77

The spectacular growth of the amount of foreign students in western universities from the end of the nineteenth century to the 1930s was the result of a series of highly divergent dynamics. Contrarily to the previous historical peregrinations, the new «republic of letters and sciences» fulfilled quite different functions for its various audiences. Among these functions was the university modernization and the «intellectual» legitimization of the dominant classes of the new nation-states; the massive transfer of newly emerging elites from east to west in upwardly mobile groups (jews from the east); the compensation of educational handicaps for those who were excluded from underdeveloped university markets (especially women); the self-promotion of peripheral universities in the west (provincial faculties in France); and, finally, the symbolic competition between western powers for «cultural prestige».