Education for Citizenship in Europe

European Policies, National Adaptations and Young People's Attitudes

Avril Keating

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781137019561
• eBook ISBN: 9781137019578
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

This book examines the evolving relationship between the nation-state, citizenship and the education of citizens, exploring the impact European integration had on national policies towards educating its citizens and citizenship.

1

Introduction

In 2013 the European Union (EU) launched the European Year of Citizens to highlight the rights that are associated with EU citizenship and to celebrate the twentieth anniversary of the promulgation of those rights in the Maastricht Treaty. The selection of this theme was inspired in part by a 2010 Eurobarometer survey, which had shown that EU citizens’ understanding of their rights was still low (Eurobarometer, 2010a). Turnout for the 2009 European Parliament (EP) elections had also been disappointing, suggesting once again that EU citizens had little interest in exercising their rights, or at least their electoral ones. And while the Official Decision for this European Year does not mention it explicitly (European Parliament and the European Council, 2012), the EP and Council representatives that issued this decision cannot have been unaware of the ongoing economic and political crisis engulfing the EU, and are likely to have been concerned about the potential implications for citizen’s attitudes towards European integration.

That there was a need for a campaign of this nature typifies both the transformation that has been taking place in citizenship (particularly in Europe), and the challenges that any project of this nature faces. This campaign was, in fact, just the latest in a long line of efforts to promote and strengthen the notion of European citizenship. Similar efforts stretch back to 1949, and extend far beyond the legal status of EU citizenship that was created by the Maastricht Treaty in 1992 (and came into force in 1993). Moreover, the conception of citizenship that is at the heart of this project is not just limited to rights (the focus of the European Year campaign), or, for that matter, to the EU. This project has also been seeking to promote certain behaviours, identities, attitudes and values, and at various points it has been led by the Council of Europe rather than the EU.

Along the way, education has often been presented as being central to the process of fostering European citizenship, and this point was reaffirmed once again in the Official Decision on the European Year of Citizens (ibid: Art. 19). Yet it was also acknowledged that ‘the primary responsibility for raising citizens’ awareness of their rights as Union citizens rests with the Member States’ (ibid: Art. 25). Despite the deepening of European integration, education continues to be governed by subsidiarity, and member states retain control over the structure and content of their school systems. As a result, the European institutions have limited power over the very institutions that could help (at least among young people) to bolster not only awareness of EU rights, but also European identities and attitudes. What is more, education has historically been bound-up with nation-building projects, traditionally focusing more on creating and sustaining the legitimacy of the nation-state rather than the European project, and often having done so in a way that excludes and ferments opposition to their European neighbours. What happens, then, when these nation-states are responsible for teaching about European citizenship?

It is these tensions, and their implications, that are the central focus of this book. To undertake this endeavour empirically, this book will first examine how European citizenship has been conceptualised and promoted in the education policies that have emanated from European institutions. The book will then examine how member states have responded to these initiatives – that is, how have member states adapted their national curricula and textbooks to teach young people about European citizenship? Finally, the book will also consider whether European citizenship has had an impact on young people’s perceptions of citizenship, and the extent to which their attitudes can be explained by their schooling experiences in different member states.

This chapter will first set out the context for this examination, providing a brief introduction to European citizenship and the debates that it has spawned, and an overview of the changing role of the state in governing education policy.

New institutions and new forms of citizenship in Europe

The emergence of pan-European supranational institutions has had a profound and unprecedented effect on relationships between and within the states of Europe. Supranational institutions first emerged in Europe in the aftermath of the Second World War as a means of promoting peaceful relations between the fractious states of Europe.¹ Two World Wars in quick succession had wrought economic, political and social devastation on the nation-states of Europe and undermined the feasibility (and for some, the desirability) of the nation-state. Supranational institutions for political and economic co-operation (at least among the West European states) were thus seen as an ideal means with which to strengthen nation-states at the same time as providing a forum with which to contain inter-state competition and tensions (as well as warding off the threat of Soviet encroachment) (see Dinan, 2004). It was in this context, then, that a range of pan-European institutions was established. Chief among these were the Council of Europe and the European Economic Community (EEC, now European Union), the former of which was established to support democracy and political co-operation between states, while the latter was initially (or at least overtly) intended to facilitate economic cooperation between the founding members (namely, Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, France, West Germany and Italy).

