CHAPTER 9 The WTO and the OECD: The Other Two Horsemen of the Global Edpocalyse

We have so far examined the increasing impact on local systems of education effectuated by the World Bank and the IMF as they go about broadening their role as major instruments of global governance, standing shoulder to shoulder under a shared banner of planetary neoliberalism. It has been argued that the central project of these two IGOs in the domain of education has been to promote free market principles of commodificatiion, efficiency, and account- ability within the context of directives and policies that put into play local con- ditions of austerity, privatization, and liberalization/deregulation for schools. We now turn our attention to the other two global Horsemen of the Edpoca- lypse: the World Trade Organization (WTO) and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). Although neither of these IGOs exerts the same level of power and influence on local education as does the WB/ IMF nexus of forces, it will nevertheless be shown that both the WTO and the OECD, each in its own fashion, also work decisively to promote the global neo- liberal project in education. Specifically, the World Trade Organization does this by promoting the free flow of educational services as part of larger trade agreements in services between member countries. The OECD, on the other hand, plays the more subtle yet equally important function of researching the relationship between education and economic productivity by constructing and disseminating curriculum and assessment tools that are underwritten in neoliberal principles firmly rooted in human capital theory. We will begin this chapter by first considering the origins and history, and prescribed purpose for education of these two IGOs. We will then explore the ways in which each actively helps to engender and preserve the sort of global neoliberal school- house that dovetails with and supports corporate capitalist globalization and the aspirations of the (post-)Washington Consensus. Our objective in this sec- tion is to conclude our analysis of how each of the Four Horsemen provide an essential stitch in the global tapestry of neoliberal education. Indeed, together they constitute nothing less than a global vision of what neoliberalism means for local education. For, without the respective contribution of each, the global texture and international configuration of neoliberalism in education today would be far less cohesive and much less well coordinated.

© koninklijke brill nv, leideN, 2020 | DOI:10.1163/9789004413603_009 168 chapter 9

1 From GATT to WTO: Global Framework for the Neoliberalization of Services

The role of the World Trade Organization in the burgeoning global neoliberal- ism of the last three decades is on equal footing with that of the World Bank and the IMF, albeit in a more indirectly supportive, contextual manner. Whereas the WB/IMF serves the purpose of providing the structural demands and gyrations needed to realize post-Washington Consensus principles and policies at the local level, the WTO serves to assist in those social and economic transmutations through the provision and enforcement of a complex nexus of regional and global free trade agreements. In this way the WTO’s main function is to insure the necessary articulation of rules and regulations to promote “unfettered” global trade, and to warrant that the exchange of goods and services involved in market liberalization around the world are delivered in a requisite scope, mag- nitude, and regularity befitting of free market capitalism with planetary designs. Along with the World Bank and the IMF, the historical roots of the World Trade Organization are also found in the aftermath of the Great Depression and World War II, with the creation of the General Agreement of Tariffs and Trade (GATT). In response to the intensification of protectionist policy in inter- national trade that helped catapult the world toward the catastrophic events of the 1930s and ‘40s, twenty-three countries, led by the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom, negotiated the creation of the GATT in 1947 (Bown, 2009). Created as the third institution for post-war international economic sta- bility, after the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, GATT’s gen- eral goal was to reduce national tariffs and promote free trade in goods. This was to be done through a “basic template of rules and exceptions to regulate international trade between members” in order to “ensure postwar stability and avoid a repeat of the mistakes … which had been a contributor to the dev- astating economic climate that culminated in the death and destruction of the Second World War” (Ibid., p. 11). Since GATT’s creation in 1947–48, there have been eight rounds of trade negotiations, with a ninth, the Doha Development Agenda, underway at the time of this writing. Early and ongoing negotiations focus on lowering tariffs on imported goods, and by the mid 1990s capitalist industrial countries’ tariff rates on industrial goods had fallen to less than 4 percent (World Trade Organization, 2015, p. 11). In its present incarnation, the WTO “deals with the rules of trade between nations at a global or near-global level” (World Trade Organization, 2015, p. 9). These rules represent:

WTO agreements, negotiated and signed by the bulk of the world’s trading nations. These documents provide the legal ground rules for international