed from parts of the present-day geography of Hungary, Czechia, Poland, Ukraine, Slovakia, Ukraine, northern Italy, Romania, Croatia, and Serbia (Surman 2018). With the political upheavals of the 20th Century, however, the Austrian higher education landscape changed drastically. In the decades following the Second World War, prior to and during which Austria had been annexed by Germany, its universities had lost much of their perceived eminence (Pechar 2005). As with other countries of Europe, it subsequently underwent its own series of modernization reforms of higher education. Of greatest relevance to neoliberal governance and steering-at-a-distance practices of public universities was that of the University Act 2002 (UG 2002), granting them full legal autonomy (Vollrechtsfähigkeit) as independent public entities (Burtscher et al. 2006; Winckler 2018).

While our focus here is primarily on public universities that operate under the provision of the University Act 2002 (UG 2002), it is necessary to note that today’s Austrian higher education scene comprises four sectors of higher education institution: public universities, universities of applied sciences, university colleges of teacher education, and private universities. Despite differing in specialization and purposes, the Austrian Federal Ministry of Education, Science, and Research (BMBWF) has in recent years additionally published strategy and steering documents that aim to present a cohering vision of Austrian higher education amalgamating all four sectors, including a national mobility and internationalization strategy (BMBWF 2020) (although the private sector may in practice be largely free to do as it will).

Indeed, Austria presents an attractive option for international students. Not only does its higher education system count as highly accessible in terms of admission requirements, but it is relatively low cost, with no tuition fees if completed within a given timeframe for EU students (BMBWF n.d.[a]). This is attributable to an epistemology as of yet accommodating the vestiges of prior social democratic government (Winckler 2018). Fellow EU students are nevertheless classed as international along with other non-Austrians in the formulation of strategies and objectives of internationalization of higher education institutions, or indeed of the Federal Ministry of Education, Science and Research of Austria (BMBWF) itself; this is by contrast with non-EU students and staff, who are rather classed as “third country” nationals or “Drittstaater” (BMBWF n.d.[a]), a term which is also to be found in the differentiated categorization of numerical data on internationalization.

The predominant use of German at Austrian universities, along with its minimal fees; fewer admissions restrictions (underpinned by a principle of “freier Universitätszugang”, literally free university access); geographical proximity; and an education system that is otherwise in many respects not too dissimilar (Johann et al. 2022) has made it an easy and attractive option for German-speaking students from other countries and regions of Europe. Nevertheless, Austria has a somewhat uneasy relationship with its larger German-speaking neighbour, Germany. While such sentiment may hark back to historical influences, not least its annexation during the Third Reich, an influx of students in more recent history from Germany preferring Austria’s to their own more restrictive higher education system has presented a bone of contention (Mandl et al. 2021). Particularly marked in certain subject areas, such as medicine, this has notably lead to quota restrictions to preserve spaces for Austrian students argued on the grounds of a foreseeable lack of at-home professionals in the future, which in principle contradicts the EU right to freedom of movement (Ferencz 2015). In fact, in one of the Austrian National Development Plans for Public Universities, the BMBWF (2017/18: 32) credits Austria for having “successfully introduced the concept of ‘asymmetrical mobility’ into the Bologna process” to aim for more balanced mobility between member states.

As both German and English coincide at public universities, such environments can be considered a form of globalized bilingualism (Smit and Verena 2024), reflected at some level also societally (Smit and Schwarz 2019). Increasing provision of English in academic master’s programmes to accommodate international, as well as home students, has been seen since the turn of the century, to the point of constituting almost a fourth at participating Austrian universities in a 2021 study by the Institute of Advanced Studies Vienna (Mandl et al. 2021: 34). In terms of the international student body in Austria, around one-fifth were classed as international, of which around half came from Germany or South Tyrol, Italy (Mandl et al. 2021). International PhD-holding staff, defined as those without Austrian citizenship, accounted for 36 % in public universities, of which Germans, separately categorized from other internationals, represented 16 % (Mandl et al. 2021: 110).

