Canada and the Global Rush for International Students: Reifying a Neo-Imperial Order of Western Dominance in the Knowledge Economy Era

Theoretical Framework

Typically in Canada, educational policy is managed provincially and reflects local needs and concerns, which are then debated and refined by policy-makers who draw on research-based knowledge to make policy recommendations and decisions. The policy sciences have sought to use value-free scientific and technically sophisticated methods to ensure the so-called ‘best’ results (Dobuzinskis, 2011; Westhues, 2006). However, critical educational scholarship has re-situated educational policy-making as a politically fraught process in both the national and the global sphere. Critical social theory uses theoretical and methodological insights from post-structural thinking, particularly the work of Foucault, to examine education policy as a ‘politically, socially and historically contextualized practice’ (Olssen et al., 2012: 3). Foucault articulated a new conceptualization of power as no longer sovereignty but rather a micro-physics of power, which he attributed to ‘the great invention of bourgeois society’ and as ‘a fundamental instrument in the constitution of industrial capitalism’ (Foucault, 1980: 105). Thus, managerial practices and organizational directives can be understood as serially related (through the capillaries of micro-power) to local practices and ‘the teacher is constituted (or reconstituted) in this network of discourses’ (Ball, 2010: 165). In this paper, our focus is on the supranational contexts of education policy formulation and how this then influences national policy developments. We strongly agree with critical scholars in education policy who view globalization as an ideology, value-laden with neoliberalism and a neo-imperial agenda (Ball, 2012; Coloma, 2009; Rizvi, 2009; Tikly, 2009).

To better understand international education policy from this view of globalization as an ideology, we trace its genealogy, which will link the preceding context with the current process and production of education policy. While history can be regarded as ‘old stuff’ which has no bearing on current events, the demarcation between the past and the present is not always clear, and while new events overwrite the past, traces of earlier events can linger on. As Ashcroft et al. put it:

While the ‘layering’ effect of history has been mediated by each successive period, ‘erasing’ what has gone before, all present experience contains ineradicable traces of the past that remain part of the constitution of the present. Teasing out such vestigial features left over from the past is an important part of understanding the nature of the present. (2001: 174)

A postcolonial standpoint does just this and foregrounds the history of western colonialism over the last five centuries. Rizvi and Lingard (2010: 25) note that ‘Historically, it can be argued that the contemporary expressions of globalization grew out of a range of colonial practices, built upon the patterns of global inequalities produced by colonial conquest’.

Postcolonial studies encompass a broad spectrum of academic disciplines and theoretical frameworks including literary theory, cultural studies, political science, and globalization. Critiqued from without and from within, postcolonial scholarship is riven with disagreements and debates. The actual term ‘postcolonial’ where the ‘post’ means that colonialism is over has been critiqued as absurd, by indigenous scholars from white settler societies (Coulthard, 2009; Smith, 2013; Turner, 2006). Literary and cultural postcolonial scholars have been critiqued as glossing over and sanitizing the colonial history of genocide, exploitation and slavery, which accompanied conquest and settlement (Krishna, 2009; Young, 2004). However, there is agreement amongst postcolonial scholars on challenging the economic inequality and power disparity between the European and North American continents and those of Africa, Asia and Latin America. Postcolonial cultural studies seek to disrupt the dominant western representations of the world, and to critique modernity and global capitalism. Krishna (2009: 4) positions postcolonialism as a ‘discursive or theoretical standpoint that opposes Eurocentrism in all its forms, not just when deployed by a geographically demarcated West upon a non-West’. Built on a tradition of anti-colonial resistance, postcolonial scholars have mobilized to struggle against the hegemony of global capitalism and neoliberal ideology, which positions the market as the arbiter of decisions (Burton, 2011; Gordon, 2010; Harvey, 2005; Krishna, 2009; Loomba, 2007; Young, 2003). Critical theories of globalization with a postcolonial lens thus guide our analysis of international education in Canada.

