This paper examines trends in curriculum, leadership, and evaluation policy borrowing occurring between contemporary nation states experiencing new and perennial tensions, such global homogenization and local pluralisation. Scholars have been studying recent globalizing curriculum policies through varying (and often Western) epistemologies and theoretical logics, frequently drawing on Luhmann’s (1995) self-referential social systems theory, Wallerstein’s (1979) world systems theory, and neo-institutional theory (Meyer, et al., 1987). In the first instance (Luhmann, 1995), educational theorizing is understood largely as a self-referential system of reflection rooted in distinct contextual conditions, intellectual traditions and value systems characteristic of its respective system of reference and context. As noted in the previous paper, Wallerstein (1979) conceived of a world system as a multicultural territorial division of labor that leads to the existence of two interdependent regions: core and periphery. Drawing on Wallerstein (1979), Meyer and colleagues further suggest the dissemination of a world-level educational ideology which is understood to increasingly influence and shape the conceptions of educational actors and to direct educational decision making (e.g. development of global core curricula). This ideology has emerged from a combination of the key concepts or institutionalized legitimizing myths, including the ideas of individual personality development and citizenship; the equalization of social and political opportunities; economic development and national progress; and a political order guaranteed by the nation state. We argue that globalizing policy studies provide theoretical logics and analytical tools for organizing new relations among national education, politics, economy and culture so as to meet the simultaneous need to establish, on an individual and collective level, a sustainable yet dynamic sense of belonging to a unified whole (e.g. nation). Understanding the interplay between societal aims and social interactions in schools may help bridge disparate fields of curriculum theory/didaktik (with its focus on societal aims, methods, and planning) and leadership-teaching studies (with its focus on social interactions in schools). In this paper, we further consider globalizing policies and the new and perennial dilemmas emerging from globalization and neoliberalism through modern classical philosophy, the non-affirmative perspective of general education theory (Benner, 1991), and discursive institutionalism (Schmidt, 1998) as well as strengths and weaknesses of curriculum theory/didaktik and leadership studies. We then ask if these modern Western conceptual traditions can provide sufficient points of departure for the contemporary situation.