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A General Agreement on Higher Education: GATS, Globalization, and Imperialism

Through successive rounds of negotiations, the World Trade Organization (WTO) encourages countries to commit their higher education system to the mandates of the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS). The WTO is an organization committed to the aggressive trade liberalization of services like higher education. This ideology, known as neoliberalism (Apple, 2005) is redefining the role of higher education. Through critical discourse analysis (Fairclough, 2003), three genres of documents have been analyzed in search of the ideology and power relations imbedded in the texts. These genres include informational documents, the legal text of GATS, and proposals from the USA, Australia, New Zealand, and Japan calling for the reduction of trade barriers in higher education. The relationship between the developed countries who are calling for a reduction in trade barriers and developing countries who are struggling to provide public education could be further strained through an international set of trade rules like GATS. Language and text can create, shift, or maintain ideologies. In the case of GATS, the ideology reflects a new imperialism where more powerful countries retain developing countries as markets in which they continue to rule intellectually.