Table of Contents

INTERNATIONAL HIGHER EDUCATION

NUMBER 40, SUMMER 2005

The High Profile of Trade in Higher Education Services

Olve SØrensen
Olve SØrensen is a senior adviser in the Department of Higher Education in the Norwegian Ministry of Education, with particular responsibility for GATS and other aspects of international trade in education services. Address: Royal Norwegian Ministry of Education and Research, P.O. Box 8119 Dep, 0032 Oslo, Norway. E-mail: olve.sorensen@ufd.dep.no.

The GATS treaty includes specific commitments to ensure that the liberalization of trade in services benefits developing countries and enhances global development. Some developing countries interpret these provisions as an exemption from most of the hard bits of GATS obligations, while trade hard-liners see them more as lofty expressions of goodwill not to be taken as binding in any real sense.

For a rich country, traditionally committed to both global trade and the interests of less-developed countries, it can be a challenge to balance the two objectives in a GATS context. Education represents a particularly sensitive area because of its pivotal role in development. How should a country act to fulfill its obligations to the global development of education for the benefit of all? An interesting case entered the public eye last year when South Africa took some developed countries to task for what it saw as aggressive behavior over education under GATS.

Basic GATS Negotiations
After setting out their initial positions, countries negotiate in the GATS setting by requesting from one another improved market access in sectors of interest. Remember that any concession given to one country must apply as well to any other country wishing to trade—national preferences toward individual trading partners are outlawed by the Most-favored Nation rule, one of the cornerstones of GATS. Also, keep in mind that a request is made and granted or rejected without any quid pro quo; a country may request increased market access for education services from others without opening its own market.

The South African Offensive
Since relatively few countries have engaged in the request-and-offer process regarding the education sector and since the secrecy of the negotiations has generally been observed, it attracted considerable interest when the then South African minister of education, Professor Kader Asmal, attacked several countries for making negotiation requests to South Africa. He specifically targeted Norway, as a country that presented itself as committed to the welfare of countries in the South yet was acting in the GATS process as a market aggressor.

Norwegian Reactions
Several factors contributed to making this attack a disturbing episode for the Norwegians. First, South Africa openly broke the explicit rule in GATS protocol that no country make public the requests it received from others. Each country is free to publicize its own requests but in practice most choose not to do so.

Second, the South African hostility to the action of launching a request seemed to question the legitimacy of the whole intricate scheme of negotiations, the courtly dance of advance-and-retreat and offense-and-defense, through which the GATS process is designed to liberalize world trade. Public accusations of the exchange of offers and counteroffers as acts of aggression may result in wariness that could lead to a complete standstill in the process.

Third, this episode demonstrated that public opinion will quickly swing behind anyone able to appear as a victim of GATS. The complexity of the issues together with the moral high ground of South Africa's status as spokesman for the plight of less-developed countries provoked widespread outrage within and outside Norway. The responsible authorities, whose explanations were drowned out by the emotional outbursts and have yet to make much of a dent in the widely reported simplified version.

Finally, the Norwegian response gave mixed signals. The camp that supports development expressed dismay and apologies; the requests to South Africa in the education sector were described as an unfortunate accident. In its wake, the episode is mostly portrayed as a full retreat by Norway and a retraction of the request. In reality, the minister of foreign affairs answered a question in Parliament by saying the requests had been made but if South Africa chose not to accede to them there would be no further follow-up or pressure from the Norwegian side. In other words, the requests still stand but nothing more is likely to happen—which is exactly the status of many requests made under the GATS regime.

The Norwegian Rationale
Norway's decision to play an active role in the GATS negotiations on education grew out of a number of convictions, one of which was the rationale that GATS would benefit trade in education, which in turn would assist in the global effort to provide education for the millions in Third World countries that lack adequate capacity to provide education services.

Norway's involvement is also based on the idea that remaining passive in GATS would allow a few influential countries with special interests in trade in education services to shape the framework of the future global education system. The belief that many countries should participate in the process led to a strategy of requesting extended market access in a number of countries, including some of the stronger developing countries. While realizing that these countries would most likely not comply fully with the requests, Norway views the negotiations as a way to involve developing countries in these development issues.

South-Africa's Position
South Africa chose, however, to interpret the requests as an opening for commercial ventures in the South African market. Leading intellectuals, Kader Asmal among them, have claimed that merely placing education under the GATS umbrella is tantamount to supporting the commodification of education and undermining the status of education as a public good and a human right. In this light they aggressively portray the requests and any other initiatives to involve South Africa in GATS as a strategy to force developing countries to bare their throats to the onslaught of unbridled market forces in the education sector.

Aftermath
The disagreement, however, has left no lasting scars on either side—in fact, collaboration in education between Norway and South Africa is thriving. Still, the episode highlights the shortage of well-defined objectives for the benevolent development of a framework for transborder trade in education. Even with the best intentions, actions within the GATS system are open to sinister interpretations in the absence of a common understanding of the interests of developing countries.

This confrontation perhaps also illustrates the dangers of the basic lack of transparency in GATS. As suspicions grow, sudden revelations are apt to be misinterpreted and misjudged. These conditions call for a serious analysis of the issues in the wider community and the gradual development of a blueprint for the benevolent regulation of trade in education.

[Online] Available: http://www.bc.edu/bc_org/avp/soe/cihe/newsletter/Number40/p6_Sorensen.htm