Despite these seemingly limited parameters, the membership, role and significance of these European institutions developed significantly over the following sixty years. In short, these intergovernmental initiatives have engendered a political arena that now stretches from Ireland to the Urals and touches upon almost all facets of governance and policy-making. This is especially apparent in the EU, which is the most prominent and integrated of the European institutions, and from which a unique political entity has emerged, one that is no longer a purely intergovernmental system but is rather an emergent polity (Chryssochoou, 2002: 757–8), albeit one that still ‘hovers between politics and diplomacy, between states and markets, and between government and governance’ (Laffan, 1998: 236). As the powers and scope of the European Union have expanded, so too has its requirement for legitimacy and, ultimately, its need for a demos over which it can exercise authoritative decision-making. Over time, the EU has thus attempted to bring Europe ‘closer to the people’ (Adonnino, 1985) and to establish a citizenship regime with legal, affective and behavioural dimensions.

The status of European Union citizenship was formally established with the ratification of the Treaty on European Union in 1992, whereupon a unique set of rights were granted to its citizens. These included the right to:

• move and reside freely anywhere in the EU
• vote and stand as a candidate in municipal elections and in elections to the European Parliament in the state where he/she resides
• be protected by the diplomatic authorities of any member state when travelling or residing in a non-member country (if the citizen’s own member state is not represented), and
• petition the European Parliament and apply to the Ombudsman.

As we shall see in Chapter 4, the concept of EU citizenship was novel, but these rights built on a legal framework that had been gradually evolving since the 1950s. For example, political rights were first established in 1979, when citizens of member states were granted the right to directly elect representatives to the European Parliament. It was around this time the European Court of Justice (ECJ) also began to establish a range of civil and social rights (albeit in a piecemeal and non-distributive fashion) that extended and strengthened the long-standing employment rights that it had secured (Wiener, 2003: 406). These legal measures were complemented by identity-building projects; that is, efforts to create common symbols, experiences and values around which citizens from all member states could unite and which could generate public attachment to and support for European integration. Such extensive efforts are often beyond the Council of Europe, which remains an intergovernmental organisation and in the shadow of the EU. Nonetheless, the CoE has also been concerned with fostering citizenship rights and European identity. The CoE has, for example, championed citizen’s rights through legal instruments such as the 1997 European Convention on Nationality and the European Court of Human Rights. In addition, the CoE has long-promoted democratic practices and European citizenship identity through educational and cultural policies (see Chapter 4).

Together, then, the European institutions have gradually established a supranational framework that provides citizens of their member states with opportunities for rights, political participation and identity. The advent of these phenomena, however, has prompted considerable debate and raised a number of theoretical and conceptual questions about the nature of citizenship. One of the key debates has centred on the question of how to characterise and categorise this ‘new’ type of citizenship. Some, for example, have argued that EU citizenship is merely a market citizenship, and perhaps even one that is rooted in ‘neoliberal precepts of the individualized “market citizen”’ (Hansen and Hajer, 2010: 11). Others, by contrast, have argued that the EU has moved beyond a market-based model of citizenship, although, as Shaw (2007: 357–8) points out, they are often less confident about stating what it has been replaced with. Despite this, some commentators have been happy to argue that European citizenship is best viewed as a post-national or cosmopolitan model of citizenship (Soysal, 1994; Bosniak, 2006; Joppke, 2010: 21–2), arguing, for example, that rights have been decoupled from nationality and national culture, and that they are now granted on the basis of residence and/or universal personhood. These claims have been contested by others, however, who point out that the postnational aspects of this citizenship regime are limited to a distinct and exclusive group, namely citizens of EU member states. As Benhabib (2002: 460) put it:

While throughout the EU a dissociation of cultural identity from the privileges of political citizenship can be observed for EU citizens, for third-country nationals the ties between identities and institutions, between national membership and democratic citizenship rights are reinforced.