Scholarship on International Education

The globalization of education, especially international education, has been represented as a natural evolution or a ‘rational’ decision-making at the individual, familial, institutional, and national level. It has been characterized as an ‘organic response’ to fast-growing technology and the development of new knowledge-based economies (Pal, 2012; Pal and Ireland, 2009). Some studies on international education and foreign students report an increasing ‘individual motivation’ to become marketable in a competitive global economy by completing western education and building western cultural capital (Ong, 1998; Waters, 2006). Others discuss increasing ‘family motivation’ to educate their children in western countries as a way to secure an upward mobility not only for their children but also for the entire family (Kim, 2012; Noh, 2012; Seth, 2002). Policy documents and other public discourses (e.g. media coverage, institutional reports, etc.) illustrate how the fast-growing influx of foreign students has contributed to an economic boom in receiving countries, which then respond to this influx by changing their educational policies and practices (Lee and Johnstone, 2014). The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (2013) refers to increasing international education as the ‘revenue generating approach’ and claims that it has little to do with any political agenda of nations.

In this apolitical approach, governance and politics are discussed separately. New Public Management (NPM), which is the application of business principles to public administration, is pervasively referred to as the ‘best practice’. It has, however, few clear measures of what constitutes ‘best practice’ but is, in effect, referring to applied neoliberalism with recommendations of fiscal stringency, privatization, commodification and quality control principles (Connell, 2010). With this neoliberal standard as the reference point of best practice, some scholars present so-called good or best management strategies in public sectors including education, but make no linkages to a political agenda (Fukuyama, 2013; Pal, 2012). Depoliticizing global education policy thus contributes to an illusion that nations only respond to this growing phenomenon motivated by individual, family, and/or economic reasons. They fail to consider the broader political implications of forming national policies that synchronize with the world order of power disparity in the knowledge economy.

In this article we question this discourse that depoliticizes globalization and governance in the international education field. We illustrate our understanding of how this has occurred by tracing the expansion of western power and western education in modern history. Through our close reading of recent changes in Canadian education policy on international education and the correspondence of these changes with OECD education guidelines, we argue that economizing and depoliticizing international education seems like a new phenomenon, but is actually an old idea with a new name. We argue that the OECD functions today as a guiding force to maintain, shape, and normalize a neo-imperial agenda globally, mimicking the earlier ruling institutions in a colonial era. We then illustrate the tactics of governing that the OECD uses to position itself as a global leader in education such as, rescaling, the policy cycle and the promotion of ‘self-responsiblizing’ students. We then explore how this impacts national Canadian education policies in the international education field.

Changing Strategies of Global Governance

After Britain conceded self-government to the settler colonies of Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa, a Council of Empire headquartered in London was established whereby representatives from the settler colonies joined with the ministers of the British government to discuss management strategies and solutions for the management of empire. From 1887 until 1937, Canada participated in colonial conferences to discuss trade, immigration, and imperial defense with this select group of co-imperialists. Like the G-20 and the G-7 ¹ now, the primary focus of the discussions was economic co-operation to ensure the well-being and success of the commonwealth nations (Marshall, 1996).

Imperial British propaganda which asserted their civilized superiority as qualification to rule the world was pervasive. It is important to note how British imperial rule established empire-wide governance by establishing uniform standards and institutions accompanied by a discourse of universal benefit, which justified the imposition of their ideas and traditions as ‘apolitical’.

In the current global era, there are some striking similarities. International organizations such as, the OECD, the World Health Organization (WHO) and the World Bank have become the new imperial centers (Tikly, 2009). Not the British civilization but neoliberal ideas are disseminated, accompanied by a discourse of universal global benefit. Ideas such as the current pervasive assumption that New Public Management (NPM) is the most advanced system of administration ever known and that minimal state provision of services and individualism are optimal, are disseminated from the global/imperial center.

The Council of Empire was disbanded in 1937, and the postwar years saw a reconfiguration of many nation-states and new structures of global governance begin to take form. The Marshall Plan (a postwar recovery plan) was administered by the United States and provided financial assistance to European countries to assist them to re-establish economic stability. The member nations of the ruling Council of Empire were to become reconfigured in new global organizations, with the United States in a central position. These new organizations provided a continuation of western hegemony.

