2002 Dale Robertson Regional Organizations As Subjects of Globalization Education

The Varying Effects of Regional Organizations
as Subjects of Globalization of Education

ROGER DALE AND SUSAN L. ROBERTSON
Introduction
Globalization is too broad and too ambiguous a term to be used unproblematically in determining the effects on national education systems of
the structures and processes, institutions and practices, that it connotes. Globalization is not a homogeneous force, nor is it consistent in effects on education, either within or between countries. Rather, it is both an extremely
complex process, whose most important feature is that it operates at many
different levels with a range of different effects, and a powerful and far from
monolithic discourse that is employed and called on to justify or denounce
a wide range of changes in contemporary societies. In this article we will
focus on one of the most significant levels at and through which globalization
operates, that of regional organizations, and we will seek to establish how
those organizations affect education within and outside them. We will focus
on the role of the three major regional organizationsthe European Union
(EU), the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), and the Asia
Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC). Though they each have as a central
purpose seeking the control and orientation of international trade in their
favor, the regional organizations have themselves become significant agents
in both powering and steering the forces that make up global capitalism.
However, we will argue that while they were set up with that purpose, it is
not possible for their activities and influence to be confined to trade matters.
They necessarily have wider social assumptions and implications. This is especially evident in the area of social infrastructure, particularly for our purposes in the formation of human capital, though the effects are not by any
means confined to that.
We begin the article by raising questions about the nature of globalization
and how we might understand its dynamics. We then turn to an elaboration
of the growth and forms of regional organizations and their role in globalization. In the third section of the article we consider the purpose and form
of the three major regional organizationsEU, NAFTA, and APECand
consider some of their formal statements on education. Finally, we develop
a set of dimensions that enable us to see more clearly how globalization works
through regional organizations and what effects this has on national and
subnational education systems.
Comparative Education Review, vol. 46, no. 1.
2002 by the Comparative and International Education Society. All rights reserved.
0010-4086/2002/4601-0002$05.00
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Comparative Education Review
REGIONAL ORGANIZATIONS AS SUBJECTS OF GLOBALIZATION
What Is Globalization?
Globalization is a very complex and confusing term whose meaning

appears to vary and is very difficult to pin down; we have already alluded to
the source of the complexity and confusion in referring to its dual (process
and discourse) meanings. These two sets of meanings are frequently confused, and in our view, it is important to any discussion of globalization,
though sometimes quite difficult, to distinguish between them. In this article,
rather than take up space with an extended discussion of the vast literature
on globalization, we will seek to elaborate briefly on the nature and effects
of globalization as a process. Very broadly, we might say that globalization in
this sense has been associated with analytic approaches, while in the second
sense it has been associated with advocacy, whether pro- or antiglobalization.
An important step in this procedure is to recognize that much of the literature
has essentially treated globalization as a process without a subject.1 This
recognition not only pinpoints a major source of the confusion and apprehension around globalization but also, and of more direct value to this article,
requires us to identify the subjects and drivers of the globalization process
and what that might mean for the globalization of education. A wide range
of such subjects might be acknowledged: transnational corporations, international financial institutions, international organizations, such as the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), but it is
also clear that major regional organizations may be seen as subjects of globalization. Our purpose here, then, is to examine something of the nature
and effect of those organizations in the education sector in ways that reflect
and, we hope, uncover the relationship between globalization and regionalization in education.
This examination requires us to expand a little on what we understand
by globalization, the process. Certainly, it is not an inevitable, irresistible,
ineluctable force over which no one has any control and that we have to put
up with, whatever its implications for us. Rather, globalization represents a
complex, overlapping set of forces, operating differently at different levels,
each of which was separately set in motion intentionally, though their collective outcomes were not uniform, intended, or predicted.
One way that we find it useful to conceptualize the epochal nature of
the changes the term globalization attempts to capture is via a shift from
quantitative to qualitative change, in the way that applying a sufficient quantity of heat to water results in its qualitative change into steam. Myriad major
and minor changes, with common though heterogeneous sources in changing forms of capitalism, arise from the activities of a range of subjects of
globalization and are not reducible to the intentions of any one of them but
1
See Colin Hay, What Place for Ideas in the Structure-Agency Debate? Globalisation as a Process
without a Subject (paper presented at the annual conference of the British International Studies
Association, University of Manchester, December 2022, 1999).
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DALE AND ROBERTSON
with a shared core aggregated to a point where they formed a clear separation
from previous ways of organizing the economy, politics, and culture at supranational, national, and subnational levels. Though iconic, the collapse of
the Soviet Union and the eastern bloc represented an important shift in the
nature of global relations. This transformed not only politics on a world scale,
and on a national scale, where traditional priorities were disrupted almost
over night, but also the possibilities for capitalist expansion and the penetration of Western values across the world.
This epochal change involved the sweeping away of what were previously
nationally based barriers to the spread of institutions and practices far beyond their local origins. These global processes have not, of course, eliminated all vestiges of the national or the local, nor, as we shall argue in the
body of this article, have they led to convergence between the countries,
or the regions, of the world. Indeed, the core of the issue for us here is
that the forces of globalization do not sweep away all before them and
homogenize everything. At one level this is because the installation of global
processes and practices is not totally determinative in its needs and expectations; on the contrary, it can live alongside a range of existing (national
and local) institutions and combine with them in a range of ways to obtain
the desired ends. More than this, local structures and institutions, processes
and practices, are crucial to, even the medium necessary for, the spread of
global practices.
One useful expression of this idea has been put forward by Jane Jenson
and Boaventura Sousa Santos.2 They argue that while there is a consensual
basis to globalization made up of what they call the neoliberal economic
consensus, the weak state consensus, the liberal democratic consensus, and
the rule of law and judicial consensus (which may be seen as one way of
specifying more closely what we referred to as the common core of the
activities of the main subjects of globalization), there is no single way to
institute any of them locally. They write, In order to diffuse efficiently, processes must be made local. In each case, the general must be given specific
form, specific content.3 In the remainder of this article we will follow Jenson
and Santos in suggesting that though there may be a common thread running
through globalization processes and practices, this does not mean that they
take the same form in all places. And, in particular, we shall be looking here
at the influence and effects of regional organizations in giving specific form
and content to the general, especially in the area of education.
Jane Jenson and Boaventura Sousa Santos, eds., Globalizing Institutions: Case Studies in Regulation
and Innovation (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000).
3
Ibid., p. 21.
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February 2002
The Growth and Form of Regional Organizations
For at least two fundamental reasons, the idea of a global economy operating in complete isolation from, and above, nation-states is an impossible
one. First, left to the logic of the competitive market alone, capitalism would
not be sustainable; unfettered competition would be ultimately destructive
of the system as a whole. Second, the fetters that it therefore depends on
for sustainability, that would prevent the war of all against all, can only,
certainly currently and for the foreseeable future, be provided by nationstates, one of whose defining characteristics is the ability to make and enforce
laws and regulations within their territory. The kinds of laws and institutional
frameworks such as property rights, contracts, and money, which as Polanyi
and his followers argue constitute the necessary embedding of the capitalist
economy, are still made almost exclusively by, or at least with, the agreement
of nation-states.4 However, one effect of globalization has been to enable
transnational capital in particular to escape from, to evade, or at least to
choose between, the fetters placed upon it through such means as tax havens
and tax breaks from governments eager to provide them with an ultraprofitable base.
Moves to weaken national regulations have, though, a similarly self-destructive potential to that of unfettered capitalism; in this case, they take the
form of a race to the bottom in terms of the legal and fiscal concessions
granted to transnational corporations (TNCs) by national governments. This,
again, is a race that can only produce losers, for there are limits to the
concessions a state can make while remaining viable; moreover, in approaching those limits, states necessarily drag other states behind them. One obvious
solution to this dilemma for states is to erect tariffs and other protective
measures around their own industries and trade. However, these sorts of
measures have been the particular targets and victims of neoliberal orthodoxy
as stimuli and challenges to the expansion of free trade. Nonetheless, this
strategy itself contains no solution to the institutional structure problem; as
Bob Jessop puts it, It is in disrupting past compromises and fixes without
providing a new structured coherence for continued capital accumulation
that neo-liberal forms of globalization appear to be so threatening to many
capitalistlet alone otherinterests.5
Together these dilemmas have created the necessity for constitutionalizing
the neo-liberal, that is to say, setting up what amounts to a minimal regulatory
framework to control the potential excesses of capitalism.6 This takes a number
of forms, all of which are effectively multinational agreements to tame those
4
Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation (Boston: Beacon, 1957).