Notwithstanding that German still predominates as the main language of university business (Dannerer et al. 2021; Smit and Komori-Glatz 2022), the two languages may occupy the same or complementary spaces, or domains. As such they present a site of potential tension in governance, although this may not be openly discussed or indeed perceived as such. Rather than focussing merely on English, however, we believe that insights are to be derived from the German language in the context of its pluricentricity. This has so far been neglected in research, although concerns among German-speaking scholars have at times been voiced about the steady encroachment of English in the scientific community more generally (see, for example, Mittelstraß et al. 2016). We believe this merits consideration also more widely within a conversation on language shift through internationalization of higher education that typically places English centre stage as an incoming language, rather than the less visibly default societal other language(s) pluricentrically shared across nations.

4 Austria and DACH: an imagined speech community of same-language speakers

German in Austria, or Austrian German, belongs to a pluricentric European language landscape (Darquennes 2021; Lenz 2018), in which sub-varieties of German are shared and codified as standards among different countries that likewise claim it as an official language, namely, Germany, Switzerland, Liechtenstein, Belgium, and Luxembourg. Further variations are to be found regionally, i.e., within and beyond the geographical boundaries of these countries, such as in South Tyrol, Italy. Of these, Germany and Switzerland have slipped into acronymic partnership with Austria in usage of the term DACH, which has been described as a shared “economic and cultural subspace within Europe” (Bauer et al. 2015: 2). This represents a German-speaking triad of strong economies, recognised as a target region also externally in international trade. As such, DACH may be applied as a concept to survey a unified, as well as a differentiated market (e.g., Witzel 2012). Both similarities and differences between its composite countries of Germany, Austria, and Switzerland may hence be explored, including in academic research (e.g., Johann et al. 2022). Nevertheless, it presents an ideationally bounded market space that is statistically reified as one geographical region through the very collation of numerical data for business intelligence (e.g., Davies 2024).

Despite deep-rooted historical, linguistic, and cultural ties between these countries, Wodak et al. (2009) note that Austria has made efforts since 1945 to differentiate its identity from its larger and powerful neighbour, Germany, by which it had been annexed during the Third Reich, while renegotiating and establishing its place in Europe with its accession to the EU in 1995. A distancing from German identity, or Germanness of identity, has also been observed in the case of German-speaking Swiss (Hobsbawm 2012 [1990]), although unlike Austria, Switzerland was never part of the “Greater Germany” of the Nazi era and has maintained a certain independence through its asserted neutrality (Mach and Trampusch 2011). It also differs in its chosen non-membership of the EU, despite extensive bilateral agreements and inclusion in the Schengen area (Czermińska 2023). Nevertheless, for both Austria and Switzerland, Germany is a big and economically powerful neighbour, representing an important export market, comparisons with which are hence drawn, albeit in different ways, in their respective at-home political discourses (Schwarze and Stopfner 2020).

Notwithstanding its unity in ideational configuration, DACH comprises countries governed by nation-states, with their own ideas of what they want their nation to be, both internally and relative to others, and both within DACH and beyond. As Hobsbawm (2012 [1990]) notes, states are now officially nations and no longer confined in recent history to an economy mapping on to the same territorial boundary; at the same time, these nation-states have become inwardly strengthened through neoliberally managed redistribution and expenditure of public revenue. Nevertheless, the concept of nation, often accompanied by that of language, underpins the construction of an imagined or imaginary community as market defined (Hobsbawm 2012 [1990]).

Anderson (2006 [1983]: 6) notably used the term “imagined community” to describe a nation on the grounds that its members “will never know most of their fellow members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion”. Here, we refer to DACH as an imagined speech community to imply a similarly abstracted community with whom fellow members do not come into contact in their entirety of population, rooted therefore in an ideational sense of communion through speakership of a shared language, pluricentrically extending beyond single nations or devolved regions.

