The paper tries reflect upon how national policy on education for sustainable development (ESD) can be conceived to relate to globalization in education. The paper draws on an empirical engagement with education, socio-economic, and sustainability policy from Southeast Asia and Sweden in order to reflect on how the articulation of the policy concept of ESD can be seen to entail a process of globalization. The paper problematizes, based  concrete instances of policy making, logics that are appealed to with the field of education research (Dale 1999, Ozga & Lingard 2007). These logics can be seen to draw on Marxist/Hegelian notions of universality in order to conceive of how an apparent cultural diversity in the form of mediation can be seen as concrete instantiations of a universal process of globalization. The paper aims to approach cultural diversity from another perspective and introduces a perspective on globalization that acknowledges a constitutive difference (Deleuze 1968, Deleuze & Guattari 1987). The objective of this constitutive intervention of the paper is to allow for the creation of a space for politics, where the particular articulations of ESD can be interpreted as to take place against particular cultural/historical backgrounds that shape these national policies. These discursive formations (Laclau & Mouffe 1985) are conceived as spaces (Laclau 1990). Drawing on the notion of globalization as connection (Buenfil-Burgos 2000), the paper presents the globalizing potential of the signifier of ESD as to allow for a connection among spaces, thereby producing something close to a tangent space. ESD is interpreted to allow for the creation of such a tangent space, as the policy concept allows for tracings (Derrida 1978, 1998) of semiotic linkages, linkages to other spaces and articulations of ESD within these spaces. As with a möbius strip, the globalized character of ESD is seen to result in its non-orientability, that is ESD does not seemingly belong to a particular space, but as a form of connection among spaces allows for tracings to alternate spaces. As such a non-orientable element, ESD can be seen to subvert space by entailing an alterity of space. Thus, instead of conceiving the relation to globalization in terms of an affiliation or alignment with an universal, tangent space is a space of a surplus and alterity. It is argued that the openness of space and the potential subversion of space by space throught the articulation of global policy concepts opens up the possibility of the emergence of the political in education. While the openness of space and the political moment within a particular space can be seen to have discussed with regards to the role of antagonism (Laclau & Mouffe 1985), the beyond space or rather the potential of non-orientability opens up a second political potential. This second political potential exists in the form of a incommensurability of perspectives as they are held by actors characteristic for different spaces. It is argued that it is this incommensurability of perspectives among spaces that allows for a conception of globalization in education where politics can become an option. This is not the case in the conception of globalization as a universal process, where this process in the last instance will determine politics reducing the apparent dissensus to a part of a broader movement of universal self-unfolding. It is thus the diversity of articulations of ESD and the apparent paradoxes that can be discerned that are interpreted as to denote the policy concept’s political character, that is its life as a contested concept that a diversity of social actors invest in within and among particular spaces.

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