Presentation at the Europe-wide Global Education Congress,
Maastricht 15-17 November 2002.

First, I would like to thank the organizers of this conference for inviting me and fellow participants from the South and giving us the space to participate and engage in your process.

I will not deny that before going here, some of us have raised apprehension as to whether or not the space given to South participants in this Congress would indeed result into a meaningful engagement. Such sentiment is not surprising because our past experience in many intergovernmental meetings including those of the UN has not been so encouraging. Despite the formal recognition given to the role of civil society in many UN summits for example, there is an observable trend that this role is being diminished or has become tokenistic, reducing our presence to an adjunct of the official process albeit necessary so as to project a semblance of participatory democracy. It is therefore our fervent hope that this meeting would prove otherwise and indeed lead to a constructive debate and meaningful engagement.

Achieving the millennium development goals and learning for sustainability is the theme and long-term objectives set by this congress for global education in Europe in the next 13 years. The MDGs, as they are, represent concrete and time-bound targets on critical areas of human development and could be a very good campaign platform for people’s education and mobilization.

A basic critique however of the MDGs that many groups in the South have voiced out lies in the policy framework that governs how the MDGs will be achieved. It sticks to the neo-liberal doctrine of economic growth based on open markets for trade and investments. Yet it is this same doctrine, which many developing countries have religiously followed in the last two decades that have made our economies more susceptible to sudden shocks of severe crisis as a result of accumulated dependence on external debt and vulnerability to volatile markets. Economic integration under neo-liberal globalization has been a lop-sided process that has favored the corporate giants of the North and constricted the options left for developing countries to determine their own alternative path of development. This is further made difficult under the rules set by the regime of the WTO and structural reforms of the IMF. The much-vaunted periods of macro-economic growth in the so-called emerging markets, in Asia or Latin America for example, have not really translated into improved lives for the poor. Moreover, these growth periods proved to be short-lived artificial bloats, which at any sign of an impending crisis, economies collapse like domino, affecting whole populations and aggravating poverty. And then comes the IMF’s prescriptive remedy to crisis-stricken economies, which is but a recycling of the same neo-liberal policies underlying structural reforms.

While the means for achieving the MDGs emphasize on the need to translate economic growth into an improvement in the lives of the poor, there are no guarantees to this, as long as the policy framework remains dogmatically hinged on a flawed paradigm.

Good governance is another prerequisite defined for achieving the MDGs through effective and equitable use of resources. Corrupt and undemocratic governments have always been impediments to real growth and development. While this is a good and valid advocacy for all, let us not also oversimplify the problem by putting the sole blame on corrupt governments in the South. Afterall, it always takes two to tango and the Suhartos or Marcoses of the world could not have been so without the complicity of foreign investors and creditors and a supportive foreign policy by the global powers-that-be. Besides, with the string of news exposing the extent of corporate corruption practiced by giant companies in the North, corruption has become so endemic in a global system that supposedly professes free market economics, transparency and democracy.

Aside from the above-mentioned infirmities in the policy framework of the MDGs, the new global politico-military situation following the events of September 11 has all the more made the MDGs a formidable task, relegating it to the backseat of policy concerns. Even the agenda of sustainable development reached a dead end in Johannesburg, with the outcome of the summit reversing many of the important achievements of Rio de Janeiro ten years ago. And while the US delegation was busy blocking all attempts in the summit to agree on time-bound targets and diluting major principles already agreed in Rio, the world attention was on President Bush’s threat of a unilateral attack on Iraq.

The Bush administration has indeed become "well-known" for its distinctive style of diplomacy. Despite the fact that it is the world’s biggest polluter, the US continues to refuse signing the Kyoto Protocol including the Biosafety Protocol. It has renounced its obligation as signatory to the Rome Treaty establishing the International Criminal Court and has also abandoned the1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty. And while it preaches free trade to the rest of the world, it has violated WTO agreements by employing protectionist trade measures such as increasing its agricultural subsidies and certain industrial tariffs.

