1 Sociology, Philosophy, and Education and Training Sciences (ETS)

As suggested above, the present work is based on a sociologist approach marked by philosophy, and framed by education and training sciences. The point is to show how citizenship education in an international perspective can be enlightened by an approach that is at the crossroads of these three academic fields. Philosophers have something to tell us about the concept of citizenship and the potential paradoxes it conceals, starting with its place of localised exercise, linked to a given territory (often national), while its meaning is generally presented as universal. Sociologists remind us that it is social contexts that allow citizenship to take shape: what indeed is the meaning of the latter, if it remains accompanied by a lived experience of discrimination, academic failure or lack of employment prospects? Education and training sciences remind us that citizenship requires the shaping of a certain knowledge, supported by educational institutions and dedicated subjects, as well as modes of participation in the community (in class and school).

These preliminary indications are, of course, simplistic and incomplete. Firstly, because the objects treated by each discipline are far more numerous than those outlined above. Secondly, because this description is marked by a school tropism, though it could be considered that citizenship education begins in the family environment and that it includes adult education throughout life, for instance in the workplace. Finally, the division between disciplines is not so tight in reality. Philosophers consider social contexts, sociologists conceptualise, and all are interested in education and training, which is, in many ways, consubstantial to citizenship.

In any event, the purpose of this introduction, which is deliberately narrow, is to highlight the main issues justifying the objectives of our method:

1. –On the one hand, to take school ‘education towards’ citizenship as a research object, taking into account its international developments: exchanges are increasingly globalised, whether they are economic, political, migratory, cultural (etc.);
2. –On the other hand, to question the disciplinary separation of work between sociologists, philosophers and ETS scholars, since they all take part in the same disciplinary field, humanities and social sciences.

With this in mind, disciplinary separations will not be avoided in this work, neither will obstacles be ignored. We must ensure that we do not privilege one discipline over another, as researchers can do. Some sociologists for instance consider that their discipline goes beyond philosophy (Joly, 2018), whilst certain philosophers wonder why sociologists, under the pretext of restoring the complexity of the field, seem conceptually undemanding. These reciprocal accusations can be founded. However, they remain too expeditious, especially if we agree to recognise that “classical sociology is configured […] as an internal subversion of political philosophy”, so that if there was indeed a ‘sociological revolution’ at the beginning of the 20th century, it was in no way in an external face-to-face with philosophy (Callegaro & Giry, 2018, p. 316).

To achieve this tri-disciplinary party, the issue is to converge disparate and, in some respects, incomplete attempts. In this case, after attempting to implement, in an international research project, the controversial and polyphonic notion of global citizenship education, we propose a holistic framing in sociology and neo-republican philosophy. The junction between these two currents has never really been established. Certainly, the philosopher Philip Pettit, sailing between Durkheim, Rawls and Habermas, has characterised himself as being both republican and holistic. Nevertheless, social science practitioners, or philosophers who are close to them, have often challenged the relevance of this holism (Descombes, 2014). Similarly, in his highly commented book The Republican moment in France (Le moment républicain en France), the philosopher Jean-Fabien Spitz, in line with Philip Pettit, specified the links between the latter and Durkheim for example, by suggesting to analyse French republicanism of the early 20th century in the light of the neo-republican works that appeared more recently in the United States. However Spitz, a philosopher, remains confined here to the history of ideas.

Should we not go further? If we draw a link between Pettit and Durkheim, then we must develop a research protocol that is both holistic and critical republican, having in mind the objective of conducting empirical investigations. We therefore formulate the following question, which will animate the present work: how can one be Pettitian in sociology (even when Pettit is a philosopher) while being Durkheimian in philosophy? By asking this question and operating this crossing, we thus relaunch sociological questioning. This issue can only be addressed in an interdisciplinary setting, the one that education and training sciences provide.

2 Holisms

The difficulty is compounded by the fact that holism can mean at least two things. It can be ontological: in which case, we believe that collective entities (the state, the nation, thinking and acting groups) exist beyond the manifestations of their individual members. Holism can also be methodological, if in spite of believing that no collective entities exist we act as if they do, since individuals believe in them and adapt their behaviour accordingly (meaning that, in our analysis, we must assume their existence). Finally, and this is a point that complicates our endeavour, we can detect in the collective ideology of modern societies an ideal of moral individualism.

