The waning legitimacy of international organisations and their promissory visions

ABSTRACT

We argue that the legitimacy of international organisations (IOs) as self-proclaimed representatives of humankind, which was unfounded from the outset, is waning. To substantiate that claim, we undertake a critical inquiry into the legitimacy of the promissory visions pursued by IOs in the field of education across three historical periods. The first traces the rationalistic educational planning and idealistic ‘one world’ projects of the post-World War II period. The second examines the era of globalisation, when the discourse that legitimised the educational visions of IOs shifted towards the promises of the ‘global knowledge economy’. The third discusses the contemporary trend towards emergency governance and crisis narratives. While the narratives of progress shifted, a pattern that has emerged is the move towards globalism and uniformity. Drawing on insights from philosophy and historical studies of world-empire, we argue that the world-making experiments conducted by IOs were destined to be unsuccessful.

Introduction

In the aftermath of World War II, an international multilateral system was created that represented a new ‘global form of sovereignty’, a project of ‘world-making’ that has been referred to as ‘Empire’ (Hardt and Negri 2000). International Organisations (IOs) such as the United Nations and financial institutions such as the World Bank (WB) formed an important part of that system. The imperial symbol of ecumenic empire was reimagined as the ostensibly cooperative symbol of international organisation, with IOs introduced to forge a new world order as representatives of the whole of humanity: ‘A power organisation, informed by the pathos of representative humanity, and therefore representative of mankind – that would be the core, as it emerges from the historical phenomena, of a definition of world-empire’ (Voegelin 1962, 172). While IOs were introduced with the stated ambition of forging a peaceful and more equitable world order, oriented towards the articulation of a global society, almost 80 years have passed and material promises remain unfulfilled, global conflicts are escalating, and inequality has reached unprecedented levels (Oxfam 2023; Piketty 2014). In light of these unfulfilled promises, the core argument of the paper is that the putative legitimacy of IOs as representatives of an imagined global society is waning, if not exhausted.

The argument is inspired by Beckert (2020), who proposed the notion of ‘promise-oriented’ or ‘promissory’ legitimacy, whereby ‘promissory stories’ communicate both ‘future states of the world’ and ‘envisioned courses of action’ (319). According to Beckert, these ‘promises – or imagined futures – serve as ‘placeholders’ … that, if they are seen as credible, create legitimacy for political authority despite the uncertainty of the future’ (319). If, on the contrary, the hopes actors have regarding the future are shattered, disorientation and discontent may arise, along with a crisis of legitimacy. These two elements of promissory stories provide an initial guide for the analysis in this paper which is further informed by recent research in international relations that investigates how IOs forge world order and maintain legitimacy in part by telling strategic narratives which render that order meaningful (Auld and Morris 2021; Miskimmon, O’Loughlin, and Roselle 2017). IOs’ promissory stories have been crafted upon and promoted variations of an Enlightenment story, or myths (Ramirez and Boli 1987; see also Caruso 2008), that assumed universality, espoused faith in rational-scientific progress and the inevitability of the one-world to come.

This opens the second level of our argument, which draws on insights from the twentieth century political philosopher Eric Voegelin who, having escaped Nazi Germany, was critical of earthly utopias and secular narratives of salvation. His experientially-grounded political theory emphasises the ‘shelter function’, whereby political societies come into being not just to provide material comforts but to give life meaning¹, gesturing towards the symbolic and existential dimensions of global governance and indeed IOs’ promissory stories. While working on the five-volume Order and History, Voegelin delivered the Stevenson Memorial Lecture (No.11) at the London School of Economics, published under the title ‘World Empire and the Unity of Mankind’ (Voegelin 1962). Therein, he observed, ‘other factors than dominion in the instrumental sense go into the making of a world’ (176), and claimed that ‘attempts at transforming the global ecumene into a “world” are doomed to failure’ (177), presenting the following conundrum for IOs and the dream of global governance:

Organization, to be sure, is necessary to the existence of man and society in this world, but no organization can organize mankind-even global ecumenicity of organization is not universality. (188)

The statement clarifies the second level of our argument, that IOs have never been legitimate representatives of a universal humanity. Moreover, by neglecting the problem of ontological legitimacy, the post-WWII project was premised upon a basic philosophical error and promissory stories of future world states were not only doomed to fail, but attempts to realise them are an active source of contemporary disorder. The problem cannot be solved by a new generation of intellectuals substituting one spiritual substance for another. At that time, Voegelin (1962) observed that ‘the dissociation of orthodoxies has not given way to new associations that one would dare characterise as definite,’ but that ‘the association of empire and spirit has again become tentative and experimental’ (173). In this article, we present an account of these experiments and promissory stories in the field of education by IOs and individual actors on a world-making mission, operating as assumed representatives of a universal humanity. The account is based on primary sources such as reports produced by IOs, in particular the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and the WB, and secondary literature on the history of these organisations.

The inquiry is presented in sections covering three historical periods: the post-World War II period of the 1950s and 1960s that was characterised by rationalistic educational planning and idealistic ‘one world’ projects; the neoliberal globalisation period between the 1980s and the first decade of the new millennium; and the period since the financial crisis of 2008 that we characterise as the age of ‘emergency governance’. Our historical analysis is structured by an analytical and conceptual framework informed by Beckert and Voegelin and is introduced in detail in the following section. For each of the three historical periods, we will identify promissory stories about (1) the ‘world to come’; (2) the envisioned course of action; (3) the representatives of the system of global governance (individuals and organisations), which have proliferated; and (4) the instruments employed, identified by Tikly (2004) as ‘technologies of government’.

Our analysis is further supplemented through Max Horkheimer’s (1947/2004)² distinction between ‘objective’ and ‘subjective’ or ‘instrumental’ reason, whereby religion or metaphysics represent ‘objective reason’, a traditional belief system that held great authority, and ‘instrumental’ reason, which emerged with the Enlightenment, is geared towards the efficient achievement of goals. This concept underpins our argument that education became a central part of a technocratic modernisation project in which the means were elevated to a higher status than the purpose of education, and IOs derived their legitimacy from the supposedly apolitical application of scientific approaches and tools and the production and legitimation of expert knowledge; keeping the wheels spinning even in the absence of visions of the world to come.

The legitimacy of the ‘world-making’ of IOs

A ‘world’ is … more than a visible order, and a ‘world empire’ more than a dominion over territory and people. To establish an empire is an essay in world creation. (Voegelin 1962, 179)

Here we briefly provide the theoretical and empirical basis for our analytical framework, before applying it provisionally to the post-WWII era to situate our analysis. World-Empire and the Unity of Mankind draws insights from Voegelin’s more expansive studies³ which aimed to illuminate the crisis of modernity as it arose in the West. Having presented an overview of various world-making experiments between empire and spirit across space and time, Voegelin focuses on the rise and deterioration of Christianity as an ordering force in the West. In particular, the ‘egophanic revolt’, and release of the individual (libido dominandi) as a social and political force in history, whereby in the Enlightenment revolutionaries ‘overcame the uncertainty of faith by receding from transcendence and endowing Man and his intramundane range of action with the meaning of eschatological fulfilment’ (Voegelin 1952, 129). Rather than putting their faith in beatific perfection in the world beyond, these thinkers imagined a perfect ecumene to come in this world, further envisioning formulas to realise the visions. This supplements our understanding of promissory stories (Beckert 2020).