The Formation of the OEEC and the OECD

In 1948, headquartered in Paris, the Organization for European Economic Cooperation (OEEC) was established to ‘manage American and Canadian aid under the Marshall Plan to help re-build Europe, liberalize trade, develop a European payments Union and eventually construct the foundations of the European Common Market’ (Pal, 2012: xii). In 1961 it was replaced with the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), at which time Canada and the United States became members. Its mission was proclaimed to be the ‘highest sustainable economic growth and employment and a rising standard of living in member countries, while maintaining financial stability’ (Pal, 2012: xii). The OECD disseminated a discourse which suggested that this would contribute to the development of a world economy with what they showcased as non-discriminatory world trade and economic expansion for member countries and non-member countries alike. To achieve these goals the OECD identified the importance of effective public administration, and to identify what this would look like they completed two important studies. The first, Governance in Transition (1995), was directed towards the needs of the ‘transition’ countries of Eastern Europe and Central Asia after the fall of the Soviet Bloc. They addressed the new pressures on the fledgling democratic states, overtly promoting capitalism and neoliberalism:

The European challenge was to introduce capitalism and all that entailed in terms of privatization of state assets, deregulation, stock exchanges and a host of other standard market institutions. … The OECD became a cheerleader for freer market systems in both Central Europe and the rest of the world, as well as for leaner governance through the adoption of practices termed the ‘new public management’. (Pal, 2012: xv)

Ten years later, a second study was completed, Modernising Government: The Way Forward, which addressed the ‘best’ practices in public management trends distilled from the experience of the ‘developed world’. Historically, public management reform was a national matter and was considered in light of the specific conditions and circumstances within a nation-state. This report suggested that now ‘there are basic and common dimensions of ‘good governance’ that can be transferred from successful states to less successful ones’ (Pal, 2012: xv). Pal comments that:

Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher provided the bully pulpits whereby a message of governance reform (in the direction of smaller government, less taxation, less interference) could gain sustained attention. International Governmental Organizations (IGOs) like the World Bank, the UNDP, the UN and the OECD began to contribute conceptual frameworks and ideas about effective public management. (2012: xviii)

This new form of governance, which became known as New Public Management, was in effect ‘applied neoliberalism’ with tax-cutting, privatization, commodification of public services and an ethos of managerial power with increased managerial salaries and bonuses. In addition, business concepts of quality control were translated into bureaucratic procedures of accountability, enforcement of standards and product surveillance (Connell, 2010).

Notably absent from this discourse about globalization and global governance disseminated by the OECD is the ideological framework of neoliberalism. This discourse presents the ideas of ‘good governance’ and ‘successful/failed’ states as irrefutable common sense and empirically tested ‘truths’ without providing any measures of the embedded relativist judgments and values. Rizvi and Lingard (2010) argue that globalization is not a neutral phenomenon but is in fact an ideology which they call ‘globalism’. They attest that

neoliberal globalization promotes and normalizes a ‘growth-first approach’ to policy, relegating social welfare concerns as secondary. It rests on a pervasive naturalization of market logics, justifying them on the grounds of efficiency and even ‘fairness’. (2010: 31)

Now, in most countries, economic restructuring guides policy production. This is increasingly evident in international education policy reform as the knowledge economy has become an important state path to prosperity. Since this discourse is of a dominant global character, ‘an understanding of policy processes now requires a ‘global analysis of contemporary states’, rather than an acceptance of a ‘stateless globe’ (Therborn, 2007: 91, cited in Rizvi and Lingard, 2010: 16). Thus it is crucial to conduct a global policy analysis in relation to a national policy analysis in order to understand how the global order in power and dominance shape and reify the state policy and vice versa. We use the influential global organization the OECD to trace the links between global governance and state governance in international education in Canada.

Rescaling of Education Policy to Create Global Governance

The OECD uses competition, policy learning, and emulation to achieve compliance with its agenda. Standards and benchmarks establish the ‘rules of the game’ and the OECD collects and publishes this material on international education. Peer review, audits, and certification are regularly used for the enforcement of norms, and position the OECD as the global leaders in a new economic/imperial order (Pal, 2012).

How does this occur in education policy, especially international education in Canada? Rizvi and Lingard (2010: 14) have described an emergent global education policy field as ‘the scalar framing of policy discourses and texts extended beyond the nation’. This means that the context of policy texts is multilayered in scalar terms across the local, the national, and the global domains. This creates a new scalar politics, which becomes a key form of governance as it creates ‘a web of complexity’ which makes the shared power of governance in education ‘invisible’. It creates multiple positions with people hired into the positions invested in producing and reproducing the assigned policy agenda. This then legitimizes their own existence (who wants to lose a job!) in their roles and positions, relying on one another in a web of relationships embedded in neoliberal and capitalistic values.