Bob Jessop, Reflections on Globalization and Its (Il)logic(s), in Globalisation and the Asia Pacific:
Contested Territories, ed. Kris Olds, Peter Dicken, Paul F. Kelly, Lily Kong, and Henry Wai-chung Yeung
(London: Routledge, 1999), p. 26.
6
See Leo Panitch, The State and Globalisation, in Socialist Register, ed. R. Miliband and L. Panitch
(London: Merlin, 1994), pp. 6093.
5
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DALE AND ROBERTSON
excesses and avert the race to the bottom. Saskia Sassen spells out the consequences of this very well when she writes What is conceived of as a line
separating the national from the globalor non nationalis actually a zone
where old institutions are modified, new institutions are created, and there is
much contestation and uncertain outcomes. . . . Globalization in this conception . . . has to do with the relocation of national public governance functions to transnational private arenas and with the development inside national
states . . . of the mechanisms necessary to accommodate the rights of global
capital in what are still national territories.7
Two sets of vehicles for the organization and transmission of the institutions are of special interest, though we should note that their fundamental
purposes do not diverge greatly and that there is considerable overlap in
their membership. The best known by far is the group of international financial, economic, and trade institutions such as the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), OECD, the World Trade Organization
(WTO), and G7/8. Their precise purposes and forms vary but they all subscribe broadly to Jenson and Santoss four elements of consensus. Although
the forms that these elements take may alter over time (e.g., the particular
form they took in the last decade of the twentieth century, what has been
called the Washington Consensus, appears now to be on the wane), the
significance and role of the international organizations are not affected because their importance derives from their structural position in the global
economy rather than on any particular policy for their influence.8 These
organizations can be seen as composing the kernel of a form of global governance set up by the leading capitalist states to advance the capitalist system
in such ways as to protect their own leading position within it, essentially by
saving the system from itself. In essence they play the role of the collective
capitalist state, meeting the conditions of the existence of capitalism at a
global level that it cannot meet itself. They are able, through conditionality,
loans, debts, and other strategies, to impose the model not only on the leading
nations but on the whole world.
Obviously, though, for the purposes of this article, the most relevant set
of organizations carrying out this role is that of regional organizations.9 We
need to begin by noting that their foundation on a common geographical
basewhich in itself should be seen as constructed rather than naturally
7
Saskia Sassen, Servicing the Global Economy: Reconfigured States and Private Agents, in Olds
et al., eds., p. 159.
8
See John Williamson, Democracy and the Washington Consensus, World Development 21 (1993):
132936; and John Pender, From Structural Adjustment to Comprehensive Development Framework:
Conditionality Transformed, Third World Quarterly 22 (2001): 38196. There are some points made in
Penders article about the increasing importance of social capital development from which we might
infer that regional organizations might be seen as able to perform a different and wider role than under
the Washington Consensus.
9
Daniel Drache lists eight regional free trade agreements; see D. Drache, Trade Blocs: The Beauty
or The Beast in the Theory? in Political Economy and the Changing Global Order, ed. Richard Stubbs and
Geoffrey R. D. Underhill, 2d ed. (Don Mills, Ontario: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 18497.
14
February 2002
occurring geographical entities and may even be somewhat shaky geographically, especially in the case of Asian groupingscannot be taken to mean
that they all operate in the same way: though it may be possible to point to
broadly similar aims and purposes, the differences in their modes of organization are much more evident.
In his very useful account of the growth of regionalism, Richard Stubbs
suggests that interest in and the pace of regionalization have accelerated
since the mid-1980s for three fundamental reasonsthe end of the Cold
War, which disrupted the existing pattern of international relations and led
states to form new relationships with each other; provision of both a defense
against and a means for taking advantage of processes of globalization; and
the existence of the EU as both a model and a threat. The emphasis in the
new regionalism has been on positioning the region so as to strengthen its
participation in the global economy in terms of both trade and capital flows.10
This does not mean that regionalization is unproblematic. As Daniel
Drache points out, the primary objectives and problems of regional organizations are access to the world economy and how to improve it, asymmetries
between members and how to neutralize them, and adjustment and how to
pay for it. Together, these mean that a trade bloc . . . needs a strong set of
non-market regulatory institutions to counter market imperfections and
failure.11
There are two major points to be noted here. The main interest in regionalism has been in how far it promotes or acts as a basis for resistance to
the development of the global economy; though these are extremely interesting and relevant issues in themselves, that is not our main concern here.
The first key point at this level is to recognize that regions do not merely
mediate globalization and its effects but that through their activities they
contribute strongly to constructing both. That is to say, if they are the victims
or beneficiaries of the rescaling that regionalization implies, they are also
the more or less willingauthors of it.
This takes us to the second, deceptively obvious point. That is, all the
regional organizations we will be discussing are the deliberate creation of
national governments. This cession of national power (some degree of sovereignty and/or autonomy) to supranational bodies is always justified in terms
of the ultimate good of the national societyor at least, the national economy,
from whose consequent improvement, neoliberal theory tells us, national
society will benefit by means of the trickle-down effect. So, just as in the case
of the international organizations like the World Bank, IMF, and the WTO,
a greater or lesser degree of national sovereignty or autonomy is ceded to
10
Richard Stubbs, Introduction: Regionalisation and Globalization, in Stubbs and Underhill, eds.,
pp. 23134.
11
Drache, p. 184.
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DALE AND ROBERTSON
regional organizations in order to pursue the national interest more

effectively.
However, our argument is that it is impossible to confine the effects of
regional organization membership on national policy to the trade (or even
the economic) sphere, whether the regional organization would wish that to
be the case or notand it is clear that this is a major point of difference
between them, with the EU quite explicitly involved in such an extension of
its scope while NAFTAs face is seemingly set quite firmly against it. It is to
this element of the issue that we now turn.
The Noneconomic Effects of Regional Organizations
In this section, while registering and recognizing that membership of

international organizations has a range of consequences at national levels,
our main focus will be on the social infrastructural assumptions of regional
organizations; those matters that result from the need for any economic,
productive, or trade force to be embedded in a set of social institutions that
underpin them or are at least not antagonistic to them.
It has become widely acknowledged that globalization has a significant
effect on states policy discretion and that it has led to states changing toward
what has been called a competitive form.12 So, a particular point of this
section is to try to understand the relationship between the competitive state
and regionalization. Bob Jessop has neatly encapsulated the thrust of what
we want to suggest. He argues that there are objective limits to economic
globalization due to capitals need not only to disembed economic relations
from their old social integument but also to re-embed them into new supportive social relations. Indeed, hard economic calculation increasingly rests
on mobilizing soft social resources, which are irreducible to the economic
and resistant to such calculation.13 He also examines two specific new forms
of contradiction and dilemmas that have emerged in the present period of
after Fordist accumulation. The first problem, he suggests,
is evident in the paradox noted by Veltz . . . that [t]he most advanced economies
function more and more in terms of the extra-economic. The paradox rests on
the increasing interdependence between the economic and extra-economic factors
making for systemic competitiveness. For this generates new contradictions that
affect the spatial and temporal organization of accumulation. Thus, temporally,
there is a major contradiction between short-term economic flows and the longterm dynamic of real competition rooted in resources (skills, trust, collective
mastery of techniques, economics of agglomeration, and size) which take years to
create, stabilize, and reproduce. And, spatially, there is a fundamental contradiction
between the economic, considered as a pure space of flows and the economy as a
12
See, e.g., Susan Robertson and Roger Dale, Competitive Contractualism: A New Social Settlement in New Zealand, in World Yearbook of Education: Education in Times of Transition, ed. David Coulby,
Robert Cowen, and Crispin Jones (London: Kogan Page, 2000), pp. 11631.
13
Jessop, p. 37.
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February 2002
territorially and/or socially embedded system of extra-economic as well as economic

