Call for Papers: Citizenship Education in European Democracies: Appraisals and Debates (original) (raw)
Related papers
“Reappraising Intellectual Debates on Civic Rights and Democracy in Europe” (RECAST) CA16211
2017
Imagining the relations of civic rights and democracy as self-evident and unproblematic disregards their plural argumentative uses, the dissensual features of their conceptual and institutional relationship, their national legal and political traditions both divergent and intertwining, and the many obstacles that hinder their common fulfilments in practice. Those conditions pose a prior challenge to intellectual debates whose character and value are usually seen as hardly relevant to European politics. The COST Action aims at recasting the interface between intellectual debates, public debates, politics, and policy action with the contributions of more argumentatively- and historically-oriented social science accounts and better institutionally-, politically- and legally-informed humanities research. Since the early nineties, the responses of European democracies to the growing conflicting claims on civic rights of individuals and groups in secularized societies framing new forms of...
Council of Europe eBooks, 2009
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2017
Since the Treaty of Maastricht (1992) all nationals of EU member states hold EU citizenship too. EU citizens hold EU citizenship rights in addition to their national rights. These rights include civil, social, economic and political rights. Holding these rights does not guarantee actual participation: there are, for instance, increasingly concerns about (too) low voter turnout and a (too) low number of citizens participating in other activities related to political decision making. Therefore, there seems to be a quest for a European civic culture. Citizenship education, and more specifically European citizenship education, is seen as an important instrument to stimulate the development of a European civic culture. <br> This study shows that (governmental) policies and practices of citizenship education differ widely between the seven examined countries (the Netherlands, Croatia, France, Germany, Ireland, Spain and Hungary). Citizenship education practices are, for instance, de...
Enacting Citizenship and Democracy in Europe
Enacting European Citizenship, edited by E. Isin and M. Saward (Cambridge University Press), 2013
In the light of the enactment approach adopted across this volume, what does it mean to assert that the European Union (EU) is democratic, or is insufficiently democratic? As we have seen in other chapters, analysing European citizenship as enacted opens up ideas of citizenship as something asserted as well as possessed. In this chapter I aim to show that it also opens up (in a way that current debates on EU democracy largely fail to do) the question of which conceptions of democracy are invoked, or at stake, in the relevant wider debates. Studying citizenship as enactment rather than arrangement (as set out in Chapter 1) further prompts us to think of democracy as enacted in different ways. Doing this work involves attending not only to conceptions of democracy within political theory or comparative political institutions, but also exposing such conceptions to more sociological, anthropological and constructivist influences. I hope to show the fruitfulness of drawing upon a rich disciplinary base while at the same time subjecting its assumptions to unaccustomed forms of cross-disciplinary scrutiny. The focus of this chapter is primarily on the fifth of the major themes set out in Chapter 1 – European citizenship and democracy. But it will also deal with other key themes. In particular, questions of democracy in Europe today and in recent years tend to be focused on the structures and processes of the European Union. That is a large and important topic, for EU leaders and commentators alike, and I hope to contribute something to that debate. But I also deploy aspects of other key themes, especially those of Europe as an abstract idea (which version of ‘Europe’ is invoked?), and Europe as an institutional assemblage irreducible to the EU. More specifically, the chapter suggests that the enactment perspective casts new light on the character, strengths and limits of key Commission-led discourses and initiatives. The character of the European Citizens Initiative (ECI), a product of the Lisbon Treaty, is examined in the light of the conceptions of democracy, participation and citizenship that have framed it. I go on to examine the idea of the EU’s ‘democratic deficit’ – what different critics think it is, how much it matters, and what (if anything) might be done about it – in the light of the ECI in particular. I argue that these debates, despite their breadth and richness, trade on a limited conception of (European) democracy, which I refer to as a ‘polity activating’ conception. The enacting perspective prompts concerns with a different conception of democracy, which I call ‘polity constituting’. Here, different notions of what it means to act as a citizen, to assert claims and rights in and of Europe, and to invoke democratic norms, come into play. I also explore links with new conceptions of political representation which see it as a dynamic practice of claiming rather than solely as a formal product of election.
Beyond Description: Civic and Political Education in Europe – Dialogue and Comparison
When we first initiated this issue, Europe was only beginning to make sense of the Brexit referendum. Many scholars in the UK and across the continent were asking themselves the same question – how to make sense of the new developments; did we do anything wrong, did we do anything differently? We felt that, in the turbulent times of a rise of right wing movements, xenophobia, but also in times of growing heterogeneity of the societies within and beyond Europe citizenship education as a project challenge practitioners and researchers alike. On the one side, good practices need to be discovered, described and possibly used in other contexts. On the other, ways need to be found to engage in a meaningful dialogue between different actors representing different political and cultural contexts. As acutely aware as we were of the division between ‘traditional’ and ‘postcommunist’ democracies, we realized that in both, the very essence of European democratic arrangements was as stake. The r...
Citizenship education policies: the contemporary european masks of democracy
2012
This paper aims to reach a wider understanding about the impact of democratic transitions across Europe, considering the experience of three EU member countries with diverse political histories: England, sometimes characterized as the oldest democracy in the world; Portugal that experienced a dictatorship until 1974; and Slovenia that restored democracy in 1991, after being a constituent state of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. Our goal is to understand whether educational policies emphasise a political Results will be discussed assuming that CE should give pupils the opportunity to critically engage with the past and that it should help students to find in their current opportunities for civic and political participation the context to exert their rights as citizens.