This apprehension of communion on the basis of language speakerhood as shared among nations, is consonant with what might be considered earlier and perhaps more sociolinguistically naïve definitions of speech community, somewhat removed in their abstraction from close analytic scrutiny. To these definitions belong Lyons (1970: 326) “all the people who use a given language (or dialect)”; or Hockett (1958: 8) “the whole set of people who communicate with each other, either directly or indirectly, via the common language”. Such definitions encapsulate a potential yet unrealized totality of communion of a same-language population that is consonant with Anderson’s use of “imagined”. Communion can, then, be understood to exist at the ideational level, as conveyed in the following definition by Corder (1973: 53), “A speech community is made up of people who regard themselves as speaking the same language […] defined in terms of its beliefs, not its language” (italics in original).

Here, then, we prefix “imagined” from Anderson’s concept of a group of people with whom one is in communion in one’s head as part of a bounded geography to a “speech community”, encompassing a sharedness of language among speakers, the totality of which may be relevant to the business of higher education, even if at an ideational level. It is the role of this imagined speech community of DACH in the internationalization of higher education that we explore in interview with our Austrian university and ministerial participants.

5 Research context and methods

The current study is part of a wider project [ELEMENTAL] (Hultgren et al. 2023) exploring the links between the surge of English as a medium of instruction (EMI) in universities of many countries of the European Higher Education Area and steering at a distance of the state as a form of neoliberalist governance (e.g., Bleiklie 2018; Kickert 1995). Starting in the Netherlands, our investigation was initially informed by Kickert’s (1995) work from within public administration, in which he observed steering at a distance as a new governance model arising and coined within the Dutch ministry of Education and Sciences in the 1980s. This, we linked to the inception of EMI programmes there, which were among the earliest we were able to identify in Europe (Hultgren and Wilkinson 2022), as further informed in particular by Bleiklie’s more recent work within public administration on higher education governance and policy (see Bleiklie [2018] for an overview). In this, he delineated steering-at-a-distance practices with instruments such as funding formulae and performance indicators, as well as mechanisms of accountability that are themselves embedded in reforms towards university autonomy. While the related concept of “governing at a distance” (Rose and Miller 1992) is well-known within political sociology, we situate our research in the literature within public administration as this better aligns epistemologically and empirically with our adopted methodological approach to investigate causal influences of policy as well as its instruments and mechanisms of enactment on EMI and Englishization in the EHEA higher education sector.

We adopted process tracing as a case study methodology, drawing on the work of Beach and Pederson (2019), to explore the possible link between Englishization at a university and governance reforms towards autonomy that implement steering at a distance in Austria. Such an approach centres on formulating and then testing hypotheses or existing theories on causal processes leading to an investigated outcome. Underpinned by critical realism (Bhaskar 2016), this approach to process tracing is epistemologically probabilistic, accepting that knowledge is a matter of degree and dependent on the quality of evidence. At the same time, it is grounded in a critical-realist ontology which assumes that there are reasons for outcomes, contingent on favourable conditions, that leave traces (or “fingerprints”) behind that can be uncovered. While the reasons may not themselves be directly accessible, process tracing calls on us to probe the presence of what traces we might expect to find were our hypothesis true, as well as to question their absence. As Beach and Pederson (2019: 52) put it, “we can infer the existence of ultimately unobservable processes through their empirical fingerprints”.

In our case, we expected to find evidence of steering instruments and mechanisms, including “normative pressures” (de Boer and Enders 2018) of monitoring and steering conversations resulting from autonomy reforms (Thomas et al. 2024). We hypothesized that these could impact on English being used in the curriculum and potentially also beyond, even in the case that they did not themselves represent explicit language policies. We then sought to follow up on relevant traces in our investigation to probe whether this might be the case. From the perspective of a sociolinguistics of domain-specific language shift, we sought traces of curricular insertion of English, as well as internationalization through mobility inflows within steering instruments and mechanisms.

