The United Nations and Education

Multilateralism, Development and Globalisation

David Coleman, Phillip W. Jones

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• Print ISBN:
  9780415653015
• eBook ISBN:
  9781134306213
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Comparative Education

The UN is often questioned about its ongoing relevance and overall effectiveness in the 21st century, particularly in its involvement with educational policy and co-operation around the globe. This ground-breaking book examines the four key agencies within the UN system that share the vital role of addressing educational futures: UNESCO, the World Bank, UNICEF and UNDP.

As the core of educational multilateralism, these agencies powerfully reflect the UN's historic grounding in peace, human rights and economic development. The history of each agency's commitment to education is explored with critical detachment, with particular attention paid to the post-Cold War period, during which each agency has needed to re-think the impact of globalisation on both its modes of operation as well as the content of its education policies. Just as education policy itself has been subject to the impact of globalisation, so to has each agency had to adapt at a time when not only education but also their own mandates have been thrown open to question.

This timely book will be essential reading for all those working with and for UN agencies, foreign aid workers and the development co-operation industry. At a time when education policies, budgets and strategies appear wide open to profound changes, this book will provide a much-needed roadmap to the future.

1: Multilateralism and world order

This book examines how the United Nations has organised itself to promote the advancement of education. As an account of multilateral education, the story is told from the establishment of the UN in its immediate WW2 and early cold war contexts through to contemporary concerns about globalisation and new threats to global security. A basic point is that the UN’s key education agencies have not been able to isolate themselves from the basic issues swirling around the UN system.

Vigorous debates persist about the relevance, effectiveness and impact of the multilateral system. The UN, in particular, seems to be constantly justifying itself, yet continues to be looked to rather than by-passed for solutions to both global and local problems. As established patterns of world order look more fragile than ever, the UN has sought to rebuild its legitimacy, holding firm to the values it regards as fundamental to its mission yet seeking fresh mandates and new ways of working.

The spotlight is on the four UN agencies most committed to the development of education–the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO), the World Bank, the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), and the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP). The history of each agency’s commitment to education is told, with special attention paid to the years since the end of the cold war. The agencies have had to assess not only the content of their education policies and programs, but also the assumptions and processes giving rise to them. In doing this, they continue to cling to much from their past, even as they attempt to forge new identities and futures for themselves.

The two UN ‘specialised agencies’ under scrutiny–UNESCO and the World Bank–remain not only the UN’s principal education agencies but also its most controversial. UNESCO, questioning many aspects of westernisation and globalisation, has remained embroiled in controversy, its legitimacy placed under serious strain during the absence for over a decade of the United States and the United Kingdom, and its effectiveness seriously constrained by the limits of its financial resources. These have compromised UNESCO’s capacity to act as the UN system’s ‘lead agency’ in education. The World Bank, on the other hand, remains under fire for its championing of economic globalisation, from which its education policies and lending have been principally derived. The bank, the strongest player in multilateral education, continues to attract strident criticism from both left and right, its intellectual, policy and financial influence dominating much official discourse worldwide on the future of education as a dimension of economic and social policy.

The other two agencies examined in this book are part of the central component of the UN system, two of several ‘funds and programs’ responsible to the General Assembly (unlike the autonomous specialised agencies). In recent years, the quiet achiever in education has been UNICEF that, with its rights-based programs in education, has emerged as a significant player, especially at the grass-roots level of country programs. The surge in UNICEF’s support for education has partly offset the official abandoning of education by UNDP in the late 1990s, UNDP having been for decades the UN system’s dominant source of grants for educational development. With the other three agencies all claiming education as an increasingly important sector of their work, UNDP’s equivocal stance on education is worthy of special attention.

Taken together, the agencies account for the significant impact the UN has had on educational development over the past half-century. As the core of multilateral education, they powerfully reflect the UN’s historic grounding in peace, human rights, and economic and social development as its primary drivers. There can be no doubting the power and influence of the agencies in shaping key ideas and policies about education futures; further, with the exception of UNESCO, their financial clout across the developing world cannot be questioned.

Yet despite their common identity within the UN system, the agencies are very different. Their patterns of governance, mandates, sources of funding and ways of working have all combined to produce sharp differences in how they view education and its relationship to wider society. With contrasting values and policy stances on education, the agencies compete for prominence, not only within the UN system but in many contexts in which education futures are debated. In the world of development policy, aid and co-operation, the agencies are competitors as much as collaborators.