Indeed, the individuals who make up society are in many ways products of a collective history, those histories of the so-called ‘modern’ societies, in which the division of social work is important. This division sometimes gives rise to what Durkheim called organic solidarity; and other times to the pathologies of hyper-individualism – inequalities, withdrawal into self, and certain forms of suicide to use one of the classic works of sociology – when the division of social work is not sufficiently integrated and regulated. Ideology is therefore not understood here in a pejorative sense, but anthropologically (Dumont, 1992): how was it formed? How did this aspect of the modern individualistic ideology, which enshrines, for instance, freedom of conscience as a concept and as a right, come about?

Without trying to account for all its historical threads, we must avoid the pitfall of losing sight of the holistic framework, collectively constituted, which enshrines the individualistic ideology of the modern. Let us take one example. Freedom of conscience, as a right, was formalised in a Christian framework that was in the process of being secularised. Moreover, a very important driver of freedom of conscience comes from Protestantism, which shares with Catholicism the idea of a faith-belief, and even of an inner faith, a ‘faith-conscience’. However, Protestantism pushes this idea further, typically, in the name of the freedom to individually interpret biblical texts. It is also within Protestantism, according to Louis Dumont, that a capital surge of moral individualism takes place: by placing God out of the world, the individual has free rein in this world and the Church becomes conceivable as an association composed of individuals. We see to what extent individuals are the product of society, and even of particular societies, which are in increasingly close relationship with each other. This has crucial consequences in the field of global citizenship education.

3 Collective Entities: Societies, Nations, States

It is remarkable to see how religion and secularism are important themes in the work that renews republicanism, and therefore political liberalism. It is obvious in Laborde’s work, but it was already so with Pettit’s, and before that with Durkheim’s. However, let us leave this aspect to move towards citizenship as such.

As mentioned above, one problem that seems crucial to tackle is the link between holism and republicanism, which we can here express in a slightly different way as the link between holism and citizenship. In our modern societies, citizenship is readily viewed in an individualistic way, in the moral sense: citizens are autonomous, they can make informed choices, decide to join a group and conversely, decide to leave it. The problem, in the intellectual sense of the term, is that these possibilities are offered to citizens in a societal framework, often that of the nation and furthermore only specific nations. However, once we have said that citizens are autonomous, we may be tempted to try to analytically reconstruct this societal framework (society) starting from individuals.

This, in a way, is what theories of social contract such as Hobbes’ have tried to do. Individuals are thought of at the state of nature, leading authors to then analyse how they go on to build a society. Margaret Gilbert, the influential philosopher, tries something quite similar, claiming her work to be in line with Durkheim’s and rereading it under an interactionist perspective (Gilbert, 2013). Nevertheless, like Hobbes, she only partially succeeds, though she has true sociological claims. At some point, she makes the mistake of thinking that it is possible to start from interactions between individuals, however complex they may be, to account for collective entities such as ‘the nation’.

To avoid this error, we must move more resolutely towards a Durkheimian perspective, which postulates that, from a logical point of view, society exists before individuals. Society provides the collective ideology of individual autonomy (Callegaro & Marcucci, 2018). This can disturb or even shock us, since we might be reluctant to think a ‘collective consciousness’ exists, to speak like Durkheim. This is precisely because we strongly adhere to the idea that individuals are autonomous, so much so that we readily imagine society, or at least political society, as an aggregation of inter individual actions and decisions, which are then framed by the state.

There is in fact no contradiction in saying that, on the one hand, there is a collective consciousness holding us, which on the other hand, allows us to be autonomous. Indeed, the morally individualistic societies of which Durkheim speaks are not just any societies; they are differentiated societies in which a form of organic solidarity reigns: people support each other because they are both different and interdependent.

Once one admits this idea, sometimes overshadowed by certain liberal philosophies and nominalist sociologies (that is, who do not easily admit the existence of collective entities), we can spot the fallacy that runs through the political and academic slogan of global citizenship. For citizenship to be global, the world must be a society. Alternatively, we must try to build a citizenship starting from individuals, and incrementally expand it, with the help of states, until it is global. However, in a republican perspective coming from Pettit, and a holist perspective coming from Mauss, this is not possible. Citizens can only be free if they live in a free state and in a specific type of society, one where organic solidarity is integrated and regulated by the state.

4 Comparative Education

The interest of this approach is to open a field of investigation according to an innovative approach: to circumscribe an empirical object of investigation, which is citizenship education in an international, even ‘global’ perspective. Its field is teacher training, in five countries: Germany (Weingarten), Belgium (Brussels), France (Nantes), the United States (Philadelphia) and Israel (Jerusalem).