Voegelin locates the maturation of this pathology in the mid-eighteenth century and illustrates it with reference to the work of Turgot⁴ (Minister of Finance under Louis XVI)l, specifically his problematic concept of the ‘masse totale’ (Voegelin 1962, 181): ‘for the masse totale is the sum total of all human beings past, present, and future, lumped together as a society to be represented by the enlightened intellectual of the Encyclopaedist type’ (182). The analysis of world-empire shifts to the rise of a new class of ‘enlightened intellectuals’ (182) who know what’s best for all of humanity. A new representative for the global ecumene, but religion, philosophy, and the wisdom of the sages have been replaced by ‘the representative humanity of a gentleman with soft mores, an enlightened mind, and a ticket for a trip around the world’ (182).

When introducing the doctrine and criteria of progress, Turgot confidently declared that despite setbacks and variation among the scattered societies of the ecumene, ‘the masse totale of mankind marches towards an ever-increasing perfection’ (181). As Voegelin observes, in Turgot’s imaginary construction, the masse totale must be informed of the progress that its representatives have achieved, or else it may not become a masse totale at all. The masse totale thus requires a treatment, and the treatment requires an instrument. A few generations on, we find Condorcet positing a new class of man as an instrument, who would employ his tricks and charm to form the public opinion, and ‘is less interested in the discovery of truth than its propagation’ (182). With technological advances since that time, we add a further category of instrument to our framework in the form of ‘technologies of governance’ (Tikly 2004). This completes the supplementary categories to our analysis of promissory stories. Voegelin (1962) argues that this combination of ideas, ‘the intramundane process, its inevitability, its culmination in the global empire directed by gnostic sectarians – is the constant from Turgot and Condorcet, to Comte … through to the gnostic empire builders of the twentieth century’ (183), which we explore from post-WWII to the contemporary era.

The end of World War II, which marked the creation of the system of global governance we are discussing in this paper, is commonly considered a watershed in history. After the ontological crisis of the West, represented by the devastation of World War II, IOs formed part of a project to remake the world. They emerged as powerful agents of ‘world-making’ not in the sense of territorial expansion, but by the mandate of improving the material conditions of the world’s populations. IOs were representative institutions in name only, but were organisational shells lacking spiritual substance. The organisations were intended to reinscribe order and meaning on the world, with the imperial symbol of Colonial Empire reimagined as the more palatable symbol of International Organisation (Sluga 2010). The One World to come was of course shaped by the tools and discourses of the former colonial Empires and the Empire that had emerged from the previous order with the United States as the new power centre, rendered symbolically through the locations of the headquarters of major IOs, and imbued with the spirit of the Enlightenment (Elfert 2018).

While UNESCO’s first Director-General Julian Huxley (1946, 17) claimed the Enlightenment project had rejected myth, religion and ‘superstition’, in fact it had replaced them with other world-making myths, such as science and technology. At the core of promissory stories, lay what Laidl (1998) refers to as ‘the cult of Progress,’ endowing history with an identifiable course and therefore meaning, ‘a movement towards a better world, up on which movement, memory, identity and, above all, the promise of a world that was qualitatively superior were supposed to converge’ (2). Enlightened intellectuals appeared as theorists of modernisation, notably in Rostow’s (1960/1990) The Stages of Economic Growth, in which every country had to pass through five stages of economic development to achieve uniformity modelled after the European and English industrialisation stories (Singh 2017). International development was established, a story of hope from which IOs and a newly established industry of aid organisations drew their legitimacy. As Singh (2017, 134) explains, ‘efforts in international organisation to improve human well-being and uplift millions of people from poverty constitute one of the greatest stories begun in the last century’. These entwined myths reinscribed order and meaning that placed western nations and peoples at the forefront of civilisational advance, and on an upward trajectory, whereby the empires that had once held in bondage now became organisations that would set free.

Undergirding the faith and perceived legitimacy of these world-making projects, and envisioned courses of action, was the rational-scientific worldview. In fact, UNESCO was initially foreseen as the ‘United Nations Educational and Cultural Organization’ (UNECO), but after the community of British scientists pushed for the inclusion of ‘scientific’ into the mandate, the word ‘scientific’ was included in its name (Toye and Toye 2010). The claim to science and rationality was also a cornerstone of other IOs that became very influential in the field of education, such as the WB and the OECD and the global education industry which supported them (e.g. McKinsey, Pearson). The perfection of economic rationality in its efficient management and business approaches was a key source of legitimacy for the WB (Elfert and Ydesen 2023).

Promissory stories were further underpinned by institutional indicators of progress. Education was positioned as a key instrument in disseminating the correct attitude of mind to the masse totale, and mass schooling a measure of modernisation, which is described by Caruso (2008) as:

… a legitimate institution in modern times, a proper ‘myth’, independent of its actual efficacy … .Beyond its actual (poor) performance, mass schooling remains an essential element of a society that aspires to be called ‘modern’ and it is in this sense that it is largely a ‘myth’ … .Education then became a secularised form of salvation constituting the ultimate initiation ritual, which promised a displaced form of salvation expressed as progress, both for the individual and for the nation. (835)

If the masse totale resisted the enlightened call of progress, disciplinary instruments could yet be employed. Threats and crisis narratives are a part of such coercive means of governing, disrupting the status quo and framing problems that necessitate preferred proposals (Auld and Morris 2021). According to Hardt and Negri (2000), ‘administrative rationalization’ (89) is a key feature of the new ‘sovereign power’ of late modernity. It is employed as a means of control and standardisation, without which the maintenance and extension of Empire would not be possible. The WB and other IOs built their legitimacy not only on promises but also on threats and coercive technologies such as structural adjustment loans (Tikly 2004). In the next sections, we will trace the promises and strategic narratives of the ‘world-making’ project of IOs, key institutions of ‘Empire’ from the post-World War II period to the present time. While the narratives and experiments shifted and the representatives of ‘Empire’ expanded, what emerges is a trajectory towards global governance and uniformity.

The post-World War II era: Education as a ‘one world’ and technocratic modernisation project

Far from being a world as is so often assumed without much thought, the global ecumene is in search of a world … (Voegelin 1962, 180)

In the first decades after World War II education was promoted as a key pillar of social and economic reconstruction. Aggravated by the ideologically petrified climate of the Cold War, that period was characterised by a scientific mindset and a belief in the ability to bring order to the world by way of objective reason and technocratic means.

