The international provision of higher education : do universities need GATS ?(1)
Dr Andris Barblan
GLOBAL UNIVERSITY NETWORK FOR INNOVATION
First General Assembly
Hangzhou, 20-22 September 2002
The international provision of higher education : do universities need GATS ?
Dr Andris Barblan
European University Association,
Geneva / Brussels
3 China is now a member of the WTO, the organisation that monitors and facilitates world trade development. For a much longer time, China has been a member of UNESCO, the agency for education, science and culture created, at the end of the last World War, to foster peace in the minds of the people of the planet. As agencies of the United Nations system, both organisations encourage some 200 nations of the world to work together rather than fight with each other. However, although composed of the same governments, representing most of the people of the planet, the WTO and the UNESCO act on a different basis, use different approaches of international co-operation, refer to different worldviews 每 also when dealing with education, and higher education in particular. Indeed, this could create tensions between decision-makers in each member country, UNESCO and the WTO calling for divergent political options not always easy to reconcile.
Processes of internationalisation
4 In other words, today, internationalisation is driven by two cultures, one resulting at UNESCO in so-called conventions, the other, at WTO, in so-called agreements.
4.1 The term convention comes from the Latin con, which means, with and from venire that translates into to come. In other words, a convention is the result of people coming together; indeed one of the meanings of the word is the group itself of those persons meeting for a similar purpose: for instance, the convention of the Democratic Party. Another and subsequent meaning relates to the transcription of the minimum common denominator that justifies the fact that such a group comes together. As a result, a convention is also a text that makes explicit a set of references accepted as common by the people gathered around the same cause. A written convention, when it extends the common will of being together, now, to a commonality of purpose for tomorrow, usually lists an agenda for action intended to foster group convergence, thus helping people to meet again on similar terms. When the partners joining together are country governments, conventions, that record the compromises made to reach a common purpose, become a tool of internationalisation, the basis for a common vocabulary, for an accepted understanding of activities leading to similar objectives. The actors join in a common system of references building consensus from experiences usually gained in bilateral contacts.
Basically, con-venire reflects a bottom up process in which each participant keeps control of the adaptations made in one＊s behaviour to sustain the group＊s shared objectives. As a result, any new step in the internationalisation process needs further exploration of possible common ground, i.e., a new round of negotiations. Countries need to be convinced of the interest of closer links 每 of a higher common denominator ; thus, each new compromise is an ad hoc decision and, in the bargaining for international coherence, governments can feel justified to re-negotiate past arrangements. In other terms, the convention culture is based on individual agendas and on a combination of ad hoc decisions that make the process relatively unstable, very complex, difficult and slow when the partners involved in the discussions are many.
Thus, after years of discussions, UNESCO and the Council of Europe proposed a Convention on the recognition of degrees in Europe, the so-called Lisbon Convention that was signed in 1997 before being ratified by various countries 每 27 to date. It tries to build recognition of training and education on trust rather than on the minute equivalence of courses and credits 每 a system that had rarely led to a greater mobility of students, graduates and academics between countries and between universities. Today, the convention is also opened to countries outside of the European region, those countries that would like to benefit from the same recognition procedures in order to join the academic communities that negotiated the Convention. Last April, in Lisbon, a conference took stock of the achievements brought about by that document; its wider application was recommended as a complement to the so-called Bologna process, an intra-European effort made at building by 2010 a coherent and cohesive European Higher Education Area including some 35 countries 每 another example of convention culture that will be discussed later.