resources and competencies.14
This means that national states must now manage the rearticulation of scales,
where the respective needs of capital and the state are reflected in a variable
mix of institutional forms and governance mechanisms involved in stabilizing
specific economic spaces.15
What is left implicit here is that the major regional groupings vary in the
emphases they place on the extraeconomicthough that is not immediately
evident from the language in which such claims are couched, which is noticeably common across the three regions. Thus, they all refer to the importance of social infrastructure at a regional levelbut they realize that
intention in very different ways.
It is important to register one other point about the nature and consequences of increasing regionalization that has considerable significance for
both the many countries that are still outside regional organizations and for
the leverage that regional organizations are able to exert on those nonmembers. It comes in a paper written for the OECD by a commentator welldisposed toward the nature and outcomes of the joint processes of globalization and regionalization and given to regarding the one as wholly economic
and the other as wholly political; he notes, Globalization and regionalization
constitute a dual challenge for firms and governments in developing countries. Both phenomena are creating opportunities for strengthening NorthSouth integration, and for enhancing productivity growth, competitiveness,
and living standards in developing countries. But, for many countries they
also raise the spectre of involuntary exclusion from the emerging tri-polar
world (our emphasis).16
A related consequence of the recognition of what regional organizations
mean is seen in what we might call the anticipatory effect that regional
organizations have on their potential new members. This is most clearly
evident in what Laux calls the Euroconformity that galvanizes policy-makers
in 10 associated countries [seeking to join the EU] to align along European
standards.17 This includes demonstrating an adequate level of educational
provision (e.g., Portugals entry into the EU in 1986 was made conditional
on such a provision). This capacity for extraregional influence illustrates
another means through which regional organizations act as bearers or carriers
of globalization even to countries that are not members of a regional
organization.
14
Ibid., pp. 2930.

Ibid., pp. 3334.
16
Charles Oman, Globalisation and Regionalisation: The Challenge for Developing Countries (Paris: OECD,
1994), p. 12.
17
Jeanne Kirk Laux, The Return to Europe: The Future Political Economy of Eastern Europe,
in Stubbs and Underhill, eds., p. 270.
15
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DALE AND ROBERTSON
The Three Regional Organizations: The European Union, the North American Free Trade
Area, and the Asia Pacific Economic Conference
It is important to note that each of these regional agreements reflects a

set of accumulated institutional relations and cultural and political practices,
which are the outcomes of struggles over particular agendas at particular
points in time. We should also note that these regional organizations are not
merely intelligible as a set of regional/national dynamics. Rather, regional
organizations are located in a complex web of global developments, such as
the WTO, the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS), and supranational organizations such as the OECD, IMF, and World Bank; a particularly sharp instance of this can be found in the competing solutions to
the Asian Crisis (199798) put forward by the IMF and other regional organizations. These supranational and multilateral arrangements are important in understanding the differences between regional organizations and
their different relations with states.18
It is essential, therefore, to have a sharper picture of the differences
among the organizations that we will be looking at if we are to compare their
effects on education. We have found it useful to identify a set of variables
that might enable us to isolate better how the regional organizations vary.
We need, on the one hand, to understand their broad purpose and form
and, on the other, to devise a means of specifying more clearly the nature
and strength of their effect on national (or subnational) education systems.
These latter effects derive fromthough not in any direct or necessary
waythe organizations broad purposes and forms, and thus we might represent them diagrammatically as follows (see also fig. 1).
i) Form and purpose.the overall structure of the organization, its purposes, and how it achieves them.
ii) Dimensions of power (hard or soft).either one or some combination of
decisions, agenda setting, and establishing new rules of the game for states
and their education systems, where hard refers to the strength of influence.19 For example, the imposition of structural adjustment by the World
Bank might be viewed as hard, while learning or technical advice might be
viewed as softer, noncoercive forms of power.
iii) Nature of effect (direct or indirect).whether the impact upon education
occurs either directly or indirectly either on education politics (e.g., new
curricula, discourses about social exclusion) or the politics of education (such
18
See, e.g., Mark Beeson, Reshaping Reional Institutions: APEC and IMF in East Asia, Pacific
Review 121 (1999): 124.
19
See Steven Lukes, Three Distinctive Views of Power Compared, in The Policy Process: A Reader,
ed. M. Hill, 2d ed. (Hertfordshire: Wheatsheaf, 1997).
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February 2002
Fig. 1.Mapping the dynamics of globalization on education through regional organizations
as new governance rules and procedures, discourses about the knowledge

economy).20
iv) Processes/means of influence on the education system.the various strategies/tactics/devices that might be employedsuch as harmonization, borrowing, learning, imposition, benchmarking, advice, networking.21
v) Scope.the extent of the regional organizations influence on national/
subnational/local levels of education measured through changes in states
sovereigntylegislative power excluding all other authoritiesand its autonomyde facto capacity for independent development of the national
space.22
20
Here education politics refers to actions and decisions within the education system itself;
politics of education refers to global, national, and regional dynamics that set agendas and impose
limits on what is possible within education. For a fuller elaboration of this, refer to Roger Dale, Applied
Education Politics or Political Sociology of Education? Contrasting Approaches to the Study of Recent
Education Reform in England and Wales, in Researching Education Policy: Ethical and Methodological Issues,
ed. D. Halpin and B. Troyna (London: Falmer, 1994).
21
An earlier attempt to elaborate these mechanisms may be found in Roger Dale, Specifying
Globalization Effects on National Policy: A Focus on the Mechanisms, Journal of Education Policy 14
(1999): 114.
22
See Stephan Liebfried, National Welfare States, European Integration and Globalisation: A
Perspective for the Next Century, Social Policy and Administration 34 (2000): 4463, quote on 45.
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DALE AND ROBERTSON
Our argument is that not only may educations possible contribution to