UNESCO played an important role in the creation of a community of scientists (Selcer 2011). During that period, Julian Huxley published a manifesto under the organisation’s auspices titled UNESCO Its Purposes and Its Philosophy (1946), in which he stated that UNESCO’s single most important task ‘is to help the emergence of a single world culture, with its own philosophy and background of ideas, and with its own broad purpose (61).’ Huxley had spent much of his career in.the search of a new civic theology for the West, and proposed his concept of ‘scientific humanism’ as a unifying principle for all humanity, based on science and rationality as the only possible vehicles of progress (Elfert 2018). As Weindling (2012) points out, ‘Huxley’s ‘humanism’ meant evolution and eugenics, and culture was a component part of the evolutionary process’ (8). Essentially, Huxley viewed culture as a higher state of evolution, extending his evolutionary views to society and eugenics, and his manifesto explicitly places European society at the pinnacle of this evolutionary process. In his view, ‘a world of superstition and petty tribalism’ [was replaced by a world] ‘of scientific advance and possible unity … ’ (Huxley 1946, 17), expressing the belief that in time the scientific experimentation underway ‘will make our hopes rational, and will set our ideals within the framework of reality’ (Huxley 1957, 16).

In common with Enlightenment predecessors, Huxley determined that the masse totale must be told about their advance into the modern world, devising a universal History of Mankind, which was promoted to provide a unifying perspective of world history that positioned scientific humanism at the forefront of civilisational advance – ‘a monument of a universalism that did not quite succeed’ (Duedahl 2011, 132). Although the concept of scientific humanism was controversial, it took hold as spiritual substance in UNESCO and was central to its first report on the future of education, Learning to be: The World of Education Today and Tomorrow, also known as the Faure Report (Faure 1972), introducing international commissions of intellectuals as representatives of universal humanity. The internationalist spirit, which was particularly pronounced in UNESCO, required ‘unity in diversity’ (Laves and Thomson 1957) by promoting universal ideas such as human rights that transcended the boundaries of nation-states. Examples of such ‘one world’ projects was the ‘Committee on the problem of the philosophical basis for an international declaration of the Rights of Man’, established by UNESCO to conduct an inquiry into the philosophical underpinnings of human rights among renowned intellectuals to feed into the United Nations’ project of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (Elfert 2018).

In the field of education, UNESCO’s first flagship programme was ‘fundamental education’, which merged UNESCO’s pursuit of human rights with the scientific mindset characteristic of the time. The programme aimed at transforming developing countries by ‘enlightening’ the millions of illiterate people who lived in ‘the ‘dark zones’ of the world’ (Huxley 1946, 29). It was foreseen to establish six training centres in different world regions that would produce educational materials, such as textbooks, and train fundamental education specialists who would spread out into communities. The programme was haunted by its technocratic neo-colonial approach, illustrated by the fact that a former military officer, John Bowers, was hired to lead it, who understood the role of the programme to be an ‘attack’ on ignorance and poverty (Jones 1988, 52–53). Relying on a transfer of specialised knowledge and technologies, such as library systems and audiovisual materials, from developed to developing countries, the project was overambitious and suffered from logistical overload. UNESCO soon realised that it could not raise the money to sustain the programme, and of the six planned training centres, only two were established. In retrospect, fundamental education has been considered a failed experiment (Watras 2007).

The OECD started to get involved in educational activities in the late 1950s. At the time it was still the OEEC, created in 1948 to administer the Marshall Plan. Significantly, it was members of the inter-war scientific community, such as Alexander King, director of the OEEC, who played a critical role in promoting education. Through the European Productivity Agency (EPA), established in 1953, the OEEC served as an agent of the promotion of American business management approaches in Europe to promote efficiency, productivity and economic growth (Bürgi 2017; Ydesen and Grek 2020). Many of the EPA’s activities and tenets, such as elevating economic principles to the status of science and applying economic paradigms to education, were continued when, in 1961, the OEEC transitioned into the OECD. Under the auspices of its Committee for Scientific and Technical Personnel (CSTP), the OECD promoted a highly technocratic approach to educational planning, represented by the Educational Investment and Planning Programme (EIP) carried out in OECD member states, and the Mediterranean Regional Project (MRP), which was implemented in six lower-income European OECD member states. The planning approach pursued by the CSTP was inspired by systems analysis, which derived from the military, manifesting the close links between military principles and education in the Cold War, which was enshrined in the 1958 National Defense Education Act (Bürgi 2017).

The MRP was an experiment in manpower planning and involved the training of young economists and social scientists (Williams 1987). It was based on ‘the growing realization that education and training … are an important factor in economic growth’ (Hollister 1967, 12). On the basis of available demographic and economic data, national teams, composed of ‘economists, statisticians and educational experts’ (Lyons 1964/1965, 13), calculated future needs for enrollment in order to meet established manpower requirements. The methodology was controversial at best, and many were doubtful whether manpower forecasting was possible or meaningful for the development of an education system (Hollister 1967). Critics questioned whether educational decisions could or should be made on the basis of perceived vocational needs of the economy, and highlighted the limitations of data, imperfect methodologies and lack of research (OECD 1965). Although programmes such as the MRP were portrayed as scientific and characterised as ‘of the most critical importance to the nations of the modern world’ (OECD 1961; cited in Elfert 2020, 55), in reality they proceeded ‘by trial and error’ (OECD 1965, 6). MRP pioneer Louis Emmerij reflected that the approach was ‘close to irresponsible’ (cited in Elfert 2020, 55). Kjell Eide, a Norwegian civil servant who during the 1960s worked for the OECD, wrote, ‘as a whole the programme was a fiasco’ (1990, 22).

Notwithstanding, in the early 1960s the MRP constituted the testing ground for manpower forecasting and, with the support of the American Ford Foundation, the approach was transferred to low-income countries, in particular Latin America (Elfert and Ydesen 2023). When the WB started giving educational loans in 1962, manpower forecasting was also the dominant approach taken by the Bank, which is why it prioritised educational projects related to productivity considerations and economic development geared towards producing ‘trained manpower’ (Heyneman 2003, 317). The WB’s move into education, a field within UNESCO’s mandate, created problems of legitimacy. The WB therefore entered, in 1964, into a Co-operative programme with UNESCO, which carried out the technical preparation of WB educational loans. As Elfert (2021) has shown in her research on the Co-operative programme, the Bank legitimised its educational activities by claiming greater managerial expertise in bureaucratic planning tools and technologies, such as budgeting, administration, and educational statistics. The Bank’s educational loans and projects were administered by a highly bureaucratic five-year project cycle, spanning from the identification through the implementation to the evaluation of a project, and the use of management tools such as the Planning-Programming-Budgeting System (PPBS), which had been developed by the RAND Corporation to increase the efficiency of military operations. Elfert and Ydesen (2023, 83) argue that the WB’s ‘claim to rationalistic-technocratic expertise remained an important aspect of its self-identity and legitimization and drove its expansion towards a development agency’.