While rescaling is occurring, there is a simultaneous occurrence of privatization. New Public Management reconstitutes quasi-markets in the public sector through a range of public-private partnerships. This privatization of public policy has changed the paradigm of ‘government to governance’: ‘This is the move away from a state-centric approach to policy production and implementation, to the utilization of multiple agencies and agents mixed in the public/private sectors across the nations’ interdependent to one another (Rizvi and Lingard, 2010: 17). This spreading of governance beyond state boundaries has created a new global politics where the exercise of power is shared between state sovereignty and global governance.

Neoliberal governance stretched out in a complex web of various private and public sectors permeates every aspect of education, not as a unitarian form but as ‘a number of heterogeneous discourses and measures, which ultimately converge and strengthen one another’ (Ondrej, 2011: 149–50). Rather than creating hierarchies of authority, networking through policy technologies (such as audit culture, peer-review, resource exchange, and standardization) governs education at the regional, national, and supranational levels. These networks self-organize their own growth, ‘performing’ in various forms yet converging and strengthening the global order of the neoliberal governance in education (Appadurai, 2006; Ball, 2009; Dale, 2006; Rizvi and Lingard, 2010).

To illustrate rescaling in international education policy in Canada, the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) from the OECD operates at the supranational level and sets the standard. At the national level, the Council of Ministers for Education, Canada (CMEC), disseminates the information across the country, providing links to the OECD and PISA standards. At the provincial level in Ontario, the Higher Education Quality Council of Ontario (HEQCO) publishes regular reports on ‘performance indicators’ in postsecondary education in Ontario, using the indicators identified by the OECD (HEQCO, 2014). At the local level, universities and schools attend to the standards provided by the HEQCO and ensure that their institution is competitively positioned. Once these standards have been transported through these multiple levels and become a pervasive norm and order of the education field, the site of origin is out of focus and the scalar nature of the policy and its political agenda is hidden from view.

The OECD also monitors the growth in annual revenue from foreign students in all their member countries and posts that information on the regular online reports. A sample of this is Education Indicators in Focus (OECD, 2013), which provides annually updated information on the educational standing of individual countries. Education at a Glance (OECD, 2013) profiles educational standards and benchmarks of individual countries, and Society at a Glance (OECD, 2014) lists an economic and social profile of individual countries. These reports provide destination information for prospective international students, but they also provide material that supports competition and policy emulation among the hosting countries. As Thornton (2012) notes, all developed countries in the global rush for international students have actively made use of these reports as essential marketing and quality assurance indicators to position themselves in best standing in international education business markets.

What does it mean that there are simultaneous plays of the local, national and global as spatial relations in the education policy? It implies that establishing the literacy rates in Toronto high schools might seem like a local initiative, but it is of national importance, as this information will be reported to the OCED and become part of their Education at a Glance report, which will be viewed by competitive nations and prospective consumers. This will influence Canada’s global rating and her success in recruiting international students, which will in turn become a factor in the national Gross Domestic Product (GDP). Similarly, this global benchmarking of performance indicators using test scores has had a dramatic impact on education in schools. For example, schools have developed correspondence teaching and testing procedures to provide the required test results to be shown in local, national, and OECD reports, and accordingly a curriculum becomes then centered on student performance in these test areas. Thus ‘accountability and performance measures for teachers contribute to this culture, which is associated with the new managerialism in state practices’ (Rizvi and Lingard, 2010: 20). In this context of globalization, education is seen as an economic policy and as the producer of the required human capital, necessary to ensure the competitiveness of the national economy. However, the complex web of multi-scalar policies in education limits the visibility of this close interconnectedness among social actors (e.g. teachers and students), education institutions, and local, provincial, national, and supranational governance and subsequently makes the neo-imperial agenda invisible.