This chapter sets the scene for the book as a whole, by providing for the general reader an overview of major currents in thinking about international relations, multilateral co-operation and world order. These accounts are of direct relevance to understanding the UN, and in Chapter 2 are utilised as a means of exploring key issues and developments in postwar multilateral education. Chapters 3 to 6 address each agency in turn, while Chapter 7 examines the expansion of civil society involvement in their work and the opening up of new spaces in multilateral education.

Accounts of multilateralism

The UN’s history runs in tandem with the development of several important schools of thought addressing the conduct of international relations (IR). UN history is tightly bound up with the posing of new questions and new ways of thinking about world order, particularly the exercise and management of global power relations. The UN is obviously a strong example of how established world order can be and has been put on an institutionalised basis; but it is also a story of how world order can be transformed through such means as the UN. Thus the UN as a reflection of world order needs also to be understood as a shaper of world order, and that dualism is seen in prominent shifts in international relations theory since the founding of the UN.

It is not surprising that theories of international relations (IR) have failed to keep pace with–let alone anticipate–the complexity and speed of change at global level. Unlike many other branches of the social sciences (that when comprehensively and coherently articulated have considerable potential to influence and shape economic, political and cultural life) theories of international politics and relations have tended more to follow than lead. Perhaps this is inevitable given ways in which explanatory and interpretive concerns have generally taken precedence, although to be sure they have been accompanied by and have interacted with an important range of normative or prescriptive concerns (for comprehensive overviews on the development of IR see Schmidt 1998; Baylis and Smith 2001; Boucher 1998; on normative approaches see Cochran 1999; on new possibilities for IR see Keene 2002; Inayatullah and Blaney 2004).

Despite the complexity of the field, each of the major theoretical accounts that have grown up in the twentieth century can be located in contexts greatly relevant to the history of multilateralism and of the UN in particular. As we shall see, the term ‘international relations’ is becoming less than satisfactory as a descriptor of the field in which multilateralism is located, in that the classic accounts placed overwhelming emphasis on nation states as the primary and fundamental units of analysis. Limiting the field to the engagement of nation states is no longer a serious option, and much of the literature today reflects a more comprehensive and inclusive concern with the dynamics of world order. In other words, states are no longer the primary avenue for understanding the exercise of power and the dynamics of change at global levels. Thus the conventional way of understanding what multilateralism is–the engaging by at least three states in matters of mutual concern–has been overtaken by commitments to construct world order in more diverse ways than is suggested by the term ‘international relations’ (this increasing diversity is well captured in Jackson and Sorenson 1999; Kegley and Wittkopf 2001).

A distinction can be drawn immediately between the organisation of political multilateralism and of economic multilateralism. The global system has long incorporated arrangements for multilateral trade and payments, involving a wide array of non-state actors. These economic actors, part of what is termed ‘civil society’, are quite separable from the state and act in accordance with norms and cultures of their own, even if their behaviour is subject to the regulation of states and the state system. This pattern of economic multilateralism remains distinct from more conventionally understood political multilateralism with its emphasis on engagement through state diplomacy and through inter-governmental organisations. Political multilateralism and economic multilateralism have both produced–independently and in conjunction–an array of inter-governmental organisations that with time built up authority, legitimacy and functions that were distinctly theirs, increasingly separable from their points of origin (states and the world economic system). Some combinations of actors have been notable in their potency, not least collaboration between global economic actors and the institutions of economic multilateralism, frequently beyond the regulatory reach of governments acting alone or in collaboration (for general overviews see Wendt 1999; Edkins 1999).

Yet to confine considerations of world order essentially to two distinct but interactive components, a state system plus a global economic system, is still too limiting. Increasingly, multilateral organisations are seen as world actors in their own right, behaving as distinctive components of global power relations and not merely as functional extensions of the systems that gave rise to them. But more than this, many conceptions of world order are now placing strong emphasis on even wider conceptions of what constitutes global society. Concerns with the biosphere and the global environment, for example, have prompted the inclusion of forces concerned with the comprehensive and urgent forging of a sustainable global ecosystem. From that, world order over recent decades has developed spaces for a range of concerns whose inclusion in very general terms has been the subject of consensus, even if debates rage about the details: human rights, gender, ethnic relations, peace, refugees–all issues that like ecology cut across state boundaries, becoming institutionalised as dimensions of multilateral concern yet primarily promoted in spaces other than those occupied by states or the world economic system. The inelegant term ‘civil society’ has emerged as a shorthand way of denoting vast nongovernmental but increasingly institutionalised means of developing world order and promoting change at the global level. Thus, analysis of multilateralism needs to incorporate these institutionalised means of promoting concerns, many of which are expressed at the local level as well as at national, regional and global levels, not least by sub-national political entities and by advocacy undertaken on behalf of the less powerful (see Falk 1995; Archibugi and Held 1995; Smith and Borocz 1995; Cox 1987).