As can be observed from the short accounts of the activities and self-understanding of IOs in the late 1950s/early 1960s, education was drawn into a scientific project moving towards the development of what Gorur (2015) has termed ‘calculable worlds’, which by capturing and calibrating progress towards universal goals and identifying ‘best practices’, appeared to make realise Huxley’s vision that science would make hopes rational and place ideals within the framework of reality. Educational planners claimed that a non-economic and non-military field such as education could be subsumed to economic and military principles. Significantly, an OECD representative compared the economics of education to the discoveries of Galileo (OECD 1965; cited in Elfert and Ydesen 2023, 194) suggesting that the economists of education considered themselves pioneers of a new era of enlightenment and change. The claim to science and objectivity was accompanied by the rise of the status of a group of professional experts, using the vocabulary and legitimacy of science to implement a new ‘belief-system’ and bring the world into their order. Given the authority they were endowed with by IOs and government agencies, the educational planners represented ‘professionally trained policy makers’ (Williamson 2006, 119). The focus of their work was on rationally ordered technologies of government that sought to optimise ‘economic rationality and efficiency’ (123) in the name of progress.

In summary, in the post-World War II period, economic growth, prosperity, modernisation and development constituted promissory stories made with regard to the future world state, undergirded by faith in the gradual convergence on one-world culture. The range of representative institutions was largely dominated by those formed in the aftermath of WWII, while intellectuals such as Julian Huxley and Alexander King assumed the roles of representatives within power organisations and sought to define and disseminate the correct spiritual substance for the masse totale. UNESCO represented a ‘one world’ approach, in which diversity was meant to be overcome by unifying ideas and norms such as human rights, with the envisioned course of action including a universal history. Representatives were expanded through international commissions, speaking on the future world state on behalf of universal humanity and envisioned courses of action. At the same time, formulations and reformations of spiritual substance were devised by theorists of modernisation, development, and an emerging ‘Economic Priesthood’ (Nelson 2010). The instruments employed to extend the truth to the masse totale and transform the global ecumene into a world included development experts, wielding forecasting and planning methods, and new technologies of government such as statistics and management tools to calibrate progress, gradually generating ‘calculable worlds’. Despite the experimental nature of the programmes and their questionable outcomes, the new IOs drew their legitimacy from their claim to expertise, their allegiance to science and their faith in their capacity to engineer a better future.

The era of globalisation: The global knowledge economy and the ‘classe totale’

The result is the ghastly farce that has emerged from the darkness of Enlightenment, the farce of an apocalypse without an eschaton. (Voegelin 1962, 186)

Laidl (1998, 4) posed that the end of the Cold War presented a crisis of meaning for the countries of the Global North, for it witnessed ‘the brutal death of.. that asymptomatic line, that telos, which we have been trying to attain since the Enlightenment’. Intellectuals pondered whether this was indeed the end of history, while theorists prematurely declared that societies were converging upon one-world culture. At the same time, postmodern incredulity towards metanarratives and rejection of foundations prevailed. Had the global ecumene indeed become a world, and yet one without meaning? The story of globalisation unfolded with no fixed centre, presented as a new phase in history, but with only vague promises regarding the world to come. Rather, with the spatial horizon abolished, it manifested as a state of acceleration and constant becoming with no telos; an apocalypse without an eschaton. With the apparent demise of rival worlds, IOs postured as representatives and carriers of truth for the global ecumene, as one world, the self-interpretation typified by the formation of ‘global agendas’.

The overarching legitimising project of that era in the field of education for ‘development’ was the global Education for All (EFA) initiative, launched in 1990 at the World Conference on Education for All in Jomtien by UNICEF, UNESCO and the WB (joined later by the UNDP), and supported by ‘eighteen additional organizations – other U.N. bodies and intergovernmental organizations, bilateral aid agencies and major foundations … some 140 NGOs … national delegations from close to 160 countries [and] a total of 40 intergovernmental organizations’ (UNESCO 1990b, 1–2). Under the banner of education as a human right, EFA provided a platform to strengthen the legitimacy of the IOs involved. Although UNESCO had to make many concessions to the WB, EFA raised the profile of UNESCO, which as the UN agency created with the mandate for education took the lead of the coordination of EFA. At the same time, the WB with its financial power cemented its role as the main policy shaper of education in developing countries and prevailed with its push for primary education, against the wishes of UNESCO, which would have preferred a broader vision of basic education that entailed non-formal and adult education, such as literacy.

EFA constituted a metanarrative that served the unifying and standardising modernisation project of mass schooling, assimilating the masse totale into a classe totale, and a new set of instruments (e.g. standardised assessments) to apply the required treatment. Although it was claimed to be country-driven and the participation of civil society was emphasised, EFA was ultimately ‘a process that was initiated and steered by four IOs to further strategic interests’ (Elfert and Ydesen 2023, 97; see also Chabbott 2003). On the other hand, EFA was legitimised as a push towards the realisation of education as a human right. The outcome document of the Jomtien conference, the World Declaration on Education for All, opened with the quote ‘everyone has the right to education’ and presented ‘basic education as the foundation of lifelong learning and human development’ (UNESCO 1990a, Article 1, point 4). In this new phase of history, the classe totale would be informed of their new status as ‘global citizens’ under the watch of IOs, with the proper dispositions and habits of minds debated and defined by enlightened scholars and disseminated through education; for the classe totale might not know they are a global citizen unless they are told. Given the shift towards neoliberalism and the imaginary of a global knowledge economy, EFA might well have declared everyone has the right to be human capital.

EFA was launched at the height of the neoliberal era characterised by the dominant promissory visions of the globally interconnected capital market, presented as a decisive break in history and with the assertion that the whole world was compelled to embrace if it did not want to be left behind (Singh 2017; Tikly 2004). As Slobodian (2018) demonstrated, the neoliberal project established governance beyond the nation-state at the global level through transnational institutions and rules to keep the power of democratic majorities around the world and calls for a more democratic distribution of resources and political claims coming out of the decolonised Global South in check. A cornerstone of the neoliberal era was the role played by the international financial organisations, in particular the International Monetary Fund and the WB in forcing the countries of the Global South into the globalisation project through the ‘Washington consensus’ and the coercive structural adjustment programmes, which prescribed the privatisation of public services and the opening up of economies to the global market, in particular American products and services. The WB’s paradigm of the 1990s, ‘market-friendly development’, as put forward in the 1991 World Development Report, ‘symbolizes the return of neoliberal orthodoxy in development economics … never mind that as a supposedly temporary casualty of the necessary adjustment people’s living standards have fallen to unprecedented levels’ (Escobar 1995, 57). The structural adjustment programmes also had implications for education as they were tied to the prescription of educational policies, such as the privatisation of education and the expansion of primary education (Carnoy 1995).