In the Austrian context, such steering is demonstrable in a diverse array of forms on the part of both the state ministries and within the institutions themselves, including our case study institution – a large research-intensive public university. The Federal Ministry of Education Science and Research (BMBWF n.d.[b]) publishes an illustrative, and hence non-exhaustive, list of numerous steering instruments of higher education governance, in which internationalization is a staple feature, ranging from university development plans (strategic plans required by law in the UG 2002 for public universities), its own national development plans (GUEPs for public universities), internationalization visions (also cohering for all four sectors), to dialogues, in which “normative pressure” might nevertheless be exerted (de Boer and Enders 2018).

Searching for both confirmatory and disconfirmatory evidence of the potential impact of steering at a distance on Englishization with respect to internationalization led us to probe an apparent anomaly in the BMBWF Unidata database, namely, the separate monitoring of mobility inflows from Germany and Switzerland, despite the former belonging to the EU, which itself represented an aggregate category for other member states (BMBWF n.d.[c]). As this could have presented disconfirmatory evidence in the case of being monitored for desirable inflows from German-speaking countries that would counteract the influence of English as a lingua franca, we followed up on these traces, of which we found similar forms of separate monitoring at our case institution. Hence, we questioned why the other-country composites of DACH – Germany and Switzerland – were handled differently in the collation of data by the BMBWF, as well as in institutional monitoring of internationalization data.

As part of our wider investigation, we identified participants for interview, including elite members in positions of higher education governance, through purposive sampling (Bakkalbasioglu 2020) at multiscalar university and ministerial levels. At the ministerial level, we were able to interview three participants with current, or prior, relevant experience of higher education governance, two of whom held or had held high-ranking positions. In total, we conducted semi-structured interviews with 20 participants, who provided us with consent to use their interviews in research, including the recording, transcribing, and in all but one case depositing of transcripts in our open repository (Nao 2024). While our process tracing investigation may bear similarities with other methodological approaches such as institutional ethnographies (e.g., Smith 2005), it was very much shaped by probing of traces gleaned from policy and steering documents to probabilistically either confirm or disconfirm any causal links between steering at a distance and EMI or Englishization.

In this paper, we focus in particular on traces and follow-ups relevant to DACH and analyse illustrative excerpts from interviews as stance-taking, namely, “the expression of an attitude, evaluation, or judgement as the speaker’s own point of view” (Lampropoulou and Myers 2012). In doing so, we aim to gain better insights into the participant perspective of DACH as an imagined speech community, exploring also its relevance as a market geography of internationalization. We consider how pluricentricity of German speakership in DACH is conceptualized with respect to internationalization of Austrian higher education and what its relevance is, if any, to Englishization. In analyzing the participants’ stance-taking in interview, we primarily draw on discourse pragmatics and modality (Maynard 1993). For this reason, we restrict ourselves to simple orthographical representation, corresponding also to the transcripts in our open access data repository (Nao 2024), with capitals used to signify lexical stress by the participants.

6 Analysis and findings

7 Discussion: neoliberal governance away from DACH as an imagined speech community

Our analysis supports a conceptualization of an imagined speech community of pluricentric German language speakership relevant to neoliberalist governance through separate monitoring of the other countries of DACH, namely, Germany and Switzerland. Such imagining and reimagining advances a redirection in internationalization strategies in Austrian higher education. The monitoring of Germany separately from the EU category in the BMBWF database, despite it being part of the EU, presents data of relevance to steering at a distance, whether this reinforces coalignment in ambitions between institution and the BMBWF, or whether the latter further exercises “normative pressure” (de Boer and Enders 2018) in such direction. This internationalization away from DACH represents somewhat of an unseen and uninvestigated dynamic of potential language shift towards English in the higher education sector, in so far as it pluricentrically converges with the invisible default of the societal language.