The field of inquiry conventionally termed ‘international relations’ is one in which high levels of theoretical doubt and tentativeness prevail. Ambiguities and ironies permeate the field. It is clear that conventional explanatory accounts of IR, with their state-centric concerns with sovereignty, security, diplomacy and the pursuit of national interest, need to accept provisionally the ultimate uncertainties of global anarchy as opposed to an ordered pattern of global governance (for an overview see Schmidt 1998; on anarchy see Bull 1977). In other words, as states attempt to influence each other, by persuasion or force or whatever, that is recognised as a matter of power, not authority embedded in some formal construction of world order (see Murray 1997; Donnelly 2000; Kissinger 1994). Nevertheless, even if theoretical certainty is sought through this focus on states and the inevitability of their rivalries, recognition must be given to the expanding place of non-state actors in the international arena, many of which are beyond the legal and regulatory reach of governments, indicative of the escalating interdependence of states as opposed to the independence they enjoy in terms of their own sovereignty and authority. It has presented a theoretical challenge, and it is unlikely that any single theoretical perspective will soon emerge powerful enough to provide a single explanatory, interpretive and normative account of the complex world of international engagement. Participants in the field of international relations are generally well tested in their tolerance of eclecticism, given the interplay of state-centric, structuralist and transnationalist accounts.

Idealist accounts and liberal internationalism

No account of the UN’s establishment can leave untouched the overwhelming influence of idealist accounts of internationalism that had grown up in earlier times, especially in the wake of WW1. There was much intellectual background, of course, but the end of the conflict saw consideration of how a differently-ordered world might prevent the recurrence of such a catastrophe. The infamous ‘war guilt’ clause of the 1919 Versailles treaty and the system put in place to extract war reparation payments from Germany were part of the response (see Boemeke et al. 1998; Stevensen 1982). But broader consideration led to new thinking that at heart attempted to apply liberal democratic principles (that had been developed primarily as guides to domestic political life in the west) to the design, organisation and management of an international system of world order. The more utopian of these applications were developed by the Fabians and other liberal bodies, primarily in the United Kingdom, and their analysis of what had caused the outbreak of the war went well beyond the prevailing official thinking that emphasised the breakdown of diplomatic efforts, both bilateral and potentially multilateral, in the lead-up to 1914.

Many of the ideas that were developing in Britain appealed to no less a figure than US president Woodrow Wilson, who was keenly interested in the relationship between liberal democratic thinking as applied at the domestic level and its promotion at the international level. Wilson’s belief was that ‘the people’ are intrinsically peace-loving, it not being in their personal interests to provoke hostilities, and that war is more the product of their leaders’ authoritarianism, imperialism or militarism. The failure at the domestic level for democratic principles to be institutionalised constitutionally, in a way that permitted genuine national self-determination, was for Wilson an urgent task in his quest for a peaceful world. Such principles, argued Wilson (in, for example, his January 1918 ‘fourteen points’ address) could then be used in the construction of an international system whereby collective security and the rule of law at international level would replace the covert pattern of diplomacy leading up to 1914 and the more general patterns of military alliances that were ultimately belligerent (Schlesinger 2003; on how these ideas developed between the wars see Long and Wilson 1995).

In applying these and related principles to the international arena, Wilson was embarking on a quest to find institutionalised means of developing a structured world order. Most tangibly, it was the League of Nations that best expressed this, but in the longer term it was the thinking behind the league that proved more enduring. Collective security demanded that each country be prepared to defend the security of all others, and that the open rule of international law would displace the need for secret or at least ‘private’ bilateral understandings. While domestic politics prevented Wilson from bringing the United States to the League of Nations as a member, it is far from a trivial acknowledgment that the line of thinking he espoused is frequently referred to as the ‘Wilsonian’ approach to international relations.