human resource policy, or social policy, be viewed very differently across the
regions in terms of its overall content but also that the structures through
which it is administered and contested, and the extent to which education
might contribute to those overall purposes of the regional agreement, vary
considerably and with very different social, political, and economic
consequences.
The North American Free Trade Agreement
On January 1, 1994, NAFTA came into effect, tying together to an unprecedented degree the 363 million people and $6.3 trillion in economic
activity in Mexico, the United States and Canada.23 This agreement followed
the conclusion of the 1989 CanadianU.S. Free Trade Agreement (CUSFTA)
and involves the United States, Canada, and Mexico. The main mover of
NAFTA was the United States, and the primary purpose of the agreement
was to promote market liberalization and encourage capital flows across the
northern and southern borders of the United States.24 The means of doing
this was through softening or removing tariffs (border taxes) and establishing
a new set of rules of the game as to how, on what basis, with what scope, and
in what sectors trade would occur between the United States, Canada, and
Mexico.
The impetus behind NAFTA can be partially explained by the United
Statess particular response to the growing levels of nationalism in Canada,
which reached a high point during the 1970s.25 It was also a reaction to
Mexican laws that were seeking to regulate foreign investment and the transfer of technology, though Mexicos own stance toward the United States
softened in the 1990s when Mexico initiated talks with the United States.
However, Mexican and Canadian nationalism and efforts at nationalization
belie the extent to which economic dependence defined their respective
relationship with the United States.26 Porter observes that, like Canada, Mexico tried to offset the negative effects of this close economic relationship by
strengthening state intervention.27 By the 1970s, amid growing U.S. fear about
its economic lead, polite political notions such as special relationship were
replaced with a more aggressive set of goals related to the United States
23
Tony Porter, The North American Free Trade Agreement, in Stubbs and Underhill, eds., pp.
24553.
24
NAFTA accounts for only one-third of trade for the United States, and it is for that reason the
United States has sought regulation via the World Trade Organization (see N. Woods, Order, Globalisation and Inequality in World Politics, in Order, Globalisation and Inequality in World Politics, ed. A.
Hurrell and N. Woods [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999]).
25
Porter, pp. 24553. Porter notes that by the 1970s new Canadian government initiatives, such
as the Foreign Investment Review Agency, had sought to shape incoming investments in ways that were
more beneficial to Canadians.
26
Ibid., p. 246. For example, by the end of the 1970s, 70 percent of direct foreign investment and
foreign debt originated from the United States and 70 percent of Mexican exports were to the United
States.
27
Ibid.
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February 2002
seeking a more competitive position in the world; the creation of a new set
of rules with Canada and Mexico were part of this strategy. In particular,
reduced wages and stemming the tide of illegal Mexican immigrants were
central. Porter observes, the Americans aimed to obtain a nearby low-wage
location in which the labour costs of U.S. corporations could be reduced
(and their competitiveness thereby enhanced) by shifting parts of their production to Mexico. Allowing freer access for products made in Mexico to
U.S. markets was also seen as a way to stem the tide of illegal immigrants
from Mexico to the United States as the work done by these immigrants
could be done back south of the border.28
It was not part of NAFTAs purpose to create a social union between the
participating countries; nor was it intended to address the inequalities between them. Rather, as Brine observes, it formalizes [inequalities] . . . building . . . the inequality that exists between Mexico and the US/Canada into
its structure.29 Its goals were economic and were the expression of powerful
U.S. business constituencies. The NAFTA text is more than 2,000 pages of
precisely worded rules on areas such as greater market access in a variety of
sectors, investment rules, intellectual property rights, dispute settlement, and
side agreements on environmental and labor rights. Market access provisions
varied by sector, and NAFTA rules were not applied to some sensitive areas,
such as Canadian culture (e.g., education) and Mexican oil.30 Finally, in terms
of purpose, unlike the other two regional organizations, creating, extending,
or embedding a greater sense of what we might call regionness was not a
part of NAFTAs agenda.
In terms of its form, NAFTA is a highly precise set of rules that obligates
each of the partners. There are terms that ensure binding commitments and
these terms are not offset with opt out clauses. This is similar to the WTO;
the same drafters were involved in both NAFTA and the WTO. It was argued
that precision would (i) reduce transaction costs that might arise with ex post
facto governmental bargaining, (ii) provide a clear and calculable environment for trade where risks are known and their effects accounted for, (iii)
guide governmental bureaucrats in their decision making, and (iv) contribute
to overall transparency. As a result, within the NAFTA framework, regional
institutions lack the power to adopt supplementary legislation that might
modify the ongoing nature of the agreement. Only a modest level of authority
is delegated for the purposes of dispute settlement and this process is tightly
prescribed.
While this was intended to restrict the growth of a strong regional body
that might undermine U.S. autonomy and hegemony, its very tightness limits
28
Ibid., p. 247.
Jacky Brine, Undereducating Women: Globalizing Inequality (Buckingham: Open University Press,
1999), p. 18.
30
Porter, p. 248.
29
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DALE AND ROBERTSON
the ability of NAFTA to anticipate the future and modify regulations and
practices in light of change. What is evident here is what we will call, in
contrast to the EUs principle of subsidiaritydelegation of decisions to the
lowest possible level of governancethe principle of supersidiarity; decisions are made at the highest rather than the lowest level of activity and are
likely to result inat least for those areas of social and economic life that
are exposed to the agreementgreater regional convergence.
Is education policy and practice affected by NAFTA, and, if it is, what are
the processes or means of influence through which this occurs? The nature
of its effect on education policy and provision is largely indirect and occurs
through the way in which the rules of the game have changed for each of
the three participating states. As we will show shortly, these changes in the
rules have major consequences for states in how they think about the governance of education (i.e., who funds and provides it and, ultimately, how it
might be regulated). We noted that NAFTA was intended to increase trading
opportunities and encourage foreign direct investment among its parties and
the agreement itself is legally precise and binding. Under NAFTA, market
access is subject to national treatment. This means that imported goods coming into a country from another NAFTA country must be treated no less
favorably than domestic goods. The agreement views most public
goodssuch as educationas goods that might also be provided by the
market and, therefore, as tradable items under the same terms as other
tradable commodities. One of the clauses within the agreement related to
the rules of nationalization states that a public-sector goodsuch as the
provision of compulsory schooling and health carewas to be treated as if
it were a private good by the state and, therefore, as a site of investment
(e.g., privatizing schools), then it would fall under the rules concerned with
investment (in the case of Canada, by U.S. and Mexican investors). The rules
protecting investors, for instance, against risks that might return the privatized
schools to the public sector, would then be invoked. This is because nationalization of foreign enterprises on economic grounds is prohibited and all
nationalizations must be compensated properly at market rates. U.S. or Mexican companies, were they to be allowed to invest in education in Canada,
would have the same rights as investors in other industries; this means being
secure in the knowledge that like any other item of trade, the risks associated
with the investment are made transparent. Government intervention is viewed
as an unanticipated risk to an investor who would then need to be compensated for future lost earnings.
It is precisely this dilemma that faces the Canadian education system.
The privatization of education services, such as custodial and canteen services,
by a number of school boards in Ontario and Alberta, and the privatization
of aspects of provisionas in the case of charter schools in Alberta with
private companies, such as Education Alternatives, keen to investmeans
22
February 2002
these companies would have to be compensated at market rates for future

lost earnings if they were to become renationalized.31 Thus, though NAFTA
has little to say directly about education, states are limited in what autonomy
they have to make decisions about their governance of schools and risk a
degree of loss of sovereignty if NAFTA rules are invoked. Nervousness about
the consequences for service areas such as education and health care has led
to a considerable amount of public lobbying and organizing around the
privatization agenda in NAFTA countries.
States face these same dilemmas when it comes to the higher education
sector. Universities are viewed as important powerhouses for research and
development within the region, able to contribute economic development
within the global economy. Universities are thus sites for investment in research and development. All the NAFTA partners, in particular Mexico, because of its different and variable level of resources, are faced with the potential dilemma of being able to direct universities as they open up to private
investors, while universities may well find themselves unable to direct their
own activities.32 It is argued that blurring the boundaries within the university
sector (e.g., between public and private activity), when linked to matters of
intellectual property, will reduce the autonomy universities have long claimed
and open the doors for a much more competitive and entrepreneurial site
that looks very different from the enlightenment university.
In terms of its processes and means of influence on education, then,
NAFTAs strategy may be seen as seeking to embed free trade and to extend
it to an area of previously public-dominated provision by employing the tactic
of binding trade agreements and the devices that accompany them, such as
dispute-resolution procedures. In terms of the extent of its influence on
national education policy, its effect is on the sovereignty rather than the
autonomy of its members. That is to say, it sets limits on the areas where they
can determine policy but not on how they make use of the sovereignty that
remains.
European Union
Any consideration of the EUs role in national education policy has to