Over the past decade since Benhabib (2002) made this point, the rights afforded to third-country nationals have increased in many European states, and some of the differences between EU migrants and third-country nationals have become more blurred; but despite these developments, migrants from EU member states and those from non-EU states still do not enjoy the same rights, and the rights that are bestowed on non-EU migrants are still largely determined by national governments and not by the EU (see Shaw, 2007 and Joppke, 2010).

This leads us to a second key debate that has emerged: What are the implications of European citizenship frameworks for national citizenship? Have EU citizenship and legal developments supplanted national frameworks? What ‘value added’ or new rights does European citizenship provide? In terms of citizenship status, it has been argued that the advent of EU citizenship has not removed the need for national rights, as Union citizenship is fragmented, adds few ‘new’ protections for citizens, and is merely a supplement to national rights frameworks (Hansen, 2009, Shore, 2004, Wiener, 1999 and 1998, O’Leary, 1998: 99). For example, European institutions do not allocate social rights to their citizens, which Hansen and Hajer (2010: 198–9) suggest is a key limitation. Bellamy (2008), Dell’Olio (2005: 61) and others have also pointed out that EU citizenship status is dependent on national citizenship, as it is only granted to those who are entitled to citizenship of a member state and member states retain the right to confer nationality and, by extension, citizenship rights and obligations. Dell’Olio even suggests that, far from undermining national citizenship, EU citizenship has reinforced the link between nationality and citizenship, at least in the area of immigration policy (2005: 146–8).

Yet while it appears that European citizenship rights are not comprehensive enough to replace national citizenship, recent developments in EU citizenship rights arena arguably contradict the assertion that EU citizenship is entirely derivative, and that it adds nothing substantively ‘new’, as Hansen (2009: 6) suggests. For one, EU institutions now grant certain rights directly to its citizens (such as the right to access EU documents and EU civil service posts, and the right to petition the EU Parliament and the European Commission directly). Second, over the past decade the European Court of Justice (ECJ) has adopted an increasingly expansive position on citizens’ rights, leading Joppke (2010: 29) to conclude that the idea of national control over citizenship law is now just an illusion, as the ECJ can (and does) make pronouncements that supersede national law (see also Kostakopoulou, 2008). Various commentators suggest that the implications of this are not merely technical, but also substantive, as the EU is not only starting to dominate the governance of citizenship law, but it is also changing the way that we understand citizenship, and the benefits that flow from it. Joppke (2010: 23–4), for example, argues that EU citizenship is not only a ‘light’ version of citizenship, but it also contributes to creating a ‘Citizenship Light’ version at the national level, because recent ECJ rulings undermine the incentive for member states to provide social benefits to their own citizens, for fear they may have to extend these benefits to citizens from other EU member states (see also Bellamy, 2008 and Hansen and Hajer, 2010: 198–9).

Nonetheless, while the supranational rights framework may be expanding and growing stronger, there is still sufficient evidence to suggest that the scope and strength of European citizenship should not be overstated. For one, Shaw (2011: 10)² has pointed out that ‘the “static” European citizen, in contrast to the mobile transnational one, does not seem to derive many benefits from the institution of [EU] citizenship’. In 2009, for example, it was estimated that only 11.7 million EU citizens were living in another EU member state, less than 2.5 per cent of the total population of EU (c. 500 million) (European Commission, 2010a: 11). As a result it could be argued that, in practice, EU rights are largely only available to, and availed of by, the small proportion of EU citizens who move to other EU member states. Second, legislation does not always lead to implementation, and the European Commission has acknowledged that its citizens still face numerous and sometimes considerable obstacles when trying to access or exercise their EU rights (see European Commission, 2010a and b).

Is there a European citizenship beyond rights?