The Wilsonian connection between domestic and international applications of liberal democratic thinking was not a matter of constructing a sequence of change, first in the domestic arena to be followed in the international. Rather, it was thought entirely possible that nations, despite whatever limits and obstacles to liberal democracy were apparent at home, could and would be prepared to ‘sign up’ to its application at the world level. This was, in fact, one of the fundamental problems of Wilsonianism: was the link between the domestic and international a necessary and pivotal one? Wilson himself, and many working in the tradition, argued that the link was not a central problem, in that their construction of world order depended more fundamentally upon capitalising on the alignment of ‘real interests’ that bound up all peoples, into a harmonious whole. This was a basic assumption of liberal internationalism, that wars broke out through short-sighted accounts of self-interest. Ignorance, greed and malice, in this view, provided no basis for security at any level of human existence. Through the careful study of self-interest could emerge solid foundations for defining and pursuing the national interest that, once understood completely, would be seen to be in harmony with the interests of all other nations.

That harmonisation of national interests could be a product of careful inquiry and reflection had important implications for education. There is no doubt that Wilson himself knew and appreciated the line of thinking espoused by John Dewey in what was perhaps the twentieth century’s most influential work on education, Democracy and Education, in which Dewey outlined his argument that the aims of education and the aims of a democratic society were identical (Dewey 1916). A democratic pattern of education would produce peaceable, progressive and socially-committed citizens, the precise basis in Wilson’s thinking for defining the national interest and aligning it with that of other peoples and nations. The 1920s and 1930s saw a myriad of intellectual and educational applications of this line of thinking, not least the progressive education movement, the international work of major US philanthropic foundations, and the very establishment of IR as an academic discipline. The global ‘export’ of these ideas, especially from the United States, was a logical outcome, a natural expression of the liberal internationalist impulse for peace and democracy.

As his presidency petered out, Wilson himself was too weak–physically and politically–to see through the application of his ideas, and political leadership across the western world was far from excited by them, whether in 1919 or in succeeding years. The events of the 1930s and their culmination in a new war shattered the League of Nations, but yet a great deal of the Wilsonian line of internationalist thinking was consciously applied in the design and establishment of the United Nations. Internationalism as a school of thought had survived, especially in the United States, Britain and France, and much of its appeal resurfaced among the chaos and desolation of the second great war. Its second great presidential champion, Franklin Roosevelt, played an astute political game, knowing when to emphasise US independence, when to put the spotlight on the interdependence of nations, and when to argue for United States leadership in the establishment of a new world order. In short, it is no exaggeration that all the official rhetoric surrounding the establishment of the UN reflects the liberal internationalism of Wilson and his followers (for accounts of the process see Divine 1967; Luard 1982; Cole 1983; Hoopes and Brinkley 1997; Schlesinger 2003).

Realism and its critique of idealist and internationalist accounts

The idealist accounts of the causes of war–and of WW1 in particular–were quick to draw the distinction between liberal democracies, intent on peaceable ways of living, and authoritarian, imperialist and militaristic regimes, whose greed and belligerence were the prime causes of war. But any observer in 1914 would have been rash to push the contrast too far if it were Britain and Germany that were under the spotlight. Even if the outbreak of hostilities were traceable to German intentions, these were the policy intentions of a constitutional state, with the rule of law and institutionalised mechanisms of accountability well-grounded as prominent features of its governance. In seeking accounts of how the world actually works, as opposed to idealised accounts of how it might or should work, contemporary critics of Wilsonian internationalism were quick to portray Wilson as yet another inconsistent and opportunistic politician, ‘duplicitous and sometimes fumbling’ (Schlesinger 2003: 24). In October 1919, John Maynard Keynes had published his Economic Consequences of the Peace (Keynes 1919), in which the postwar settlement was portrayed not as an attempt to construct a peaceable world order along democratic lines, but rather as crude and vindictive measures applied by the victors that would humiliate Germany, render its economy unworkable, and provoke devastating consequences on a much wider scale.

The breakdown in world financial discipline through the 1930s was a stark fulfilment of Keynes’ analysis. But more than that, the rise of populism in Germany, through which the German people protested their sustained economic subjugation, led to unprecedented levels of nationalism, levels that were swiftly and deftly capitalised upon by the national socialist movement. Even if idealist accounts of the causes of war made reasonable sense of developments in fascist Italy and imperialist Japan, the contradictions concerning Germany were too numerous to ignore. German populism saw the national socialists legitimately elected, even in 1933 when militaristic triumphalism was all too apparent as a plank for restoring national pride and rebuilding the economy. The clear support of the German people for national socialism dealt a severe blow to idealist and internationalist patterns of thinking. More than that, the i...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• The United Nations and education
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Tables
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• 1: Multilateralism and world order
• 2: Education, multilateralism and the UN
• 3: UNESCO
• 4: World bank
• 5: UNICEF
• 6: UNDP
• 7: New spaces for multilateral education
• Bibliography