EDUCATION, GLOBALIZATION AND THE NATION STATE Also by Andy Green andfrom the same publishers EDUCATION AND STATE FORMATION Education, Globalization and the Nation State Andy Green Reader in Education Institute of Education University ofL ondon palgrave macmillan First published in Great Britairi 1997 by MACMILLAN PRESS LTD Houndmills. Basingstoke. Hampshire RG21 6XS and London Companies and representatives throughout the world A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN 978-0-333-68316-3 ISBN 978-0-230-37113-2 (eBook) DOI10.1057/9780230371132 First published in the United States of America 1997 by ST. MARTIN'S PRESS, INC., Scholarly and Reference Division. 175 Fifth Avenue. New York. N.Y. 10010 ISBN 978-0-312-17266-4 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Green. Andy. 1954- Education. globalization and the nation state I Andy Green. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index. ISBN 978-0-312-17266-4 (cloth) I. Education and state-History-Case studies. 2. Education -History-Case studies. 3. Comparative education. I. Title. LC71.G76 1997 370'.9-dc2I 96-46320 CIP @ Andy Green 1997 All rights reserved. No reproduction. copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced. copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright. Designs and Patents Act 1988. or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency. 90 Tottenham Coun Road. London WIP 9HE. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright. Designs and Patents Act 1988. 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Transferred to digital reprinting 2002 For Caroline Contents Acknowledgements ix Introduction Postmodernism and State Education 7 2 Education and State Formation in Europe and Asia 29 3 Technical Education and State Formation in Nineteenth-Century England and France 52 4 The Roles of the State and the Social Partners in Vocational Education and Training Systems 74 5 Education and Cultural Identity in the United Kingdom 93 6 Educational Achievement in Centralized and Decentralized Systems 106 7 Education, Globalization and the Nation State 130 Notes 187 Bibliography 190 Index 203 Acknowledgements Many of the chapters in this book are based on essays of mine which orig inally appeared in journals and edited books over the past three years: Chapter 1 from 'Postmodernism and State Education' in Journal of Education Policy; Chapter 2 from 'Education and State Formation in Europe and Asia' in A. Heikkinen (ed.), Vocational Education and Culture - European Prospects from Theory and Practice, Tampere; Chapter 3 from 'Technical Education and State Formation in Nineteenth Century England and France' in History of Education Journal; Chapter 4 from 'The Roles of the State and the Social Partners in Vocational Education and Training Systems' in L. Bash and A. Green (eds), Youth, Education and Work: World Yearbook of Education 1995, Kogan Page. Chapter 5 is from an article written jointly with Richard Aldrich which appeared as 'Education and Cultural Identity in the United Kingdom' in B. Hildebrand and S. Sting (eds), Erziehung und Kulturelle 1dentitiit, Waxman. My thanks to the editors and publishers of those volumes and particularly to Richard Aldrich for allowing me to publish a revised version of our essay here. A number of people have been generous enough to read and comment on various versions of these essays. I would like to thank in particular Pat Ainley for his sound advice on Chapters 1 and 7, and Hugh Lauder, Brian Simon and Michael Young for their very helpful comments on the final chapter. My thanks also to Hilary Steedman with whom I have collabo rated on a number of research projects, the results of which I have drawn on in Chapter 6. Needless to say in the course of writing these essays I have been helped and influenced by many others, not least my students at the Institute of Education. I am grateful to them all but take full respons ibility for the outcome here. Introduction Historically, education has been both parent and child to the developing nation state. The national education system as a universal and public insti tution first emerged in post-revolutionary Europe as an instrument of state formation. It provided a powerful vehicle for the construction and integ ration of the new nation state and became one of its chief institutional sup ports. Since then few nations have embarked on independent statehood without recourse to its ideological potential; even the older states, at least in periods of war and crisis, have continued to view education as a valu able source of national cohesion and a key tool for economic develop ment. However, the role of the nation state is now changing, and with it the place of education. The world system of nation states is being transformed by new global forces. For many social scientists globalization has revolutionary con sequences, not only in terms of the world economy but also in the realms of politics and culture. National economies are eroded by the growing interdependence of world markets in capital, goods, services and informa tion. Multinational corporations become transnational entities, relocating their operations as profit dictates, and beyond the power of national con trols. Financial capital becomes equally mobile and ubiquitous - like power to Foucault (or God to deists), it is immanent everywhere and at the same time. Faced with these uncontrollable world market forces, so it is argued, governments no longer have sovereign control of monetary, fiscal and labour market policies; national economies can no longer be managed. Information technologies and modern communications are likewise transforming cultures and politics. Time and space are compressed and a new global culture emerges, at once both more uniform and more particu lar than the national cultures it replaces. The autonomy of the nation state is curtailed by new levels of political agency, from outside by the growth of supra-national, regional and world associations, and from inside by subnational regionalisms. The nation state, it is argued, is also fast losing its military sover eignty; it no longer has that monopoly of legitimate violence which was, to Max Weber at least, its defining condition. The year 1989 marked the end of the Cold War and of a world divided into superpower military blocs. The old 'balance of power' system, which kept the world at war 2 Education, Globalization and the Nation State and at peace for the last two hundred years, is now finished. We are entering an era of fluid international relations, where areas of relative order and safety coexist uneasily with zones of disorder and uncertainty (Cooper, 1996). The advanced states of the West and East have lost their imperial urge and their territorial ambitions. They no longer want to fight each other and, even if they did, so the argument goes, would be con strained by nuclear weapons and the regionalization of defence. In the developing world there are still areas of danger and tension, exacerbated by the ever widening gap between rich and poor nations which is made daily more visible through global communications. But, as the Gulf War demonstrated, the advanced world still retains the overwhelming mili tary power to contain challenges to the status quo. For the moment, at least, there is a new, if precarious, order in world relations, based on new prin-ciples. This so-called 'cooling out' of international relations, and the weakened military rationale for nationhood, it is argued, has left the advanced nation states with a crisis of identity. Since the development of a world system of states from the seventeenth century, the military imperative provided the principal raison d'etre for the nation state. In fact it was primarily through warfare that it came into existence (Tilly, 1990). Since the Reformation, it was a commonplace of statecraft, as Elizabeth I famously noted, that national unity could be won through facing a common enemy abroad. The Cold War embodied this principal to an extreme (Chomksy, 1969) but by then it was already becoming a politics of 'virtual war', hastened by the US debacle in Vietnam and the 'media war' in the Gulf. Now the advanced states no longer have this 'easy' option. They have to find new bases for national identity and social cohesion. In the twenty-first century the dangers to the nation state will come as much from within as from without. Massacres in Lockerbie, Hungerford, Dunblane, Oklahoma, the Tokyo Metro and Port Arthur have all tragically emphasized just how far the means of violence have been privatized and internalized. But the problems of social violence go deeper than these extreme examples - bearing on the very basis of social solidarity in modern pluralistic societies. In the coming century the main challenge to nation states will be to find renewed forms of social solidarity com mensurate with their new roles in the global order. What is the role of education in this 'post-national' era? How far can national states control their education systems in a world of global markets and supra-national political organization? How distinctive will national education systems remain against pressures for international convergence? How far can states promote 'national cultures' through education and what