take into account its constant evolution.33 To do justice to that evolution
would require a full-blown and detailed chronology, for which we have no
space here.34 To address that in part, we have chosen to identify two particular
31
See Susan Robertson, Victor Soucek, Raj Pannu, and Daniel Schugurensky, Chartering New
Waters: The Klein Revolution and the Privatization of Education in Alberta, Our Schools Ourselves 7
(1995): 80106.
32
Guillermo de los Reyes, NAFTA and the Future of Mexican Higher Education, Annals of the
American Academy for Political and Social Science 550 (March 1997): 17.
33
The current members of the European Union are Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France,
Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, and the United
Kingdom.
34
For the early period, see Jacky Brine, Educational and Vocational Policy and Construction of
the European Union, International Studies in Sociology of Education 5 (1995): 14563.
23
DALE AND ROBERTSON
points in time, the period culminating around the mid-1990s and the most
recent proposals for education that emerged from the Lisbon Summit in
2000. We will contrast these periods across each of the dimensions we have
proposed. We should note here that we have considered only the level of
compulsory education because this remains very much the legal responsibility
of member states; the EUs activity in the areas of higher education and
vocational and technical education is much greater.
The idea of a community of European nations grew out of a desire to
maintain peace after World War II. This was a political plan focused upon
economic ties; in 1957 the Treaty of Rome established the European Economic Community. Purdy observes that the EUs initial purpose was also
informed by a view that market liberalization might meet aspirations for
higher wages and social expenditure as a result of economies of scale and
rapid growth.35 In the following decades, as more countries were admitted,
there was a growing realization that European integration had to be more
than an economic union. That is, if the effects of rising unemployment as a
result of economic restructuring were to be managed and events such as the
1968 demonstrations avoided, there needed to be a union of people that
might be brought about through wider political, economic, and social policies. The later change in title to the European Union reflected this broader,
more social, perspective. The European Union then can be seen both as an
economic agreement that facilitated trade liberalization and investment and
as a social and political union.
The initial scope of social policy was explicitly confined to matters affecting employees rather than citizens. Further, on these matters, the role of
the commission was, and continues to be, restricted to conducting research
and offering opinions. This is largely because social policy was initially assigned a minor role where the emphasis was on standardizing access to the
market through law (in particular, labor mobility and the impact of internal
free trade on working conditions, wages, and social insurance). Political and
social rights thus remained matters of national responsibility until 1984, when
Jacques Delors was appointed president of the commission. Delors seized the
opportunity presented by the Single Market program to propound the idea
that social cohesion was just as important as market integration.36 However,
even then, the preoccupation with employment, as under the initial provisions
of the Treaty of Rome, remained, thereby confining the scope of social policy
to matters affecting employees rather than citizens. In contrast with NAFTA,
where the provision of social programsand therefore educationis viewed
rather like any other tradable good or service, social provision within the EU
is conceptualized as a social and public investment in current and future
35
David Purdy, Social Policy, in The Economics of the European Union, ed. M. Artis and N. Lee, 2d
ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), p. 284.
36
Ibid., p. 281.
24
February 2002
workers that will potentially secure social cohesion and social stability. However, Delorss 1993 White Paper on Growth, Competition and Employment
stressed the importance for Europe of intangible investment, particularly in
education and research, with investment in knowledge playing an essential
role in European competitiveness and social cohesion.37 This reflected a more
activist conception of social policy, though again the focus was on the human
resources necessary for a competitive regional workforce within the global
economy.
By the time of the Lisbon Summit, education had become more central.
Consistent with the will to promote social policy as a productive factor,38
and the EUs new strategic goal for the next decadeto become the most
competitive and dynamic knowledge-based economy in the world, capable
of sustainable growth with more and better jobs and social cohesion,39 education is deeply implicated in two of the three aspects of the overall strategy
proposed to achieve this goalpreparing the transition to a knowledgebased economy and society by better policies for the information society and
Research and Development . . . [and] modernising the European social
model, investing in people and combating social exclusion.40 The concrete
implications of these proposals for education call for emphases on raising
the standards of learning by improving the quality of training for teachers;
facilitating lifelong learning; updating the definition of basic skills, especially
through information technology (IT) skills training; facilitating labor mobility; and introducing quality-assurance mechanisms to better match resources to needs to enable schools to support their new, wider role.41 Its
purpose in respect to education, then, is very broad, covering not only infrastructural support but also a high degree of regionness.
In terms of form, the legal basis of EU social policy is set out in the Treaty
of Rome (1957) and modified by the Single European Act (1986) and the
Treaty of European Union (1992). The role of education as a tool for assisting
changes in an evolving European society was gradually acknowledged, and
the first action plans in the field of education were put into place. However,
it is crucial to note that it remains very much a national responsibility. Article
126 limits the EU to supporting and supplementing national education
systems, though Article 149, which allows the community to contribute to
the development of quality education . . . while fully respecting member
States control of content and organisation does offer something of a loophole that has been more recently used.
37
European Commission, White Paper, Growth, Competitiveness and Employment: The Challenges
and the Way Forward into the Twenty-First Century (Brussels, 1993).
38
See European Commission, Proposal for Decision of EU Parliament and Commission, Presented to Lisbon
Summit (Brussels, 2000).
39
European Commission, Lisbon European Council: Presidency Conclusions (Brussels, 2000), par. 5
40
Ibid.
41
See Commission of the European Communities, Report from the Commission: The Concrete Future
Objectives of Education Systems (Brussels, 2001). Executive summary.
25
DALE AND ROBERTSON
Thus, although the very existence of the EU imposes some degree of

commonality, the possibility that initial divergences might eventually wither
away has so far been blocked by fundamental disagreements, both about the
proper scope and objects of social policy and about the proper division of
responsibility and power between the union and its member states.42 Indeed,
to make aspects of the EU acceptable, especially in relation to social policy,
serious recognition of the principle of subsidiaritythat is, delegation to
the lowest possible level of governancehave been necessary.43
The EU has, of course, a very powerful bureaucracy in the form of the
European Commission, which now has a separate Directorate General for
Education and Culture. This, too, has developed over the EUs history. Writing
of the pre-1995 period, Jacky Brine comments that the demands of legislation, the influence of policy documents, and the allure of funding are the
main means by which [the] construction of the union of the European nation
states takes place.44 By the Lisbon Summit, not only was there the Directorate
General for Education and Culture but wider use was being made of the
possibilities of Article 149in particular through the development of common indicators and benchmarks.45 This is very much a part of the new Open
Method of Coordination (OMC), which was put forward by the Lisbon Summit and seems set to become the major means through which the EU education (and other social) policy will be developed.46 It essentially involves
fixing guidelines for the Union, combined with specific timetables for achieving the goals which they set; . . . establishing, where appropriate, quantitative
and qualitative indicators and benchmarks against the best in the world and
tailored to the needs of different Member States and sectors as a means of
comparing best practice; translating these European guidelines into national
and regional policies by setting specific targets and adopting measures, taking
into account national and regional differences; and periodic monitoring,
evaluation and peer review.47 The potential of the method was recognized
in a paper prepared for the Education Ministers Meeting held in May 2000
at Bucharest (significantly, acceding countries are included in many of the
new initiatives). In this paper it is suggested that indicators lead to benchmarks, to issues and questions and thence to examples of good practice which
provide a focus for policy development in every European country.48 It was
also recognized that national goals and policies differ and will continue to
42
Purdy, p. 289.
John Grahl and Paul Teague, Is the European Social Model Fragmenting? in The Welfare State
Reader, ed. Christopher Pierson and Francis Castles (Cambridge: Polity, 2000).
44
Brine, Educational and Vocational Policy, pp. 14647.
45
European Commission, Directorate-General for Education and Culture, Developing Quality Indicators for Education Systems (Brussels, 1999).
46
See European Commission, Constructing New Programmes in Education (Brussels, 1999).
47
European Commission, Lisbon European Council: Presidency Conclusions, par. 37.
48
European Commission, Directorate-General for Education and Culture, European Report on
Quality of School Education: Sixteen Quality Indicators (paper prepared for Education Ministers Meeting, Bucharest, May 2000 [Brussels, 2000]), p. 4.
43
26
February 2002
differ, but much may still be learned from innovative practice and new and
different approaches to old problems. As the Report on Concrete Future Objectives
of Education Systems post-Lisbon concludes, the objectives set out in the report
cannot be achieved by member states alone and thus need cooperation at
European level.49
It should by now be clear that the EU does affect various elements of
member states policies through all three of the dimensions of power. It can
make rules and decisions that are binding on members; it clearly determines
particular agendas to which all member states (and, it should be added,
acceding members) have to pay heed and respond (even where these are
not formally restricted or binding); and it sets the rules of the game, through
the effects it has on overall national policy direction in other sectors, the
ways it divides up sectoral responsibilities, and the sticks and carrots it provides
to follow particular programs. These powers have been more or less available
throughout the EUs history, but it seems clear that agenda setting and the
rules of the game have been given greater prominence in the later phases
of the periods we are looking at, given the continuing strength of the prohibition on intervention in national educational decision making and the
continuing attachment of many members to the subsidiarity principle. We
see this especially in the introduction and likely future importance of the
OMC.
We should not ignore, however, another form of influence that operates
as a result of the existence of the EU. We might call it an enhanced institutional and discursive thickness, which is the outcome of the development of Euro-networks of all kinds, initially linked directly with the
Community or Commission, but more recently growing independently in
the form of lobby groups, professional associations, conferences, mutual
recognition of a possible European agenda, or of joint possibilities of European-funded research, and the creation of professional journals with a
European focus. Most of this work is formally independent of the EU, but
it does have some role in shaping national education policies in ways influenced by the existence of, and to some degree the agendas of, the EU.
It would be unfortunate to overlook this form of regional effect on education, particularly because it is one that clearly distinguishes the EU from
the other two regional organizations.
When we come to look at the processes and means of influence through
which the EU operates in the field of education, we notice a number of
similarities with the last group. In particular, the change over time becomes
quite evident. In terms of strategy, there have been significant changes since
the early 1990s, before which education initiatives were based on the Maastricht Treaty and especially on Article 126, which made education very much
a national responsibility. Brine, writing in 1995, could conclude that the
49
Commission of the European Communities.
27
DALE AND ROBERTSON
European dimension in education, . . . has as its main purpose, within

