After the fall of the communist regime, in 1995, Romania launches the first multi-systemic reform in the education sector. The Education Reform Project (ERP) was largely financed through a World Bank loan and addressed the sector’s core elements: mission, content, governance, and subjectivities.  Designed primarily by Washington experts, the reform is a direct translation of the neo-liberal ideas in education. It proposed to create new markets, set incentives to encourage competition, install mechanisms for cost efficiency, set in national examination standards, decentralise administration. Yet, in order to introduce such policy shifts, Romanian education had to be constructed first as an object of knowledge. The Bank experts scanned the sector and “diagnosed” its problems and their cause. In this paper, I demonstrate that Romanian education was problematized in a specific, rhetorically coherent way as under-performing and lacking precisely those things that the upcoming reform would propose. This structure of knowledge was built using a temporal and a spatial dimension, the “communist past” and the “OECD countries”. Further, I show that the discourse encompassed not only institutional arrangements but also people. The local actors were portrayed as being incapable of initiating and sustaining the reform without the help of the WB, not only financially, but also ideologically. Based on these two findings and on examining the project’s asserted impact, I argue that the real stake of the Bank in reforming the Romanian education system was in the field of governance. The WB aimed to create or transform institutions, bureaucratic processes, and people. By ignoring the political nature of government, i.e. by emptying the state from its political substance or what Ferguson (2003 [1990]) called “depolitisation” and by manufacturing their role as impartial, apolitical “experts” they created a niche in governance, a space which 25 years since the reform, continues to belong to them.

There is growing research on neo-liberal “global education policy” (Ball, 2012), with diverse focus: policy mobility and network analysis (Ball 2012, Au & Ferrare 2015), neo-liberal themes and impact (Apple 2006, Bell & Stevenson 2006, Anyon 2011) or critiques and alternatives of neoliberal policies (Torres, 2009). This study takes a slightly different approach. I focus less on “who governs” and how policy is implemented and with what effects, and more on how it is discursively constructed. I look at how neo-liberal ideas are embedded in local contexts, how they are grafted on domestic meanings, values, histories, and institutions. More precisely my study addresses the political aspect of neo-liberalism (Ball, 2012), as my discourse analysis deals with “governamentality” i.e. with “a whole series of specific governamental apparatuses” and “the development of a whole complex of savoirs” (Foucault, 1991[1978]: 103).  Although my case study is focused on Romania, the paper aims to spark a conversation around the process of globalisation in the education sector and one of its “central architects” (Torres, 2009) in Central and Eastern Europe –World Bank, the single largest external source of funding of education in the world (Tse, 1997).

The critical apparatus is grounded in policy constructivist- interpretative models and more precisely in “What’s the problem represented to be” approach, developed by C. Bacchi (2009). Following her design, I look at the key concepts, categories, binaries, linguistic elements and emphases that constructed a specific interpretation of the Romanian education system’s problems, to which particular resolutions and interventions were proposed or what Ferguson (2003 [1990]) calls the process of simultaneously creating an “object of knowledge and a subject of intervention”. In particular, I examine the interventions and measures proposed in the reform project, how they were framed, and what resources were allocated for implementation. I confront the Education Reform Project narrative with information extracted from other policy texts (governmental decisions), historical documents, scholarly research, and monitoring reports (including other reports issued by the WB), in order to show that what we are dealing with a distinctive, intentional and well-crafted representation of the local system of education and its actors.

The Bank created a specific representation of the Romanian education system and its actors in order to legitimate its proposed forms of intervention. This was achieved by appealing to specific key concepts (reform, communism, efficiency); dichotomic categories (OECD vs. Romania, communism vs. democracy/free market), and subjectivities (rigid and outdated vs. innovative and entrepreneurial human beings). This apparently neutral choice of text structure, language elements, and use of data implies, in fact, a hierarchy that constructs the Romanian system and actors in severe need of reform. It creates a coherent architecture of knowledge around the object that requires a particular set of solutions. These solutions are conveniently put at the disposal of the Bank, which was correspondingly defined as the source of know-how and financing for a country struggling with post-communist reforms. What was produced was a “usable representation of the object” (Ferguson, 2003 [1990], p.71) that aimed to legitimate and potentiate the role of the WB in domestic governance. Decision making, coordination, and control no longer lie solely in hands of an elected and, thus politically recognisable and accountable government, but they are significantly influenced by transnational policy actors. Seemingly apolitical, impartial, and grounding their authority on “Western expertise”, these agencies have a very clear political, neo-liberal agenda. What they bring in the countries they “assist” are not just money but ideas they manage to impose by modifying governance structures and educating key actors. Once “the perfect agreement between mental structures and objective structures” was reached the power relations are naturalised (Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1994, p.2). Ideas become embedded in institutions, practices, and lived experienced and the power relations that stood at their genesis are obscured. My study is an attempt to unmask these power-knowledge arrangements

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