The educational visions of IOs during this period were characterised by the discourse of globalisation, competitiveness, and the concept of the ‘knowledge society’, which according to the narrative, was driven by technological developments (Lundgren 2011). Just as Huxley had inflated his ‘scientific humanism’ to ‘scientific world humanism’ (Huxley 1946, 8), so the ‘knowledge economy’ was enlarged through the imaginary projection of a ‘global knowledge economy’. The OECD’s 1989 report Education and the Economy in a Changing Society represented the neoliberal focus on education ‘as an instrument in global competition’ (Rubenson 2008, 253), geared towards the role of education for the economy and employability, which became a priority also in light of growing youth unemployment during the 1980s (Eide 1990). Education provision was re-conceptualised in terms of ‘competences’, which shifted the focus from inputs to outputs. The emphasis on individual competences was in line with the neoliberal shift towards individualisation of learning and the construction of citizens as entrepreneurs responsible for their ‘employability’ in the labour market, deflecting from the responsibility of the state for the welfare of its citizens (Bagnall 2000).

Eide (1990) commented on the OECD’s neoliberal turn: ‘Towards the end of the 1970s, the role of OECD as a kind of uncommitting political think-tank was gradually replaced by the task of legitimating the policies of conservative governments’ (38). In that context, the OECD, with pressure from the United States, started its ‘Indicators of Education Systems’ (INES) programme in the late 1980s, which aimed at producing comparative education statistics (Grek and Ydesen 2021). ‘In a global world international indicators delivered support for arguments on competitive strength’ (Lundgren 2011, 25). INES led to the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), which allowed for the comparison of intellectual resources, turning education into ‘an international commodity’ (28). As the imaginary of the global knowledge economy was rendered actual in the form of PISA’s ‘calculable worlds’, the promise that science would one day make hopes rational and place ideals in the framework of reality appeared to have been realised.

The global knowledge economy represented the legitimising backdrop for the OECD’s measurement agenda in industrialised countries, which found expression in the ‘calculable worlds’ of PISA. The WB took a similar empirical orientation for its activities in developing countries. In the mid-1990s, the WB took a turn towards a ‘knowledge bank’, building its legitimacy on technical knowledge advice and evidence-based policy, based on the generation of data and research that was ‘broadly supportive of open economies and free markets’ (Stone 2003, 44; see also Zapp 2017). The WB’s strategic narrative for its activities in this period was that the ‘knowledge economy’, new technologies and the ‘information revolution’ (The WB 1999, iii) required knowledge, in terms of ‘ideas and know-how as sources of economic growth and development’ (The WB 2003, xiii). The Bank’s promissory vision was that the integration of developing countries into the global economy would lead to poverty reduction, higher economic growth, and overall development, such as narrowing the ‘knowledge gap’ and alleviating the ‘learning crisis’ (The WB 1999; see also The WB 2002; 2003).

Applying our analytic framework, IOs’ promissory stories during this period increasingly emphasised the one-world in cultural, economic and political terms, but most powerfully through the imaginary of a globalised knowledge society populated by autonomous and empowered knowledge workers, or ‘global citizens’. On the one hand, representatives emphasised that societies had already arrived in the new global era and must act accordingly or be left behind, and on the other, the global ecumene was in a constant state of becoming – ization. The instruments employed by IOs were further expanded to include global targets, benchmarks and comparative education indicators, which would ultimately yield PISA. This was the age of pragmatism and the neoliberal ‘what works’ mindset, whereby, ‘truth is to be desired not for its own sake but in so far as it works best’ (Horkheimer 1947/2004, 31).

Given that the promissory story of the global knowledge economy was an anti-democratic neoliberal project, excluding ‘the millions across the globe who remain[ed] disconnected from the networks of the knowledge society’ (Cooper, 2011; cited in Alexander 2014, 51), it is ironic that a key educational initiative of that period launched and coordinated by IOs was Education for All, which in the process boiled down to the expansion of primary education – the marker of modernisation. As argued by Elfert and Ydesen (2023), EFA has greatly contributed to the standardisation of education, by shifting the focus towards educational targets, eclipsing and homogenising differences between countries and cultures – another instance of ‘instrumental reason’ in terms of prioritising the means over the end. EFA set out to draw everybody into the same world-making project of universal schooling, the ‘classe totale’. In that regard, EFA also drove the expansion of global governance, the coordination of global agendas, and a further build-up of the development industry (Chabbott 2003).

While the narratives over the two periods shifted from rationalistic planning to a global market-based ideology, there is a commonality in that IOs derived their legitimacy from the expert role they played in envisioning and bringing about the promises of a better world, progress and development. However, as the world plunged into ever greater economic crisis, and discourses of an impending environmental catastrophe rose, the legitimacy of IOs’ promissory stories was challenged.

An era of global crises: Education ‘in flux’ and ‘emergency governance’

They are not satisfied with making the best of this world, but want to make a world of the worst. (Voegelin 1962, 182)

Despite best efforts and concerted theorising, the global ecumene had not become a world, in the cultural, economic or political sense, let alone existentially. Moreover, the targets established within promissory stories told under EFA had not been met (Bennell 2021; Elfert and Ydesen 2023). Still, new agendas were formed, expanding in scale and scope with each failure, and inviting greater numbers of representatives to partake in the imagination experience of development and global governance in education. After the 8 Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) launched in 2000 (including one for education) and the six EFA goals were unfulfilled and promises ultimately proved empty, a revised agenda was put forward with 17 goals and 169 targets under the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), including 10 targets, 11 indicators and a myriad of sub-indicators for education.⁵ The hypercompetitive global knowledge economy not only replaced a collective story of hope and ultimate unity with one of unforgiving competition and individual struggle, but its promises that learning equalled earning proved unfounded (Brown, Lauder, and Ashton 2010). Moreover, the promise of limitless economic growth and its status as an end goal for creating a qualitatively better world was also being challenged by the financial crisis of 2008 and the rise of environmentalism in the United States, a clash which Nelson (2010) refers to as the ‘new holy wars’. This tension was ultimately assuaged in the symbol of ‘sustainable development’, an agenda which superficially formalises an empty promissory story (towards collective wellbeing) but we argue has largely been co-opted by enlightened corporations and philanthropic actors posturing as moral representatives of universal humanity in a perpetual state of emergency.