compulsory education, the attempt to build a shared cross-national understanding of what it means to be European.50 Whether or not faute de mieux,
the EUs influence on compulsory education was restricted to the advancement of a Eurodimension in national education programs, and whatever
(sometimes not inconsequential) spin-offs might be obtained from interventions in the areas of vocational training and higher education, where the
treaty did allow it to intervene. The main tactic employed, as we suggested
above, was the promotion and funding of relatively small-scale programs,
such as Comenius (whose overall objectives are to enhance the quality and
reinforce the European dimension of school education, in particular, by
encouraging transnational cooperation between schools),51 though the European Social Fund could also be useful as a means of funding some initiatives.52 This restricted the possible means employed to meetings of experts
and other interested parties for the development of programs, some limited
interschool networking, and school and student exchanges.53
Since the mid-1990s, there have been significant changes in all three
areas. The strategy has been associated with increasing emphases at all levels
of the EUs work on promoting the knowledge economy and lifelong learning, in which education is taken to be central. This change might be seen
as a shift from vertical to horizontal cooperation, and from harmonization
to coordination as an ideal. It is intended to involve, in particular, renewed
emphases on quality, IT, science, and technology and access to opportunities
for learning. The tactics have shifted from promoting the Eurodimension to
bringing about much greater levels of coordination of national education
policies by means of the OMC. And the means used derive directly from this
tactic. They center on benchmarking and performance indicators as a means
of bringing together different national goals and aspirations for education
in a more coherent way at the European level.
The final variable of external influence on national education systems is
its scope, measured by its effects on national and subnational systems and
the means by which it is achieved, through effects on national sovereignty
or autonomy. It is clear in the case of the EU that it has effects on both
levels. While its influence on national sovereignty in the education sector is
extremely limited, as we have seen above, it is able to have considerable effect
on how its members exercise their autonomy in the area of education policy.
We might consider here a case in which both sovereignty and autonomy
50
Brine, Educational and Vocational Policy, p. 161.

See More Information about Comenius, http://www.europa.eu.int/comm/education/socrates/comenius/moreabou.htm. For a useful evaluation of the effect of the Comenius program on schools
across member states, see John Field, European Dimensions: Education, Training and the European Union
(London: Jessica Kingsley, 1998), pp. 1015.
52
Brine, Educational and Vocational Policy, p. 152.
53
See Field, chap. 4.
51
28
February 2002
have been influenced by the EU and the mechanisms through which this
has taken place. The case of Scotland is particularly informative, partly as its
subnational status opens up the possibility of it being both directed by national
policy yet also able to respond to supranational policy if and should it choose
to do so. Livingstone observes that there has, since the early 1970s, been an
office in Edinburgh actively promoting European links and exchanges.54 The
1988 resolution regarding the promotion of European culture prompted
a response from the United Kingdom, which for this purpose included Scotland. However, while Whitehall was responsible for creating an official framework to encourage good practice and dissemination, the Scottish Education
Officewhich had a degree of devolved responsibility for education in Scotlandwas responsible for its implementation. The policy also encouraged
support for language learning and teaching and bilateral links and exchanges.
These links have been consistently pursued with some degree of institutional
formality. For example, in 1990 the Scottish Office set up an International
Relations Branch; two of its objectives are of note: the provision of easy access
to information about the EU and the establishment of a number of networks
to facilitate the development of a European dimension.55 These have been
followed by publications, conferences, curricular materials, and inclusion of
a European dimension in teacher-training programs.
Asia-Pacific Economic Co-operation
The APEC forum has an extremely large and diverse membership. Its 21
members include not only all three members of NAFTA but the worlds three
largest economies (the United States, China, and Japan) and Russia, which
joined recently.56 Together they account for almost half of all world trade.
The diversity of its membership distinguishes APEC from the other two organizations. The membership covers the whole range of national wealth, from
the United States to Papua New Guinea. There are distinct cultural and
religious differences among the members, and many of them have education
systems that continue to bear (rather different) traces of their colonial histories, so that, overall, there is a correspondingly broad diversity of educational systems and provisions. Furthermore, to a much greater extent than
in the other two cases, there are other subjects of globalization, such as
the World Bank, the Asia Development Bank, and UNESCO, at work in the
education field in the APEC region. Sylvia Ostry places great emphasis on
54
Kay Livingstone, The European Dimension, in Scottish Education, ed. T. G. K. Bryce and W. M.
Humes (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999), pp. 93746, quote on p. 941.
55
Ibid., p. 942.
56
APECs membership is made up as follows. The founding members were Australia, Brunei
Darussalam, Canada, Indonesia, Japan, South Korea, Malaysia, New Zealand, the Phillipines, Singapore,
Thailand, and the United States. In 1991, they were joined by the three Chinas, the Chinese Peoples
Republic, Hong Kong (later Chinese Hong Kong), and Chinese Taipei; it is the presence of the PRC
and Taiwan in the same organization that led to it being called a conference of regional economies.
Mexico and Papua New Guinea were admitted in 1993, Chile in 1994, and Peru, Russia, and Vietnam
in 1995.
29
DALE AND ROBERTSON
the importance of international nongovernmental organizations in the development of APEC.57

APEC was originally proposed in 1989 by the thenprime minister of
Australia Bob Hawke as a kind of Asian OECD and was set up, with considerable support from Japan, in the form of a ministerial-level meeting
of twelve economies. The stimulus to its creation at that time was in large
part a response to the deregulation of the international finance system
and the competition for foreign direct investment, together with the fear
of exclusion from two projectionist regional blocs . . . a Fortress Europe
and a Fortress North America.58 However, by 1993, trade liberalization
had become the most important of its three pillarsthe others were trade
facilitation and technical cooperation. A key feature that adds to the difficulty of precise definitions of APECs purpose is the existence of what
John Ravenhill calls competing logics between its Asian and Western
members; Asian preferences for lack of specificity in agreement and an
informal incremental bottom up approach to regional co-operation were
juxtaposed with Western models based on formal institutions established
by contractual agreements.59
There have been more recent attempts to give a higher profile to Ecotech
(economic and technical cooperation, a term that replaced development
coordination at the 1995 Osaka meeting), where we find the most explicit
references to education. These concentrate on capacity-building in the lessdeveloped economies of the region and may be seen as a form of economic
development assistance without the negative connotations of neocolonialism
or the conditionalities of loans from international financial institutions. Possibly associated with this has been the development of what Ravenhill calls
a community building60 or what Higgott calls an identity building purpose
on the part of the Asian members.61 Higgott suggests this may form the basis
of Asian positions on some issues, arguing that it may have been considerably strengthened by their collective hostility toward both the content and
the manner of the IMF-imposed solution to the Asian economic crisis of
1997.
However, while education does not appear to have a very high priority
in APEC, it remains a matter of interest and importance outside the region
as well as within it because of its perceived contribution to the economic
57
Sylvia Ostry, APEC and Regime Creation in the Pacific: The OECD Model, in Asia-Pacific
Crossroads: Regime Creation and the Future of APEC, ed. Vinod K. Aggarwal and Charles E. Morrison (New
York: St. Martins, 1998), pp. 31750.
58
Ibid., p. 343.
59
John Ravenhill, Australia and APEC, in Aggarwal and Morrison, eds., pp. 14364. Quoted in
Miles Kahler, Legalization as Strategy: The Asia-Pacific Case, International Organisation 54 (2000): 557.
60
Ravenhill, APEC Adrift: Implications for Economic Regionalisation in Asia and the Pacific,
Pacific Review 13 (2000): 320.
61
R. Higgott, The Political Economy of Globalisation in East Asia: The Salience of Region Building, in Globalisation and the Asia-Pacific: Contested Territories, ed. K. Olds, P. Dicken, and P. F. Kelly
(London: Routledge, 1999), pp. 91106.
30
February 2002
success of the Asian Tigers (Hong Kong, Singapore, South Korea, and
Taiwan). Morris quotes The Economists conclusion on the basis of the Tigers
success: the last lesson is probably the most important: investing in Education
pays off in spades. The tigers [sic] single biggest source of comparative
advantage is their well-educated workers, and he comments, Increasingly
the Asian experience is portrayed as providing an exemplary model for those
societies suffering from low or declining levels of economic growth.62 This
suggests that there may be a predisposition to emulate the educational policies
of the Tiger economies that exists alongside, as well as through, the medium
of APECs efforts in the sector.
The most direct moves to include education in APECs work have been
the two meetings of education ministers, the first in 1992 and the second in
April 2000. At the 2000 meeting the ministers committed themselves to meeting every 5 years. The ministers at the first meeting, held in Washington,
D.C., saw it as affirming the direct link between education and economic
development and emphasized educations crucial role in human development; they recognized the need to continue to work cooperatively to identify
strategies for addressing the challenges presented to their education systems,
[including] . . . the need for students to develop the skills required in a
technologically sophisticated world and a better understanding of the cultures
and economies of the Asia-Pacific region.63
These themes were specified somewhat differently at the 2000 meeting
in Singapore, where there was recognition that high standards in literacy,
mathematics, science and technology provide the necessary foundation
needed for the new global economy, with a strong emphasis on IT in
schools.64 Evidence of perhaps a bigger role for education comes in the
statement that in recognition of the need to constantly adjust the focus of
education efforts to prepare for an ever changing world, the ministers had
decided to rename the APEC Education Forum set up at the 1992 meeting
the APEC Education Network; significantly, it is to be part of the threenetwork structure of the Human Resource Development Working Group.
At the 2000 meeting the ministers identified four strategic areas for transforming their education systems to become the foundation and impetus for
Learning Societies: (1) sharing ideas, experiences, and best practices on
the use of IT, as a core competency in education, through physical or virtual
exchanges, networks and programs; (2) enhancing the quality of teacher
development, through sharing effective teaching and teacher development
62
Paul Morris, Asias Four Little Tigers: A Comparison of the Role of Education in their Development, Comparative Education 32 (1996): 99.
63
APEC, Declaration of the APEC Education Ministerial, Towards Educational Standards for the
Twenty-First Century (Singapore, 1992), http://www.apecsec.org.sg/virtualib/minismtg92.html, par. 2,
3.
64
APEC, Joint Statement of the Second APEC Education Ministers Meeting, Education for
Learning Societies in the Twenty-first Century, Singapore, 7 April 2000, in Selected APEC Documents
(Singapore, APEC, 2000), pp. 2936, quote in par. 9.
31
DALE AND ROBERTSON
practices; (3) cultivating sound management practices among policy makers