Since September 11, the Bush administration has transformed the global state of affairs into something similar to a "Wild, Wild West" episode, punctuated by thrilling sound bytes like "it’s either you’re with us or against us". And in the past 12 weeks, the whole world was again treated to another high point in the story, leaving us all quivering at the thought of an American unilateral attack on Iraq (with UK in the supporting cast of course). Many analysts think that the war in the Middle East is certain to happen and may just be a matter of time whichever way the UN Security Council could have agreed on the US proposal.

Now, why should the role and content of global education in Europe be concerned about Bush’s idiosyncracy? Or is it simply one of idiosyncracy? In my view, the current global state of affairs whereby the single most dominant superpower in the world is aggressively brandishing its politico-military hegemony and eroding the basic principles of multilateralism, sovereignty of nations, human rights and even that of liberal democracy should be a concern of global or development education. As professed in the documents of this meeting, "global education is education that opens people’s eyes and minds to the realities of the world, and awakens them to bring about a world of greater justice, equity and human rights for all".

The threat to global peace and security is increasingly becoming the more immediate and graver concern, with the US "war on terrorism" evolving into a bigger threat to world peace than the terrorism it seeks to contain. The events of September 11 gave the Bush administration a political justification to redefine international relations in accordance with American hegemonic designs. It has re-organized American foreign and military policy along "anti-terrorism" lines with the ultimate objective of pursuing American economic, political and military supremacy at the world strategic level and in every region. It insists on unilateral and preemptive use of force against all perceived challenge to US dominance. It is foisting upon all nations and peoples of the world the might of the US military forces, the most powerful in the world and the only one capable of engagement anywhere at anytime, in the name of real or imagined threats to America.

War and armed conflict aggravate poverty and social insecurity. A war in the Middle East, according to economist Jeffrey Sachs, will bear serious economic consequences not only in the Middle East but also globally as oil prices tend to increase and normal trading is disrupted. And as is always the case, the poorest populations take the heaviest toll from the crisis.

In my country, the Philippines, the US-led campaign against terrorism has brought thousands of American soldiers back into our soil, more than ten years after the Philippine Senate voted to abrogate the US military bases treaty. An anti-terrorism bill is pending in Congress, basically patterned after the US Patriot Act, which many human rights activists fear as a blank check to curtail civil and political liberties. Government peace negotiations with communist rebels have been forestalled and the current peace agreement with the Moro Islamic Liberation Front may also be revoked as more and more rebel groups are included in the US black list of terrorists. The result is an escalation of armed conflict in the rural areas, disrupting regular classes of children in school, dislocating farmers’ livelihoods and draining government resources for military spending at the expense of much-needed basic social services.

In sum, I would like to posit the following points for consideration and study in terms of defining the role and content of global education in Europe in the next 13 years:

• The MDGs and sustainable development, I agree, are good themes for global education in Europe until 2015 because they represent more or less the general global consensus on eradicating poverty and achieving a better and sustainable world for all. We should however formulate our education program and campaign on a critical understanding of the MDGs’ policy framework and put forward the need for flexibility in adapting paradigms for development that are not dogmatic but more attuned to the experience and needs of many developing countries;
• We should take stock of the deficiencies and failures of the WSSD outcome in Johannesburg and actively campaign to achieve concrete progress in areas like climate change,energy, water, biosafety, corporate accountability and resource allocation for sustainable development; and make substantive input towards supporting the UN Decade for Education for Sustainable Development:
• Under the current precarious politico-military situation, we have an urgent task to work for global peace and security, defend human rights and sovereignty of nations and oppose American unilateralism and militarism that today poses a grave danger to these principles and values, not to mention that war means loss of human lives and massive destruction; and
• Lastly, to continue a process of dialogue and engagement between government and civil society and between North and South in order to promote a broad-based consensus on the role and content of global education and arrive at more effective strategies of educating our people towards proactive mobilization and making the role of governmental bodies more responsive to the needs and goals of global education.