Before proceeding, and to aid interpretation of the present setting, we step back to the late 1960s, and the formation of an enlightened club of gentlemen exhibiting revolutionary spirit as self-appointed representatives of universal humanity. Specifically, The Club of Rome, which was created in 1968, and over the years has released a series of reports on future scenarios. In one of its reports, titled The First Global Revolution published in 1991, the former OECD official Alexander King and Bertrand Schneider formulate one of the Club’s guiding principles as ‘adopting a global approach to the vast and complex problems of a world in which interdependence among the nations within a single planetary system is constantly growing’ (King and Schneider 1991, x). The premise that ‘the resolution of the global problems demand global action’ (17), anticipates a key characteristic of the age of ‘emergency governance’. The book is about ‘forging a global society’ (xxiii) and refers to ‘humanity’ as a unity that needs to be brought under a global governance regime, which requires curtailing of national sovereignty: ‘Erosion of sovereignty may be for most countries a positive move towards the new global system in which the nation-state will, in all probability, have a diminishing significance’ (16). The OECD’s positioning of PISA as a new yardstick for education also served to undermine national sovereignty, a revolutionary instrument aimed to re-engineer the global by which standardising outputs and translating the societies and inhabitants into variables awaiting expert manipulation, and whereby values and preferences of the masse totale would be forced to evolve and align with the global era, or risk being left behind (Auld and Morris 2023).

In line with the call by the Club of Rome to ‘forge a global society’, we are seeing a shift from the multilateral system that was established after World War II, where IOs were created to represent nation-states, to a system of multistakeholder governance, where non-elected, mostly corporate or philanthropic ‘partners’ are invited into the intergovernmental sphere (Gleckman 2018). Focusing on the governance of the European Union, White (2019) has examined ‘the ascendancy of a governing mode centred on the logic of emergency’ (2). A feature of ‘governing by emergency’ is ‘the informalization of power’ (5): ‘decision-making today is increasingly relocated to ad hoc settings’ (5), such as – in the context of the European Union – the Eurogroup that undermines the function of the European Commission and Parliament. A key development towards multistakeholder governance at the level of the United Nations was the ‘Global Compact’ initiative launched in 2000 to forge partnerships with the corporate sector, which was aligned with the eighth’s of the MDGs, ‘global partnerships’ (Gleckman 2018; Singh 2017). Since then, global networks that are not democratically legitimised have mushroomed and ‘enlightened intellectuals’ in the form of corporate and philanthropic actors have become very influential in IOs (da Silva, Croso, and Modé Magalhães 2023; Seitz and Martens 2017).

An example is UNESCO’s Global Education Coalition, a network of EdTech companies established to respond to the Covid crisis that furthered their interest in opening up new markets for education technology (Morris, Park, and Auld 2022; Shultz and Viczko 2021), or UNESCO’s endorsement of initiatives such as the Global Skills Forum and the Global Teacher Prize (UNESCO 2023a) pursued by the education entrepreneur Sunny Varkey, who is also a UNESCO Goodwill Ambassador. UNESCO, with its UN mandate for education, gives legitimisation to corporate actors. Given its very limited budget, ‘UNESCO is increasingly becoming a brand for sale’ (Ridge 2019, 1). This is problematic as UNESCO’s traditional partners are governments and NGOs, and constitutionally, relationships with the private sector are only foreseen if those partners ‘pursue goals that are in conformity with UNESCO’s ideals’ and ‘are entirely non-profit-making’ (UNESCO’s constitution).⁶ What we are seeing is that formally, the institutional structures of the IOs remain intact as empty shells, but their original mandates and ideals are diluted and their governance structures reshaped by new opaque power dynamics and networks.

Examples of corporate/philanthropic influence in the OECD is the support of the American Christian neoconservative John Templeton Foundation of the OECD’s agenda for social and emotional learning and happiness indicators (Williamson 2021), or the OECD’s Network of Foundations Working for Development (netFWD), a transnational network of philanthropies active in the field of education for development (Viseu 2022). In an interview with Elfert and Ydesen (2023), a former staff member spoke to the growing influence of ‘global plutocrats’ and business representatives in the OECD and the diminishing role of academics:

The other thing that you need to think about is the relationship not only of the OECD with global plutocrats as it were. The Davos Forum for example, the OECD always turns up at that and Andreas [Schleicher]⁷ … spends an awful lot of his time at these kind of forums involving philanthropic organisations, … business men or business women who have come to have views on education and like to talk about it. And you could say that to some extent the interaction with that kind of … non-government constituency, has actually grown quite considerably over time. And also that you’ll find, not necessarily everywhere but to some extent the denigration of the academic constituency in this as well. The privileged interlocuters have become business foundations etcetera and governance, you know. (Interview with William Thorn, 2021; cited in Elfert and Ydesen 2023, 210)

Ever more stakeholders are claiming expertise in education, not only philanthrocapitalists, but also influential networks such as the World Economic Forum (WEF). The WEF holds annual meetings in Davos where self-proclaimed and for the most part unelected ‘enlightened intellectuals’ representing governments, corporations, high finance, and selected academics and celebrities come together to discuss the order of the world and put forward ideas for its future. Transnational management consultants and education companies such as McKinsey and Pearson are key actors in these global networks and promoters of global education policy models. Apart from the ever greater representation of global corporations and private actors in IOs, another feature that distinguishes the contemporary multistakeholder governance landscape from earlier eras is that it is no longer dominated by US institutions, representatives and technologies. Other nations such as China and South Korea have become more influential in global agencies and have emerged as ardent advocates of global policy scripts, such as social and emotional learning and happiness. South Korea was, in fact, a first mover in promoting the happiness agenda (Kim 2023). China is expanding its influence in UNESCO to promote AI and STEM (Mochizuki and Vickers 2024).

A common theme in their educational visions concerns the positioning of humans vis-à-vis technology in an age of automation. The WEF’s White Paper on Education 4.0 (WEF 2023) outlines a ‘set of abilities, skills, attitudes and values’ that will enable ‘young learners to embrace and develop their uniquely human qualities – those unlikely to ever be replaced by technology’ (3). In previous years, the WEF touted the ‘Fourth Industrial Revolution’ as ‘a new chapter in human development’ characterised by the merging of ‘physical, digital and biological worlds’ – a ‘revolution … forcing us to rethink … what it means to be human’ (WEF 2024). This is a topic that also preoccupies the OECD that, in 2020, signed a strategic partnership with the WEF (WEF 2020a). Andreas Schleicher has recently repeatedly talked about the importance of focusing on what sets humans apart from robots (see, for example, Schleicher 2022). Schleicher also provided the epilogue for the book Teaching in the Fourth Industrial Revolution: Standing at the precipice (Doucet 2018), which comprises six chapters written by Sunny Varkey’s Global Teacher Prize awardees about the opportunities and challenges of teaching in the age of the ‘Fourth Industrial Revolution’, as well as a foreword by the Chairperson of the WEF, who foresees that ‘the future of education’ will ‘neither [be] wholly digital nor wholly human but a hybrid of both’ (xvi). Kim (2024, 11), argues that the OECD presents ‘social and emotional skills … as the defining characteristics that differentiate ‘first-class humans’ from ‘second-class robots’, particularly in the context of the increasing influence of AI technologies and the prospect of jobs being replaced by automation’.

