Efforts to promote intercultural and global competence within European University Alliances (EUA) risk reproducing the very national-cultural imaginaries they seek to transcend. This paper examines how intercultural initiatives often end up framing difference through the lens of national cultures, despite their intentions to the contrary. Based on document analysis and critical observation of practices within one of the first EUAs, Unite!, we argue that even among the cosmopolitan professionals working within the alliances, many of whom have transnational biographies, cultural difference is regularly articulated in reductive, nation-based terms. Partner institutions become synecdoches for national cultures, and stakeholders are imagined as nationally bounded collectives. The promotion of national languages within Unite! further underlines the persistence of nation-centred frameworks.

The Unite! Policy on Multilingualism and Multiculturalism, the key document for this study, is based on a non-essentialist, dynamic understanding of interculturality. However, its emphasis on drawing strength from diversity - an idea in line with the EU project as a whole - can still, when embedded in the ‘banal nationalism’ of everyday discussion, reinforce the assumption that cultural diversity naturally corresponds to national divisions. We argue that conceptual development requires moving beyond inherited national ontologies, but explicitly addressing this dilemma can serve as a productive starting point for a deeper, contemporary approach to cultural diversity. Such an approach would foreground everyday practices and interactions that truly transcend national categorisations. Ultimately, the challenge for the EUAs may not be so much to manage cultural difference, but to question the frameworks through which ‘culture’ itself is made legible.