This paper provides a description of the international networking tensions involved in the recent development of a higher education system in the United Arab Emirates (UAE): a single context offering distinct and variable constructions of "local" and "global." The paper explores contextualised associations of these concepts--or instances between localism and fundamentalism, focusing on pan-Arab and Egyptian influences in the country as key to understanding the variable boundaries of these networks that support a relativist, situationally constructed reading of the "global networking phenomenon." Within this context, the paper also explores connections between higher education networking, collective identity and state governance; it offers a version of modernism in which nation-state sovereignty and a networked society, facilitated in a range of ways by a uniquely outward-looking approach to higher education, are integrally linked, and not dependant on the existence of such "global" norms as constitutional democracy.