We have explored such trend in relation to three key themes in our data analysis: DACH and Germany as a perceived inhibitor of internationalization; prototypicality of internationalization as non-German-speaking; and the separate monitoring of the German-speaking region by both the ministry and case study institution, a public university, as a market geography of little or non-effort, falling short of ambition towards the outward world from this ideationally defined boundary of same-language speakers.

Within DACH, Germany features more prominently than Switzerland in our participants’ interviews, as Austria’s larger, more populous, and economically more powerful neighbour. Austria has, and has had, a somewhat complex relationship with Germany, from having been annexed as part of “Greater Germany” during the Third Reich to its sustained economic interdependence as an important export market in recent decades. The former history of Nazism was referenced in our first interview excerpt by the participant [E1] as a point of interception in the previously advancing eminence of the Austrian higher education system, linked to its imperial past. Nevertheless, Austria’s comparisons with Germany in at-home political rhetoric suggest ongoing socio-economic aspirations towards its model of success as well as competitive differentiation (Schwarze and Stopfner 2020). With its own imperial past (Surman 2018), Austria may thus draw on socio-cultural and linguistic similarities with Germany in its own aspirations as a nation-state, while also diverging from them in outwards thrust towards the non-German-speaking world as part of a (re)shaping of its national identity. In terms of internationalization of higher education, this implies also a reconfigured market, which may be ambiguous towards Germany itself. As one of our participants puts it, “The Germans are NEITHER properly international NOR are they local” [P14].

The relevance and indeed relative magnitude of Germany could be understood in our data from the outset with the account by a former high-ranking ministerial participant [M3], in which they contrasted Austria with the Netherlands on the basis of an estimated population of shared German language speakership. It is to this shared speakership of DACH, and in particular with Germany, that Austria’s later development of Englishization of higher education was attributed, implicating inbound mobility of a German-speaking demographic through internationalization, which had previously been held as sufficient. With respect to the Netherlands, this observation accords with the findings of our research on the Netherlands as part of the wider ELEMENTAL project, given that our case study university there was compelled as early as the 1980s to cross national borders to non-Dutch-speaking areas in its recruitment drives for students to meet KPIs as government-imposed targets of neoliberal governance practices, given an insufficient number of students (Hultgren and Wilkinson 2022).

On the other hand, Austria had an abundance of students from DACH, and Germany in particular. Not only that, but it had an over-abundance from Germany in certain subjects, leading to the aforementioned quotas (Ferencz 2015). While this would, on the one hand, serve to account for the fact that Austria need not have gone elsewhere in terms of any desire or demand for incoming students, and would thus provide one possible reason for the later delay of inception and development of English language academic programmes by contrast with the Netherlands; at the same time, it does not account for any such motivation to turn away from the DACH demographic, either.

Population may, then, rather be taken to hold symbolic significance as part of a neoliberal ethos of operation, in which a German-language demographic is seen to inhibit outward-looking expansion elsewhere. Such symbolic value holds all the more so, given that the system of Austrian higher education is less marketized and with a low direct currency of internationalization through tuition fees, while it had little need to seek out students across its borders in the same way as the Netherlands at the time. Population size is, rather, interlinked with what we have defined as an imagined speech community – it represents an estimated aggregate of a population of same-language speakers, with whom one does not come into contact. This imagined totality of speakership of a language is consonant with earlier and more naïve sociolinguistic definitions of speech community (e.g., Hockett 1958; Lyons 1970), as well as Anderson’s (2006 [1983]) and Hobsbawm’s (2012 [1990]) use of “imagined”, which further marries with Corder’s (1973) ideational definition of a same-language speech community as founded on belief. It is this potential totality of speakership based on population size that may serve as a politico-geographically bounded ideational market, even if it does not translate more directly to financial gain as in heavily marketized systems of higher education, whether through tuition fees or KPIs. Where it does not do so, it points to a higher level of imagining.