The other dimensions of European citizenship-building projects have been similarly challenging and equally contested. In particular, the question of ‘European identity’ has been subject to much attention, both theoretical and empirical. In the process scholars have raised questions not only about the substantive content and foundations of a European identity (Delanty, 1995; Checkel and Katzenstein, 2009; Guibernau, 2011), but also about its relationship with, and implications for, existing political identities (primarily focusing on national identities). Here again, there is much disagreement, not least because there are multiple ways of conceptualising and measuring identity (Checkel and Katzenstein, 2009). For some, European citizenship policies have ‘an exclusivist “ethno-cultural” dimension emphasizing the (Judeo-Christian) civilizational, cultural, and religious facets of a European identity’ (Hansen and Hajer, 2010: 14). For others, by contrast, European identity has been (or should be) stripped of its cultural and political dimensions, and be based on an apolitical, technocratic and rational version of identity. These versions of European identity are sometimes presented as alternative or binary options, but Katzenstein and Checkel (2009) point out that both of these versions of European identity may co-exist (along with others), as European identity and its formation is far ‘messier’, complex and varied than current identity theories and studies often suggest.

While the parameters and progress of European identity continues to be debated, its impact on national identities has produced a more clear-cut set of possibilities. For example, ethno-nationalist theories contend that identities will remain tied to the nation-state as supranational identity projects lack the requisite cultural and emotional bonds to bind citizens to the (supranational) community (Cederman, 2001: 142, 146–7). Others, meanwhile, have argued that nationalist discourses will instead react against European citizenship, and generate new forms of nationalism such as extreme xenophobia (Delanty and O’Mahony, 2002). At the other end of the spectrum, pan-nationalists, by contrast, contend that European identity can act as a positive and unifying force. This strand of the field assumes that Europe has a ‘cultural’ core that can be ‘rediscovered’ and deployed to replace divisive national identities with an inclusive, umbrella culture that unites rather than divides Europeans (Cederman, 2001: 145–6, 150). Critics have warned, however, that efforts in this vein are often premised on a modified form of nationalism and thus replicate the exclusionary nature of citizenship status and identity (Delanty, 1995: 123). From this perspective, then, even if national citizenship identities were superseded, it could well be replaced with a similarly problematic ideology.

Postnationalism suggests a similar transformation will occur in national identities, but for different reasons; namely that it will be possible to decouple political and cultural identities (Cederman, 2001: 146, 148–9). As noted above, political identities are therefore to be based on universal, civic principles such as human rights and democracy, which in turn allows for political identities to shift from the national level to the supranational level, while cultural identities can remain particularistic or national. Citizenship rights and status are also organised at the national level, but stem from universal personhood and/or residence rather than membership of a national, cultural or ethnic community, and these rights are protected by national and international rights regimes (see Soysal, 1994; Habermas, 1992 and 1994). From a bounded integration perspective, however, the link between the nation-state and citizenship identities is too strong to erode, and thus its supercession by European forms of citizenship is doubtful (Cederman, 2001: 146, 150–2).³ Instead, the nation-state will merely continue to adapt its policies and mechanisms of identity-formation to ensure their survival.

This is not to say that the persistence of national attachments has entirely precluded the development of additional (supranational or other) attachments. Over the past decade or so there has been increasing recognition that identities can be ‘nested’ (national and European) rather than exclusive or binary (national or European) (Checkel and Katzenstein, 2009: 10). Nor indeed should it be assumed that national attachments remain unchanged by European integration. In a cross-national study of subjective attachments among ‘ordinary people’ to political institutions in Europe (national and supranational), Robyn (2005) found little evidence of exclusive attachments to supranationalism or ‘traditional’ nationalism. Instead the survey suggested that individuals tend to adopt a pluralist position and multiple identities that encompass both supranationalist and nationalist attachments (albeit to varying degrees), and that how these attachments are expressed varies across European countries. The Italian survey, for instance, included what could be considered ‘vague anti-nationalists’, nationalists, ‘European Italianists’ and ‘United States of Europe’ supporters; while the French case re...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Tables and Figures
• List of Abbreviations
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Governing Education Policy in Europe
• 3 Theorising and Measuring Citizenship at Multiple Levels
• 4 Promoting Education for, and about, Europe – The European Dimension
• 5 The European Dimension to National Curricula
• 6 European Citizenship and Youth Attitudes
• 7 Schools, Socialisation and European Citizenship
• 8 Conclusions
• Appendix A
• Appendix B
• Appendix C
• Appendix D
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index