and practitioners through exchange of information and expertise; and (4)
promoting a culture of active engagement to forward understanding within
the Asia-Pacific community, through teacher and student exchanges.
The organizational form of APEC quite deliberately rejects both the EU
harmonization/cooperation models and NAFTAs rules-based approach, reflecting a fear of domination by the United States or Japan. APEC has always
been characterized by what Kahler calls the ASEAN model of incremental
institutionalization and low legislation.65 This reflects the historically nonlegalized culture of much of Asia as well as lack of agreement on particular
objectives that might structure the activities of APEC. Finally, APECs capacity
is limited by the provision of only a small secretariat that relies heavily on
working groups to arrive at consensus, and by the absence of any financial
levers.66 The agenda of annual meetings is determined by the host economy,
which sets limits to consistency and continuity and means that the outcomes
in policy terms reflect this ad hoc, episodic nature of the forum. All of this
has contributed to what Ravenhill calls the largely incoherent process by
which projects proliferated their weak links to APECs core activities and the
failure of most of them to generate substantive outcomes.67
In the education area, the principles of participation set out at the first
ministerial meeting are that participation should be open to all APEC members. Specific cooperative initiatives may be proposed by any individual member or group of members that so desires. Participation in any given initiative
is open to all members, but such participation is voluntary. Members participating in an initiative would be responsible for identifying the resources
required to carry it out.68 The renamed Education Network (whose participants come from members ministries of education) elaborates this a little,
with lead economies taking responsibility in distilling strategic statements
for each main theme identified by the ministerial meeting, and working
groups then developing the projects. There is no capacity for monitoring the
outputs or outcomes of the projects.69
In terms of the other elements of figure 1, then, we may see APEC
operating in the education area, as in all other areas, with a very soft and
65
Kahler, p. 551.
Kahler quotes Janow as arguing that its members have shown little willingness to formalise APEC
by means of binding agreements on a defined set of substantive economic or trade issues nor have its
members sought to create a regional institution with rule making, interpretative, enforcement, or adjudicative powers (p. 558).
67
Ravenhill, APEC Adrift, p. 325.
68
Examples of the kinds of project undertaken include Vocational Teacher Standards and the
Formulating Method (China); Best Practice Workshop on School-to-Work Transitions (Canada);
Achieving High Performance Schools (China and the United States); Improving the Understanding
of Culture in APEC (Australia); Exchange of Education Professionals among APEC Members (Korea);
and APEC Youth Networking: Youth Preparation for the APEC Society in the Next Millennium
(Thailand).
69
APEC, par. 12. http://apecsec.org.sg/virtualib/minismtg/mtgedu92.html.
66
32
February 2002
indirect form of power. (It is crucial to note that not only on this variable
but also on all the others we discuss, the great diversity of the membership
means that the effects will be experienced very differently by different members. However, we should note that this diversity is rarely, if ever, mentioned
in discussions and reports within APEC.) It is neither able to nor wishes to
make decisions that are binding on its members. Its method of concerted
unilateralism (which Ostry describes as voluntary liberalization encouraged
by peer group pressure),70 however, does suggest that an element of agenda
setting is considered desirable, and this is clearly evident in the readiness to
identify and disseminate best practice in areas of education, and to enable
the growth of networks that focus on topics determined interesting by the
collectivity of the members.
In terms of the nature of the effect, there is no capacity for a direct
influence on either the politics of education or education politics. It seems,
unlikely, however, that the relentless emphasis on the instrumental contribution of education to economic development, and the attaching of the great
majority of its education activities to that end, does not have an effect on
the politics of education, especially in the less-developed economies. At the
level of education politics, there is potential for a somewhat more direct
effect through the emphasis on activities like sharing best practice, benchmarking, educational exchanges, and professional networking.
We can infer the processes and means of influence quite directly from
the examples given above. The formal strategy might be seen as one of
cooperative action to enhance the contribution of education to economic
development in the region as a whole. This should not entail any imposition,
however, nor should it be expected to lead to harmonization. The tactics to
be employed to bring this about are prescribed and circumscribed by, on
the one hand, the method of concerted unilateralism and, on the other, the
organizations deliberately undeveloped formal capacity. There is, however,
evidence of some assistance from the more- to the less-developed members
through educational support in terms of personnel, hardware, and software.
These tactics are forwarded largely through meetings and networking among
members, which essentially also define and refine the most appropriate devices for their realization. These are centered around identification and dissemination of best practice, collective projects around specific and restricted
schemes, and, perhaps increasingly, the developments of benchmarks and
performance indicators.
Finally, the scope of the effect is limited in depth; it is rather shallow,
having no effect on sovereignty and no formal effect on autonomy (since all
members determine policy unilaterally). In terms of breadth, it has the potential to impinge on most levels of national and subnational systems. It may
have an effect on the ministries of education, for instance, through atten70
Ostry, p. 346.
33
DALE AND ROBERTSON
dance at ministerial meetings; while no member is required to take part in

any activity, or to accept a particular form of best practice, these do stand as
collectively approved targets and, hence, do have greater-than-random authority and influence over members priorities. As with NAFTA and the EU,
when ministers sign up for a project, they are under some obligation to
report back on progress, which in itself represents a form of soft power.
Participation in the Education Network can affect programs of teacher professional development and the organization of classrooms, around the use
of information technology, for instance.
One conclusion that may be drawn from the foregoing is that the strongest education implications of APEC can be inferred from the philosophy of
concerted unilateralism and individual action plans. That is to say, the
great majority of the members attribute a central role to education and
human capital formation in economic development, and this is a core element of their overall policy, but they all achieve this in their own way.71
However, this conclusion needs to be tempered by two other factors. First,
however belatedly, there is evidence, in the form of the Ecotech projects and
the Education Ministers meeting, that educational issues are becoming more
recognized in their own right and not just as adjuncts to or instruments of
economic issues. Second, it ignores the conformity effect of regional membership on nonmembers within the region, on its non-Asian members, particularly Australia and New Zealand, both of whom have taken steps to introduce an Asian focus to their curriculum as a means of establishing their
commitment to Asia,72 and on its Asian members, for whom it may carry
elements of identity- or region-building education systems.
Conclusion
We have sought in this article to clarify the idea of globalization in ways

