Chapter 22, pp 397-399

CITIZENSHIP EDUCATION FOR A DIVERSE EUROPE

Wiel Veugelers

The concept of citizenship education is in Europe widely used in policy, theory, research, and practice. And citizenship development is considered an important task of education. Citi- zenship is the common word used when speaking about the social and political role society expects of the people involved. It’s about the desired identity of its inhabitants. This identity includes moral values, ideas about what a “good life” is and what “the common good” is. These values are materialized in attitudes and desired behavior in social relations and in the political arena.
Each nation has its own ideas about citizenship and citizenship education. These ideas can be very manifest and explicit or can be woven into broader ideologies and political prac- tices. Citizenship can have very different political orientations: it can be democratic, but also authoritarian regimes have a policy and practice of citizenship. In Europe and particularly in the 27 Member States of the European Union democracy is of central value. The history of Europe, and in particular the image Europe likes to give of itself, is a longtime construction and reconstruction of democratic processes, growing attention for human rights, and increased participation of its citizens. Building democracy in Europe itself and exporting democracy to other parts of the world is presented as an important moral drive within modernity and in Western history. Negative aspects of “citizenship development” in Western history in practices of domination, colonialism, and slavery are shrouded by the supposed overall positive processes of building democracy and enforcing humanity in Europe and in the rest of the world.