The ‘uniquely human qualities’ promoted by the WEF are similar to the skillset promoted by the OECD’s Future of Education and Skills 2030 programme (OECD 2018). As analysed by Robertson and Beech (2023), the OECD has taken a turn from its ‘data evangelism’ represented by PISA towards a seemingly more benign emphasis on ‘well-being’. The ‘new normal’ of a future of uncertainty requires competences such as resilience, reflexivity, and empathy. But, as Yliniva, Bryan, and Brunila (2024) argue, the agendas of ‘well-being’, ‘happiness’ and ‘social and emotional learning’ that on the surface appear to be humanistic, are strategic narratives that serve to depoliticise education and produce a ‘post-political, resilient, empathic, bio-perfected, transhuman subject … conditioned to ultimately adapt to, rather than agitate, challenge or resist unjust structures’ (14-15). The happiness discourse, we would argue, is also meant to soften the threats of the crisis narratives, such as the threat of job loss due to AI and automation and the breakdown of the meritocratic refrain (study hard and get a good job), illustrated in WEF’s slogan ‘You’ll own nothing, and you’ll be happy’ (WEF 2016).⁸

These problematic developments are legitimised by narratives of crisis and emergency. Morality and hope are less prominent and increasingly replaced by doom, fear and uncertainty, and narratives of ‘resilience’, ‘crisis’, ‘shock’, encapsulated in the slogans of the World Economic Forum, ‘Welcome to the age of the polycrisis’ (WEF 2023) and the United Nations’ UN 2.0 initiative, ‘Reimagining our global organization for a world in flux’ (United Nations 2023). Crisis narratives are also commonplace in recent OECD documents (OECD 2018; 2022). As introduced above through the Club of Rome, to some extent the masse totale is being blamed for the crisis, as strategic narratives such as the ‘Anthropocene’ frame a scenario in which nature and the earth need to be saved from human activity (e.g. UNESCO 2018; WEF 2020b). These narratives conveniently legitimise the dehumanisation entailed in the merging of human agents, such as teachers, with technologies and AI, and the datafication of education (Riep 2017; Williamson 2020).

The dehumanising agenda has been accelerated by the Covid crisis, which presented a convenient opportunity for EdTech companies and surveillance technologies to enter classrooms and homes by restricting human interactions and confining everybody to their screens (UNESCO 2023b). An expression of transhumanist fantasies in UNESCO is the report ‘Reimagining Education. The International Science and Evidence Based Education Assessment’, published in 2022 by UNESCO’s Mahatma Gandhi Institute of Education for Peace and Sustainable Development (MGIEP), which touts brain-science, social and emotional learning and personalised learning as the new educational panaceas (Bryan 2022; Vickers 2022). As Yliniva, Bryan, and Brunila (2024) argue, ‘transhumanism propounds a depoliticised conception of ‘human perfectibility’ largely oblivious to questions of social and political emancipation’ (14).

Applying our analytical framework to this contemporary period, the narratives of the future state of the world are of a world in a permanent state of crisis and emergency. Disorder is the new order. The narrative invokes the threat of disruption and the promise of opportunity at the same time. As Robertson and Beech (2024) explain focusing on the OECD, ‘this reimagined future, whilst hazardous, accelerating, unpredictable, [is] yet full of new opportunities’ (8). The chairperson of the WEF claims, ‘The Fourth Industrial Revolution may be driving disruption, but it is wholly in our power to … embrace the new opportunities’ (Doucet 2018, xvi). These opportunities will likely only be available to the privileged few who will be ‘resilient’ enough to cope. Rather than asking questions about how we ended up in this situation and what the IOs’ own role has been in bringing it about, the responsibility is placed on learners to acquire a ‘crisis-prone’ skill set, in which ‘resilience’ takes a central role.

The envisioned course of action is a constant cycle of reform, a perpetual revolution, driven by the gospel of technology. The technologies of government are ‘big data’, required for what Yliniva et al. (2024) call ‘precision education’, ‘facilitated by a complex convergence of mobilising discourses and ideologies emanating from, inter alia, positive psychology (e.g. resilience; human flourishing), the neurological, behavioural and life sciences (e.g. social-emotional learning) and transhumanism (e.g. biomedical enhancement)’ (15). As stated on the website of the UN 2.0 initiative, ‘At the core of UN 2.0 is the so-named ‘Quintet of Change’, a powerful combination of data, innovation, digital solutions, foresight, and behavioural science solutions’ (United Nations 2023). According to Hardt and Negri (2000), it is characteristic of Empire that the ‘imperial command is exercised no longer through the disciplinary modalities of the modern state but rather through the modalities of biopolitical control’ (344).

As discussed above, the representatives of the age of emergency governance are a range of ‘stakeholders’ that work together in multistakeholder bodies in which the lines between government and business, public and private interests are blurred. Philanthrocapitalists represent one species of the ‘enlightened intellectual’ Voegelin was so wary of – ultra-rich entrepreneurs who set out to save the world, representing a great peril to democracy (Amarante 2018). Their henchmen are the educational experts of previous periods who still exist but have become more entrepreneurial. An example of our current age is Sir Michael Barber, the self-appointed ‘messiah’ of Deliverology who held leading positions at Pearson and McKinsey, and was instrumental in spreading ‘the gospel of efficiency and effectiveness’ in the UK government of Tony Blair (Auld and Morris 2023, 346). Another prominent entrepreneurial ‘enlightened intellectual’ is Andreas Schleicher, who ‘ … has taken educational sciences out of the hands of ‘experts’ in academia and placed the dominant expertise on education in the hands of entrepreneurs, technicians and statisticians’ (Pettersson and Popkewitz 2019, 29). He represents like no other the obsession with the effectiveness of the means that Horkheimer (1947/2004) warned us about, as illustrated by his fatalistic comment at the end of his book World Class: ‘If we stop pedalling, not only will we not move forward, our bicycles will stop moving at all and will fall over – and we will fall with them. Against strong headwinds, we need to push ourselves even harder’ (Schleicher 2018, 280).

As Horkheimer (1947/2004) predicted, we are seeing ‘the triumph of the means over the end’ (31). And yet, if we always ‘push ourselves harder’, if ‘everything must be endlessly in motion’ (Adorno and Horkheimer 1947/2020, 106), it will be impossible to pause and think about why world-making experiments of the past have failed and why the material promises remain unfilfilled. The exhausted legitimacy of IOs and their enlightened intellectuals and their incapacity to fulfil the promises of development and progress will never be reckoned with, as there will be ‘no time to remember and meditate’ (Horkheimer 1947/2004, 15). As the wheels must keep spinning, IOs deflect from their exhaustion by promoting fearmongering narratives and promises of salvation through the ever greater acceleration of history in terms of technological developments. The fixation on the means drives the self-proclaimed ‘enlightened intellectuals’ of our time to ever further escalation, a perpetual cycle of acceleration and revolution. As Voegelin (1962, 182) warned us,

enlightened intellectuals are not a harmless curiosity; they are dangerous maniacs. They take themselves seriously, they really believe they represent mankind … and if a recalcitrant masse totale [resists] … they will use force to correct the mistake and remould man in their own image.