A Cycle of Policy and Authority to (Re)produce Power

The OECD announces guidelines and indicators (e.g. PISA) for the so-called ‘best’ practice in education from so-called ‘successful states’ – neo-imperial states – which set the agenda and structure the situations that other countries want to follow as the standard. In etablishing this imaginary, common menus include cultural and ideological attractions, structuring interdependence and creating alliances. Cultural and ideological attractions such as multiculturalism, diversity, and a notion of a vibrant and clean city are common menus that appear in advertisement and recruitment pamphlets for international students (e.g. Canada Starts Here: The BC Jobs Plan, International Education Strategy). Structuring ‘interdependence’ in world orders – e.g. using a catch phrase like ‘in the global era, the world gets closer and connected’ – is crucial to influence the outcomes. Nye (1990: 158) cautions us that ‘interdependence does not mean harmony. Rather, it often means unevenly balanced mutual dependence’. Please recall the example where getting a good test score in a standardized exam in Toronto high schools is influencing the outcome of Canada’s GDP. In order to maintain the power in this uneven and colonizing dynamic, ‘alliances’ among neo-imperial nations and institutions using communications and institutions are crucial. Thus, ‘political leaders use international institutions to discourage or promote such linkages; they shop for the forum that defines the scope of an issue in the manner best suiting their interests’ (Nye, 1990: 158). Examples include the OECD/US Forum on Trade in Educational Services in Washington DC, 2002; the UNESCO/OECD Third Forum on Trade in Educational Services in Sydney, 2004; the annual OECD forum where education governance themes are addressed as a subcategory; the OECD Global Forum on Education held in Santiago, Chile, 2005, and in the Dominican Republic, 2008; and the OECD High Level Policy Forum on Skills for Social Progress held in São Paulo, 2014.

Using cultural and ideological attractions, structuring interdependence, and creating alliances, neo-imperial nations maintain and re-produce soft power. How can we understand this self-fulfilling soft-power mechanism? Ball (1994) accurately decodes this complex phenomenon using the term, ‘policy cycle’. As the mechanism of soft power production, a policy cycle is set up whereby state authority validates policies, and in turn the same policies are cited as a source of validation. The policy cycle itself becomes a form of governance creating non-disputable power. The repetitive use of phrases such as ‘best practice’ and ‘good performance’ of education appear in various policies, and by constantly reading and being reminded of them in numerous texts (e.g. legislations, reports, guidelines, indicators, media coverage, etc.) and everyday talk (e.g. meetings, presentations, etc.) in various education institutions, what the OECD produces and claims as ‘best’ or ‘good’ practice is not even questioned but marked as a norm or even as preferred values and ideologies.

For example, in 1995 a conservative government took office in Ontario, Canada’s largest migrant-receiving province, resulting in huge funding cuts on public services including the education system. Premier Harris promised to return to ‘the good old days’ and claimed that mass cuts in education were ‘common sense’ approaches (Johnstone and Lee, 2014). Who would dispute then returning to the ‘good old days’ and ‘common sense’? Thus, these neoliberal ideas become the norm and the indisputable agenda. The OECD prides itself on using non-coercive ways of governing but the strategies of governance they employ create implicit yet undeniably coercive normalization.

Furthermore, neoliberal values become normative and are expanded into national and local levels. Ball (1994) documents the impact this has on individuals swept into the cycles. Individuals are positioned as ‘consumers’ within nations and become ‘marketable products’ in the cycle. The ‘neoliberal social imaginary’ positions them as self-responsible for a ‘life-long productivity’, and the social imaginary offers new skill acquisition and new learning as the key to employment and the pathway to productivity. Self-reliance and autonomy are the new social values while social rights have become invisible. This neoliberal social imaginary has become pervasive not only in institutions and society but also within individual minds. This form of governance works through the discursive production of self-responsiblizing individuals (Rose, 1999). Foucault (2008: 192–3) argues that it is ‘not just an economic and political choice formed and formulated by those who govern and in the governmental milieu’ but ‘a whole way of being and thinking’, ‘a type of relation between the governors and the governed’ and ‘a general style of thought, analysis, and imagination’. Foucault (1991) refers to this process of governing through a pervasive and normative mentality as ‘governmentality’. Considerable recent scholarly work supports his analysis that ‘neo-liberalism is shaping the current governmentality controlling education’ (Ondrej, 2011: 147).

Through this production of self-responsiblizing individuals the policy cycle comes full circle. Clothed in the neoliberal imaginary, policies are disseminated through rescaling from a global center – which is the dominance of imperial power – through the national and local institutions and cultural and ideological preferences of individuals. These individuals internalize the neoliberal ideology while self-policing and self-monitoring the implementation of the policies. This then provides the data for the reformulation and renewal of policies which are ‘proved’ successful by gathering the data on the performance of the self-responsibilizing individuals. International students, who respond to recruitment campaigns and travel to a western host country to earn educational and cultural capital and perhaps new citizenship and employment in the knowledge economy of the host country, become part of the data system which ‘proves’ the efficacy of the OECD education policy. What they are (re)producing are the efficacy and effectiveness – the standards they set out as desirable – for education and other social sector management in receiving (neo-imperial) countries and their shared power alliance (i.e. OECD) as a norm and even desired and superior form of learning, living and being.