Our study has shown that in Austrian higher education, that of pluricentric German-speaking DACH, which is effectively thought to drive itself, may now be one to leave be, or indeed leave behind. Renewed efforts are to be directed instead towards the seemingly unbounded potential of English as a lingua franca, hence requiring intervention of system-level strategy in such direction where it does not coincide with the aims of the higher education institution itself. Such movement is signalled in our data initially by a shift of stance-taking by [M3] from a breach with the past, marked by total linguistic exclusion of German speakers from the definition of internationalization, to one in which it represents but a lesser form that falls short of prototypicality. It further finds resonance in other participants’ accounts through the negational use of modifiers of prototypicality, e.g., not real/true. This concern applies also to the appointment of international staff who do not stem from DACH, which is voiced at ministerial level as a priority of its steering conversations with universities, although at the time of research, such differentiation was not explicitly formulated in its actual published steering instruments, such as GUEPs for public universities.

A limitation of our study is that we cannot say within any certainty that the steering through conversations on internationalization as non- or beyond-DACH is a contributing factor in any directly measurable terms of Englishization in the higher education curriculum and elsewhere, although they might be expected to exert normative pressure in such direction (de Boer and Enders 2018). Certainly, our interview data with participants in governance at both university and at ministerial level, show concurrence between accounts, through deontic modality of relayed direct speech of what public universities “have to do”, which point in such direction. Such mirrored alignment between institution and ministerial accounts is further apparent in non-DACH observations elsewhere in our interview data. At the very least, then, such dialogues can be assumed to mutually reinforce each other at some level, and in so doing to further reify DACH as an imagined speech community from which to turn away in neoliberal pursuit of greener pastures elsewhere in the non-German world.

8 Conclusions

As a less marketized higher education system that is nevertheless neoliberally governed through steering-at-a-distance practices, Austria has provided us with an insightful context in which to explore language shift towards greater Englishization through the monitoring of internationalization and inbound mobility of staff and students. In a novel and revealing sociolinguistic twist, we have done so by inverting the common lens from English itself as an encroaching language onto the societal default of German, which is also an official language in other countries, including its more populous neighbour Germany, as well as Switzerland. Together with Austria, these countries constitute the acronymically defined DACH region. In this way, we have moved away from a simplistic anglophone-centric focus on English which would disregard other pluricentric dynamics, paradoxically perhaps thereby reinforcing its very status. This is a move we would argue as necessary to give a more nuanced and integrated sociolinguistic view of Englishization within the higher education landscape, and one which we would encourage others to take up in pluricentric contexts of research.

Further, it is the innovative transdisciplinary use of a process tracing methodological approach informed by literature from within public administration that allowed us to uncover a separate monitoring of Germany and Switzerland as internationalization data of relevance to steering conversations between the Austrian Federal Ministry of Education, Science and Research (BMBWF) and higher education institutions. This presented an anomaly for Germany, in particular, as a member state of the EU, and one which was mirrored in the monitoring of data and its collation at our case study university – a large research-intensive public university. Pragmatically rooted in the instruments of steering and monitoring, this investigatory approach to neoliberal governance led us to interrogate the normative use of a category in a way that revealed a more subtle and hidden policy narrative, namely, one that was not contained within the instruments themselves but part of recounted steering conversations in interviews.

Our analysis of participant stance in which we probed this anomaly supported a conceptualization of DACH as what we have expounded as an “imagined speech community”, seen as a limited, outmoded, and less real inbound demographic; this, by contrast with a bigger, faster-growing, and more visible form of internationalization, requiring a desired effort consonant with a competitive neoliberal ethos of performance and its assessment. Such differencing of German-speaking countries in the collation of internationalization data, and in particular the larger and more dominant neighbour Germany with which Austria has a complex and ambivalent relationship, is mutually reinforced through the practices of neoliberal governance by ministry and institution. While potentially inhibiting German language reinforcement through inbound mobility, the implicated shift towards the wider non-German speaking world through English at the same time allows Austria to assert and rearticulate its identity as a nation-state.