This paper aims at comparing the transnational governance of education during two distinctive time periods. On the one hand, the paper focuses on the period around 1900, or – more exactly – the decades from the 1870s until the outbreak of WWI. On the other hand, the focus is on the period around 2000, or the more recent decades since the 1990s.

Before 1914, nation-states (or their subunits) monopolised educational decision making. There was no structured governance of education above the level of the nation-states. Coordination between nation-states was rudimentary. Transnational contacts between educational decision makers occurred only sporadically. International organisations did not exist. Moreover, educational decision making was largely dissociated from political, economic or financial  supremacy. Britain, the supreme power of the time, did not play an international leadership role in education. In this situation, world exhibitions constituted important venues for an exchange of ideas, also because they provided occasions for other communication channels, such as international conferences, the circulation of printed publications and investigative study missions. Under this constellation, the transnational circulation of knowledge was demand-driven, responded to national (or subnational) agendas and often followed unpredictable and surprising ways. The most famous example is the Russian workshop method that educators adopted in many industrialised countries in the 1870s. In this case, knowledge circulated from a peripheral country to the centres of the international system.

With the League of Nations and its affiliate organisations, the interwar period announced a transition to a new regime of international governance. During and after WWII, the USA established itself as the leading international power, notably by creating the UN. The Americans “muscled” the international sphere with real sanctioning power. In this way, “the global” became institutionalised as a separate sphere above the nation-states. The distinction of “the global” and “the local” came into being, whereby “the global” usually refers to American-backed “Western” models and “the local” relates to their rather imperfect implementation on the national level. Despite challenges by the Soviet Union, the Global South (Non-Aligned Movement, New Economic International Order) and more recently the rise of China, this system has since been structuring the world. Key institutions of this system, such as UNESCO, OECD and the World Bank play a major role in educational decision making around the world. These organisations have direct (conditional credits) and indirect (international large-scale assessments) sanction power to make nation-states implement the neoliberal policies that they pursue. International organisations now “impact” on nation-states, limiting the latter’s policy options. As a result, the international circulation of educational ideas follows today a supply-driven top-down model from “the global” to “the local”, from centre to periphery. Ideas do less circulate horizontally between sovereign states, but rather vertically from “the global” to “the local”. This arrangements serves to prolong “Western” hegemony. Or, one can ask critically: are UNESCO, OECD and the World Bank organisations that prevent the “West” from learning from the creative dynamism of the “rest”?

This paper suggests a diachronic comparison of the transnational governance of education in the late nineteenth and early twenty-first century. For the period prior to WWI, I draw on my own extensive empirical research on education at world exhibitions. Sources include publications that were published in preparation or after world exhibitions, further monographic publications, reporting in specialised educational journals, as well as papers of key education experts. For the more recent period, this paper is based on existing research of historians, historians of education, sociologists, scholars of international relations as well as international and comparative educationists, in addition to selected policy documents.

I hope to show that, despite widespread talk of global interconnectedness since the end of the Cold War, policy options in education circulate today less freely than around 1900.

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