Higher Education in the Global Age by Daniel Araya & Peter Marber

Author:Daniel Araya & Peter Marber
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Routledge

HIGHER EDUCATION IN LATIN AMERICA: GLOBAL AND REGIONAL PROJECTS

A key assumption is that processes that are re/constructing higher education across the Latin American region do not follow a “one-way road.” Being relational, they are taken as happening concomitantly, vertically and horizontally, intensively and extensively, and have uneven, determined, and fragmentary social, economic, political, and cultural implications for the institutional, national, regional, and global governance of higher education. Yet they diverge in important ways, and as a result of political and historical contingency.

On the one hand, the emergence of MERCOSUR in 1991 involving Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, and Paraguay, is testament to this claim. According to Almeida (2002), MERCOSUR is a result of the evolution of bilateral political and economic relations between Argentina and Brazil over many years that, by the later 1980s, had advanced to a privileged momentum and then “modified in a relevant way the strategic scenario in South America” (p. 4). On the other hand, the 1986 European Unions Single Act to establish a single market by December 1992, added to by the creation of the Free Trade Agreement between the US and Canada (1989) and the later North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) between the US, Canada, and Mexico in 1994, was crucial in the decision to form and advance MERCOSUR as a defensive project. This regionalization project and set of processes in Latin America, however, was profoundly embedded in what came to be known as “open regionalism” (Phillips, 2003; Tussie, 2009), particularly from the mid-1980s and during the 1990s, when structural adjustment, shock therapy, and major programs of privatization were in the process of being implemented in the region. Hence, MERCOSURs aim to achieve an “appropriate international insertion of the Member States and to advance the Latin America integration” (MERCOSUL, 1991b) might not be interpreted as a regional endogenous movement, but rather as a relational action of multiple-scale signification.

The 1991 Treaty of Asunción formally marked the creation of MERCOSUR by Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay, and Uruguay. It is an economic arrangement encompassing the: (1) free circulation of goods, services, and factors of production; (2) elimination of customs duties and nontariff restrictions; (3) establishment of a common external tariff; (4) adoption of a common trade policy in relation to third states or group of states; (5) coordination of positions in economic and commercial regional and international forums; (6) coordination of macroeconomic and sector policies between the member states; and (7) commitment to harmonize member states legislation in relevant areas in order to strengthen the process of regional integration (MERCOSUL, 1991b).

This group of statements draws the economic and political contours and boundaries for MERCOSURs regional project, which had to be done with the active participation of four national governments. The first three components set up the economic conditions for the development of a common market, despite the fact that the notion of market gains a specific meaning particularly in the field of higher education. The last four components are openly concerned with the regional political economy governance. In order to

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