4.2 The other culture 每 in fact, a specific example of the convention culture 每 refers to the term agreement or, in French, ※accord§, which comes from the Latin ad and cordia, i.e., to the hearts - in other terms of the same heart. An accord expresses a conformity of feelings, of wishes. To agree goes deeper than to convene. In fact, to be of the same heart, the participants must not only join a system of references but also accept the merging of these references into one common system that expresses the conditions and constraints of their co-operation. They have to go beyond promises 每 that are implied in the word com-promise 每 and must offer con-cessions, a procedure in which they cede, or abandon part of their autonomous will in order to join common development. An agreement does not allow for real changes of mind; indeed, there is little room for retreat from a system which lists the frame conditions for co-operation, thus requiring from participants an open ended acceptance of future, potentially unexpected arrangements. Thus, as an accord supposes a commitment to the unexpected, at least in the framework of an agreed area of common competence, there is no use for the constant re-negotiations of closer contacts, as is the case for a convention. In a way, an agreement has more of a top down nature than a convention - considering the relative automatism of its extension to enlarged areas of common interest. Thus, an agreement is simpler, easier, faster to apply than a convention. Why? Because it requires more trust in the other, more confidence in the future than a convention that tends to check the direction of change at every step. And this requirement is not written in the document!
In this spirit, the World Trade Organisation, in 1995, proposed a General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS) that would extend the lowering of tariffs and other commercial barriers to exchanges other than the trade of goods that had been covered by an earlier series of negotiations, from the Kennedy round in the early sixties to the Millenium round at present. GATS should cover in particular financial services 每 banking and insurance, for instance -, tourism and transportation, health or education, to name but a few types of services of common interest. The 1995 Agreement indicates a few basic principles 每 accepted by all signatory governments 每, principles that can apply to all services under discussion. For instance, the national treatment clause says that all foreign services are to be treated as if they were national; or the most favoured nation clause, the MFN, indicates that any concession offered to one country is automatically granted to all the others which are also part of the agreement. These principles represent the framework conditions of the deregulation of trade - for services, in this case; once accepted, they become the constraints of commercial internationalisation 每 also in the field of education.
In June this year, all WTO member governments were invited to outline the areas of trade in services that they were ready to commit to deregulation, i.e., the fields which they would accept to open to foreign providers on conditions similar to those applied to their own national providers. All these offers are now being collated in Geneva to prepare for the bartering of concessions 每 which will apply to all partners in the system. The whole process should be finished by the beginning of 2005. As for education, 31 countries 每 out of 180 (?) WTO members 每 have indicated an interest in lowering trade barriers concerning the provision of training, four mentioning explicity higher education, Australia, Japan, New Zealand and the United States of America, but in very different terms.
Trust and value 每 the implicit tenets of internationalisation
5 Let us look back on our international past, in the 19th and 20th centuries
2.1 In the middle of the 19th century, the countries of Europe were known as the ※concert of nations§; they were the countries going through the same industrialisation process, characterised by the use of steel, coal and steam to develop shipping and rail connections that, starting from Britain in the 1840＊s, expanded throughout Europe in the next 30 years before extending to the whole world by the turn of the 20th century. As a group of nations 每 long accustomed to quarrel and fight 每 the countries of Europe accepted at the time that they needed some kind of procedure to harmonise their common economic fate rather than to insist on their unique political identities. In the 1860＊s, under the leadership of France, and with the support of Britain, the most favoured nation clause was invented to reinforce the economic ripples of industrial development. Such a policy was based on trust, trust in the partners of the concert of nations, on the one hand, trust in one＊s own capacity to benefit from competition, on the other. But also trust in an open future in which governments could take the risk for the unknown, i.e., for the unexpected consequences of a world community that would affect them in the long term. Most European governments felt confident enough to risk tradition against potential wealth. Such trust was turned into value by the use of gold as the standard for measuring exchanges and assessing the success of trade. Combined to the MFN, the gold standard, common to all, allowed for the opening of European markets to foreign competitors and for the fast reorganisation of production, from food to industrial products, that was to transform world society in the second half of the 19th century. Not always without reactions, however, as groups of people and countries were losing well-defined positions and roles to make way to the new world order. To counteract such losses, some encouraged colonial enterprises that would channel and protect trade restricted to specific partners only 每 France and Indochina, Britain and India, for instance, not to speak of Far Eastern conquests for Russia or Far Western settlements in the US. This also led to nationalist assertions of identity, in newly created countries like Germany and Italy in particular. Such reactions against free trade contributed, in the long run, to the political and military oppositions that led to the first World War: they killed global change and global exchange for most of the 20th century. For the cosmopolitan classes that ruled at the time, however, these fifty years of free trade remained the memory of a golden age when people, capital and goods could move freely, thus passing borders with no need for a passport or a visa, while using gold as a standard making comparable trade and exchanges all over the world.
