‘Make Finland and the entire world a better place’: banal and cosmopolitan nationalism in Finnish education export marketing

This paper analyses the marketing discourses of the Finnish Government Education Export (FGEE) initiative through a conceptual lens of banal and cosmopolitan nationalism. Drawing on multimodal discourse analysis, the study examines a range of promotional materials produced by public authorities to promote 'Finnish education' for the international market. The analysis pays particular attention to the orchestration of various visual and textual modes – including layout, colour, writing, image, font – and investigates how they interact to generate coherent meaning. The findings indicate that the materials contribute to constructing an imagined national identity of Finland as an educated, modern, liberal, and rational nation, thereby portraying Finland as a missionary of liberal-humanitarian education in the global community. These findings call for broader societal and scholarly reflection on the ethical dimensions of the nationalistic tendencies inherent in education export.