School Choice and Globalisation

Abstract

One of the defining characteristics of globalisation is the demand it creates for a system of global free trade and laissez-faire economics. Marginson (1999) argues that under it nation states are now merely junior partners for large multinational companies, and that this particular politico-economic agenda is advanced through pro-capitalist ‘manoeuvres’ like the introduction of the euro. The development of global markets is not a natural occurrence, but the deliberate result of specific national and transnational forces (Bottery, 2001), which have had the effect of introducing to education a new business lexicon and a new ethic. At its most basic, globalisation affects the ‘financial probity of nation states and their ability to maintain adequate provision of services’ (ibid.: 204) like public schooling. Critics hold that globalisation constrains what a state can do in its own interest, and although national governments still have a large degree of freedom in relation to domestic economic policy, that discretion is lessening all the time (Held, 1999). In the interim, multinational companies are creating international networks of coordinated production that pay little or no heed to national borders (Reid, 2002) and the fear of wealth fleeing from one inhospitable country to another more sympathetic one limits the de facto autonomy of national governments to act. Decisions are now increasingly made by international bodies such as the United Nations, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the European Union, the North American Free Trade Association, the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) and so on, in a constrained form of democracy where decisions are no longer made by elected representatives.