3.1 From 1918 onwards, the history of the 20th century can be considered as a single-minded effort to recreate the conditions of that golden age; politically, to make war impossible, the concert of European nations was to be enlarged to the countries of the world through the setting up of the League of Nations, with a secretariat in Geneva. This attempt at internationalisation suffered a fatal blow, however, when the US Congress refused to follow President Woodrow Wilson, who had launched the organisation. On the economic front, gold was reinstated asthe standard of trade, with disastrous results however, when the golden standard was pegged too high 每 in particular vis-角-vis the pound sterling -, thus restricting commerce at a time of reconstruction while stimulating, on the contrary, efforts made by single countries to control their own economic fate. One of the results of such developments was the second World War.
After 1945, efforts were renewed stabilise the world, especially through the creation of the United Nations organisation with its many specialised agencies, UNESCO in particular, but also, the World Trade Organisation. Super-powers, however, were reluctant just after the war to entrust a world organisation with the monitoring and the facilitation of trade; again, a question of trust in the other or in the future! Instead, they settled for a treaty that would cover one aspect of commercial exchanges only, custom duties and tariffs. Thus was signed and ratified the General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs, the GATT, on the basis of which various negotiation rounds were organised to reduce the obstacles to international exchanges represented by country rules protecting national providers of goods and products. And it is only in the nineties, during the Uruguay round, that, comforted by the success of GATT as a forum of negotiations, the World Trade Organisation was finally set up.
Some governments considered that the global approach proposed by UN agencies was too slow and cumbersome, by the sheer fact of the number of countries involved and of the diversity of conditions prevailing in each of them. For instance, the lessons of two world wars fought in Europe in less than fifty years were pointing to the need for stability and peace if the area were to rise from its ruins. Several approaches were proposed to uproot hatred and mistrust in Western Europe: political ones, for instance, that would help national decision-makers to meet and develop common regulations, projects and programmes. Thus the Council of Europe was created and its Assembly comprised of parliamentarians from some 20 countries, at first, and now from 42 nations. Economic linkages were also considered as a possible route to international confidence. Consequently, in the early fifties, the six countries that had been at the heart of the two world conflicts 每 France, Germany, Italy, Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg - organised as a single sector of multinational activities the many firms that could support war efforts, steel and coal industries in particular. That European Community for Steel and Coal represented the seed of trust for the Common Market, set up in 1957 by the Treaty of Rome, that extended free trade to all goods and products produced in the area 每 beyond steel and coal. At a regional level, the most favoured nation clause was being used to its full and, as a consequence, like in the 19th century, the mobility was not only granted to the objects but also to finance and, more importantly, to people. The launch of the Euro, and its formal use since January this year, have completed the model of the earlier century by offering a money standard that would also make possible comparisons of value, in terms of goods and services. No longer in the 6 original countries of the 1950＊s but in the 12 countries that have accepted the common currency 每 the last three countries of the community hesitating still to abandon their own monies, the sterling in Britain, the crown in Denmark or Sweden. Again, a question of trust! With some 400 million people, however, the Common Market 每 now the European Union - has turned in fifty years from a disaster area into a pocket of prosperity that attracts neighbouring countries. At present, it is also a leading partner in commerce which, in the World Trade Organisation, deals as a single entity vis-角-vis all other governments. This same dream of liberalisation to counter nationalist stances has also been pursued in other regions, at a lesser level of integration hoowever, for instance in South America with the Mercosur or the Andean Pact, or in North America with NAFTA, the North American Free Trade Agreement.