Advances in Education in Diverse Communities: Research, Policy and Praxis

Through political decisions – in the North mostly willed decisions, in the South decisions forced on them by monetary institutions in the North – governments have dismantled national controls with capital movements, profits and foreign investments. By this willed or enforced political choice – the consequences of which has seldom been spelled out to the electorates – political leaders have removed those legal and administrative tools which might have protected local economic and social systems. Directed by Western interests the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund have used and continue to use their creditor powers to pressure first the poor debtor countries of the South and then the collapsing members of the former Soviet Union to turn their own battered economies into the same kind of unrestricted markets. Last but not the least the World Trade Organization (WTO) has become a vehicle for assuring that practically the whole world is opened for the unhindered operations of private capital. This ideology, which I here term globalization, leads to a democratic deficit, increases income differences and forces new groups into poverty.