ABSTRACT
The World Trade Organization (WTO) is a multilateral institution with 152 member countries that promotes free trade at a planetary scale. The WTO deals with a broad range of sensitive policy issues, such as agriculture, intellectual property, public services and the environment. In the framework of this international organization, these and other issues are treated from a very particular perspective that seeks to give new global trade rights to capital, while neglecting labour, environmental, cultural and social aspects related to trade. This is the main reason why, since its creation in 1995, the WTO has become a prime target of a broad range of social movements. In fact, the mobilizations against the WTO – such as the ‘Battle of Seattle’, organized during the third WTO Ministerial Conference – are considered key episodes in the constitution of a ‘movement of movements’ or, put another way, in the convergence of different movements in common battle fields (Waterman 2001; Santos 2004; Smith 2001). One of the most sensitive issues that is being negotiated in the WTO is the
liberalization of education. The link of this international organization to education was established in one of its principal agreements, the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS). GATS pushes for the liberalization – and the blockage of liberalization commitments – of all kind of services, including education. GATS seeks guarantees for transnational education providers to facilitate their ability to operate at a global scale with a minimum of barriers and obstacles. The barriers to trade in (education) services are normally fixed in state regulation. As a result, the liberalization commitments adopted within the GATS mean that states will have to modify the regulation of their education systems to apply more business-friendly rules. GATS has been strongly criticized by the education community because it threatens to lead to the commodification of education and to an unequal exchange between southern and northern countries. It also accentuates the problem of brain drain, promotes cultural and linguistic homogenization and makes it more difficult for countries to build their own public higher education systems (Robertson, Bonal and Dale 2002; Scherrer 2007).
