Enhancing Asia-Europe Co-Operation Through Educational Exchange

Georg Wiessala offers a critique of the ways in which intellectual and academic exchanges inform and shape external interactions with countries, institutions and non-state actors across the Asia-Pacific. Wiessala analyses ideologies, mechanisms and policies through which matters of exchange and inter-cultural dialogue have come to bear on the EU-Asia dialogue.

This book examines the ideas of knowledge-transfer and higher education exchange in the relationship between the European Union and countries, regions, universities and think-tanks across Asia. It critically investigates some discourses of particular relevance to the cognitive framework of the academic discipline of ‘European Studies’, as currently taught across a number of countries in the Asia Pacific. For this purpose, this book presents a range of theoretical explanations, drawn from notions such as the global knowledge village, intercultural dialogue, regional integration, foreign policy analysis and international education. The author offers a unique, in-depth, investigation of a range of EU policies and agendas towards Asia, scrutinizing a number of contemporary centers, curricula and exchange initiatives in the field of European Studies in Asia, and analyzing over-arching themes, such as human rights and further sheds light on the long history of the exchange of ideas and knowledge between East and West, surveying the function of educational and intellectual exchange as a developing foreign policy tool of the European Union in Asia.

This book is essential reading for anyone interested in the relation between Europe and Asia, within Politics, International Relations, Asia-Pacific Studies, European Studies, Education, Law and Human Rights.

Dr Georg Wiessala is a Professor of International Relations at the University of Central Lancashire in Preston, UK.