that make it more possible to use it productively in an analysis of the role of
regional organizations, specifically APEC, the EU, and NAFTA, in education
within their respective regions. While we suggested that they could be identified as key subjects of the process of globalization, our aim has been to
examine the consequences of this role for their regions and member states
rather than what we can learn about the process of globalizationthough,
ultimately, of course, the two are part of the same whole.
71
For a good example of the contrasting strategies used in the key area of vocational training, see
Francis Green, David Ashton, Donna James, and Johnny Sung, The Role of the State in Skill Formation:
Evidence from the Republic of Korea, Singapore and Taiwan, Oxford Review of Economic Policy 15 (1998):
8296.
72
On Australia, see Michael Garbutcheon Singh, Studying Asia for the National Interest: An
Analysis of the Australian Governments Strategy for Schools, Discourse 17 (1996): 15370; on New
Zealand, see Roger Dale and Susan Robertson, Resiting the Nation, Restructuring the State: External
Effects on New Zealand Education Policy, in Education Policy in New Zealand, ed. Kay Morris Matthews
and Mark Olssen (Palmerston North: Dunmore, 1999).
34
February 2002
We recognized from the start that there were major differences between
the three organizations and a major aim of the article has been to specify
the nature of those differences and the ways that they have affected education.
We did this by describing and examining the purpose and form of the organizations as they affected education, how these differences in intention
and capacity were played out in the practices they adopted, and the scope
and depth of their effect on education within their region. In order to enable
a clearer and tighter understanding of the differences between the organizations and to provide a more effective basis for comparison between them,
we isolated a number of what we saw as key variables along which the strength,
scope, and mechanisms of their effect on education in their regions might
vary. In our accounts of the organizations we have drawn on this framework
to plot the differences between them, to the point where we hope that readers
will be able to fill in the cells in figure 1 as a form of summary of some of
our main points that would be more effective than we could provide through
simple recapitulation of them. There are, though, four wider points that we
would like to make in conclusion.
The first is the necessity of basing any discussion of globalization on as
clear an understanding of the concept as possible. This may seem obvious,
but as the literature demonstrates, it is far from redundant. The failure to
distinguish different kinds and levels of understanding of globalization has
dogged discussion of it and led to the kind of confusion that is all too
prevalent. The distinction we have adopted from Colin Hay between globalization as discourse and globalization as process (a process, moreover, whose
subjects it is crucial to identify) is an initial but, we hope, worthwhile attempt
to make a distinction that is both conceptually useful and capable of providing
testable theory. Our focus here has been on globalization as process, and
considerable work remains to be done on globalization as discourse, the
relationship between the two, and their joint consequences for national education policies.
Second, the method we have suggested for comparing the effects, of
course, need not be confined to the effects of regional organizations. Indeed,
in its earlier formulation,73 it was explicitly intended as providing a means
for clearer understanding of a range of external effects, including, but not
limited to, all the subjects of globalization that we have referred to in the
article. This method also enables us to compare not only the practices of
organizations or institutions and how they might affect education policy but
also the means through which they seek to attain rather similar goals. For
instance, it seems to us that one of the more appealing areas of future research
that this article suggests would be between the tactics of the three organizationsNAFTAs rule-based approach, the EUs Open Method of Coordi73
See Roger Dale, Specifying Globalization Effects on National Policy: A Focus on the Mechanisms
(n. 21 above).
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DALE AND ROBERTSON
nation, and APECs concerted unilateralism; the comparison between the

latter two would be especially interesting.
Third, the article might be expected to shed some light on a key question,
Is it likely that any of the member states of the organizations are doing
anything in education that they would not have been doing if they had not
been members? This question cannot be answered directly on the basis of
the account we have provided since we have not been able to discuss the
effect of regional policies on any national system in detail. However, we hope
that the approach we have adopted is sufficiently clear in its implications for
national systems for those with intimate knowledge of particular systems to
be able to recognize how, and how far, membership of transnational organizations might affect themand we have tried to provide some examples of
these effects. So, we would conclude that the answer is yes in each case,
but for different reasons and with different consequences. In the case of
NAFTA, the answer is clearly yes, but so far at a relatively trivial level; in
the case of APEC, it is yes, but not in most cases very much or very pervasively; and in the case of the EU, it is yes, and with increasing scope and
consequence.
Finally, as with any area of globalization, it is necessary to ask whether
the transnationally initiated effects we have been looking at are leading in
the direction of a convergence of education systems and/or policies and/or
practices. Here, the evidence we have discussed in this article reinforces our
view that what we are witnessing is an increasingly globally structured agenda
for education, but little increasing convergence of national practice or policy.74 Rather than contributing to international convergence, we might see
the activities of the regional organizations in the education sector as, on the
one hand, strengthening and reinforcing that global agenda (at the discursive
as well as the process level), which may set different priorities for other nationstates and provide resources on which they might draw but, on the other,
doing very much less to inhibit continuing divergence in implementing the
agenda.
74
See Roger Dale, Globalization and Education: Demonstrating a Common World Education
Culture or Locating a Globally Structured Agenda for Education, Educational Theory 50 (2000): 42748.
36
February 2002

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The Varying Effects of Regional Organizations

as Subjects of Globalization of Education

Comparative Education Review

REGIONAL ORGANIZATIONS AS SUBJECTS OF GLOBALIZATION

Globalization is a very complex and confusing term whose meaning

DALE AND ROBERTSON

REGIONAL ORGANIZATIONS AS SUBJECTS OF GLOBALIZATION

The Growth and Form of Regional Organizations

Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation (Boston: Beacon, 1957).

Comparative Education Review

DALE AND ROBERTSON

REGIONAL ORGANIZATIONS AS SUBJECTS OF GLOBALIZATION

DALE AND ROBERTSON

regional organizations in order to pursue the national interest more

In this section, while registering and recognizing that membership of

REGIONAL ORGANIZATIONS AS SUBJECTS OF GLOBALIZATION

territorially and/or socially embedded system of extra-economic as well as economic

Ibid., pp. 2930.

Comparative Education Review

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It is important to note that each of these regional agreements reflects a

REGIONAL ORGANIZATIONS AS SUBJECTS OF GLOBALIZATION

Fig. 1.Mapping the dynamics of globalization on education through regional organizations

as new governance rules and procedures, discourses about the knowledge

DALE AND ROBERTSON

Our argument is that not only may educations possible contribution to

REGIONAL ORGANIZATIONS AS SUBJECTS OF GLOBALIZATION

Comparative Education Review

DALE AND ROBERTSON

REGIONAL ORGANIZATIONS AS SUBJECTS OF GLOBALIZATION

these companies would have to be compensated at market rates for future

Any consideration of the EUs role in national education policy has to

DALE AND ROBERTSON

REGIONAL ORGANIZATIONS AS SUBJECTS OF GLOBALIZATION

DALE AND ROBERTSON

Thus, although the very existence of the EU imposes some degree of

REGIONAL ORGANIZATIONS AS SUBJECTS OF GLOBALIZATION

Commission of the European Communities.

Comparative Education Review

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European dimension in education, . . . has as its main purpose, within

Brine, Educational and Vocational Policy, p. 161.

REGIONAL ORGANIZATIONS AS SUBJECTS OF GLOBALIZATION

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the importance of international nongovernmental organizations in the development of APEC.57

REGIONAL ORGANIZATIONS AS SUBJECTS OF GLOBALIZATION

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practices; (3) cultivating sound management practices among policy makers

REGIONAL ORGANIZATIONS AS SUBJECTS OF GLOBALIZATION

Comparative Education Review

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dance at ministerial meetings; while no member is required to take part in

We have sought in this article to clarify the idea of globalization in ways

REGIONAL ORGANIZATIONS AS SUBJECTS OF GLOBALIZATION

Comparative Education Review

DALE AND ROBERTSON

nation, and APECs concerted unilateralism; the comparison between the

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