Conclusion

We have analysed how IOs have claimed legitimacy through promissory visions, in three historical periods. The first section traced the modernising projects pursued by IOs during the heydays of educational planning in the 1960s, characterised by the rise of a professional class of ‘enlightened intellectuals’ in the form of education development experts. The spiritual substance for their modernising visions, such as manpower planning and expansion of universal schooling, stemmed from the promise of economic growth and productivity. This promise was underpinned by the ‘imperialist expansion of modern economics’ (Fourcade 2010, 92), which was compared to major scientific paradigm shifts in the history of civilisational knowledge. Another strand of the post-World War II years were the ambitious idealistic ‘one world’ projects pursued by UNESCO. Julia Huxley (1950, 17) promoted ‘a new ideology for the One World of the future’, which illustrates the universalism of this world-making – everyone, the masse totale had to be brought into a singular world.

The second section examined the era of globalisation, when the discourse that legitimised the educational visions of IOs shifted towards the promises of the ‘global knowledge economy’ and the competitive market, represented by projects such as the pursuit of comparative education indicators which yielded the OECD’s PISA. Another major initiative of that era was EFA, drawing the masse totale into the classe totale, the modernisation project of universal schooling. EFA was framed by the human rights agenda. Although some have argued that the human rights discourse of the 1990s served to legitimise the anti-democratic neoliberal project of the market-based society (Whyte 2019), the promise of progress, economic development and equality still prevailed.

The third section discussed the contemporary qualitative shift towards governance of a permanent state of emergency that we see emerging since the financial crisis of 2008, accelerated by Covid. Not only have IOs arguably not delivered on their promises, they also seem to have given up on promissory and moral visions of a better future altogether by resorting to crisis narratives. Although the ‘crisis’ discourse has a long history in the global governance of education, what is new is the absence of the promise of a better future, of a ‘world to come’. As the legitimacy of IOs and their promissory educational visions is waning, ‘enlightened intellectuals’ double down, illustrated by Schleicher’s insistence that we resist empirical reality and pedal harder on the mythic bicycle of progress. If the evidence is not on their side, they must press on (‘push ourselves even harder’) – as Voegelin (1962, 181) put it, ‘the masse totale is the symbol by which [the ‘enlightened intellectual] tries to beat down the obstreperous facts’.

While the narratives of progress shifted, a pattern that has emerged is the move towards globalism and greater uniformity. The imperative of national economic growth of the 1960s shifted towards the ‘global economy’ in the neoliberal period, and in the contemporary period of ‘emergency governance’ we are seeing unauthorised global networks managing ever-greater global problems. The globalist pattern seems to be in tension with the contemporary rise of popular nationalisms and a seemingly multipolar world. We interpret the former as counter movements to waning state sovereignty and ‘state subordination to capital’ (Brown 2020, 67). With regard to the latter, while there is clear evidence of increasing (geo)political multipolarity, our analysis has shown that transnational actors and networks hold converging interests and pursue strikingly similar societal and educational visions. As argued by Nóvoa and Yariv-Mashal (2003), drawing on Hardt and Negri’s (2000) notion of ‘spectacle’, in ‘the “international spectacle” … there is an excess of mirrors, creating the illusion of several images that … reflect the same way of thinking’ (427).

IOs were premised on the promise of the ‘world to come’. After almost 80 years of such ‘world-making’ experiments, from the technocratic manpower planning of the 1960s to the project of mass schooling to the measurement agenda of the neoliberal era, to contemporary emergency narratives, these world-making experiments were always bound to be unsuccessful. In the age of ‘instrumental reason’, the point are the experiments. Enlightened intellectuals are obsessed with the means (such as assessment, indicators, models, etc.), but less interested in whether the outcomes justify the means. In our current age of output-orientation and assessment culture, ‘experts’ claim that they are concerned with optimising the outcome but in fact, the means are the dominating factor. We argue that the fixation on the means, is key to understanding the history of development, modernisation and the role of IOs in that story. As 2030 approaches, we anticipate a new agenda aspiring towards ever more unachievable goals, continuing a perpetual cycle of failure.

The fact that IOs rely less on stories of hope suggests their promissory legitimacy is waning, if not exhausted. If we return to the role of strategic narratives and meaning-making for the legitimacy of IOs, captured in the concept of the ‘shelter function’, it is clear that they have failed to render the contemporary world order meaningful, turning instead towards crises and emergencies. The intramundane eschatology introduced by enlightenment revolutionaries as a line of meaning in history has run its destructive course, and yet the revolutionary desire to drive the masse totale forward persists even without a telos. Significantly, while the Turgots’ and Condorcets’ and other enlightened intellectuals of the past did not have the instruments to extend their reach, the rise of global agendas, IOs and sophisticated technologies of governance make it much easier for the self-appointed leaders of mankind, ultimately sowing disorder. Writing in the aftermath of WWII, Voegelin (1962, 183) had presciently reflected: ‘Nobody can predict at this juncture how attempts to transform the ecumene into a world … will end. It is only certain that they cannot succeed.’

Acknowledgement

We would like to thank Christian Ydesen, Paul Morris and the anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on previous drafts of this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Euan Auld

Euan Auld is Assistant Professor in the Department of International Education at The Education University of Hong Kong.

Maren Elfert

Maren Elfert is Senior Lecturer in International Education at King’s College London.

Notes

1 Insights on this theoretical approach can be found under the title, The New Science of Politics: An Introduction (Voegelin 1952).

2 Horkheimer’s and Voegelin’s work speaks to each other in many ways. Both were concerned about the authoritarian tendencies of the scientific and instrumentalist worldview that underpins ‘Empire’.

3 An interested reader can consult The New Science of Politics: An Introduction (Voegelin 1952); the five volume Order and History, in particular Book IV The Ecumenic Age (Voegelin 2000); and, History of Political Ideas, in particular From Enlightenment to Revolution (Voegelin 1982).

4 The background for this analysis can be found in the book From Enlightenment to Revolution (Voegelin 1982).

5 https://tcg.uis.unesco.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/4/2020/09/SDG4_indicator_list.pdf

6 https://www.unesco.org/en/legal-affairs/constitution

7 The director of the OECD’s Directorate of Education and Skills and PISA study.

8 This video has since been removed from the website of the World Economic Forum. It is still available on the organization’s Facebook page (see reference).