It is obviously impossible, in the context of a book, to restore the complexities that are inherent to the legal, professional and cultural frameworks of these five countries and the five training sites involved. The book will therefore have a more general aim, likely to serve investigations in other fields and to provoke a discussion about the multiple conceptions of global citizenship. This book centres on the contention, to be developed, that the Durkheimian perspective is essential, in comparative education, to understand the slogan of global citizenship education (GCE) and its place in teacher training. This place varies because the GCE slogan has two sides: one of them falls under our modern ideology (moral individualism); the other, under our indigenous or ‘ordinary’ way of apprehending society.

Here, sociology and philosophy intersect again. We are right to think, from a philosophical point of view, that global citizenship must be based on the individualistic ideal: it is indeed relevant to consider that human rights must not depend on any particular society, nation or civilisation. This idea is in the range of philosophy, joining humanism and cosmopolitanism. However, we are wrong if, from this philosophical position, we deduce that a ‘worldwide society’ can be created from individuals or states composed of individuals. Yet this mistake runs through part of the studies promoting global citizenship. In order to allow their individualistic bias, these studies must postulate that existing interstate regulations could lead to a global society. However, Durkheim and Mauss demonstrated that regulation is not enough to make a society. What is more, this mistake by the ‘nominalist’ promoters of global citizenship generates a conservative reaction from people who simply want to get rid of the term ‘global citizenship’, such as David Miller who claims it is absurd. From the specific point of view of an analytical philosopher such as him, the notion of global citizenship is somewhat like a squared circle, a logical impossibility. However, it is not sufficient to leave it at that. The idea of global citizenship must be given a practical content: practical for empirical surveys, as well as for training teachers in Education and Training Sciences (ETS).

In this sense, ETS go beyond philosophy. It allows the demonstration, in the perspective we defend, that it is crucial for teachers and their trainers to experience a division of labour more in line with what our moral individualism dictates, which tends quite naturally towards cosmopolitanism. In this sense, the European Commission’s Erasmus+ actions, including the GlobalSense research, are interesting. They allow us to build courses on citizenship that are carried out by several countries, questioning new, international regulations in teacher training.

It is crucial though to be vigilant and avoid moralism. Moral individualism comes from the fact that people in our societies are different, and consequently, that the only thing they have in common is that they are human persons. The development of organic solidarity replaces mechanical solidarity, based on similarity, which is typical of traditional societies. In this Durkheimian perspective, injunctions to become tolerant and multicultural are of little help. The crucial issue is rather to think of a labour organisation, on our teacher-training sites, that is more in line with the ideological cosmopolitanism of the modern. This is why we will give here the framing of an object of empirical study, with an adapted methodology: questionnaires, interaction analyses, cross-interviews.

In the context of this work, not all results can be detailed and not all survey techniques will be presented, because the question above all is to frame the way in which ideals (liberalism, republicanism, democracy), an empirical investigation (teacher training in particular societies) and a society project (global citizenship) can be articulated and put into action. An institutional anchoring in education and training sciences makes it possible to take some distance, while benefiting from the help of philosophy and sociology as disciplines that are not only contributory, but also constitutive of ETS in the sense that they were part of their foundation. The figure of the philosopher and sociologist Emile Durkheim perfectly illustrates this point. Professor of education science at the Sorbonne in 1906, then of education science and sociology in 1913, Durkheim articulated the three disciplines and addressed, in education science, themes similar to those we wish to develop (Republic, secularism, nation, citizenship). Furthermore, as a sociologist, he provided a framework for thinking about the notions we propose to reinvest (individualism, beliefs, religion, collective entities).

Thus, this work can be read as a Durkheimian gesture, on three levels: the convergence of disciplines, the revision of sociological concepts, and the holistic perspective intimately linked to an educational project when it is conceived, within public education, as a way of involving students in an entity that transcends them (society, nation, world). Education and training sciences have an important contribution to make here, for though they need philosophy and sociology, the reciprocal is also true.

5 Structure of the Book

We shall now present the structure of this work, which comprises two main parts. The first part presents the interdisciplinary framing, while the second part, which is longer, develops a Durkheimian perspective on GCE and puts it to the test with help of empirical data.

Chapter 1 immediately enters into the tensions or even contradictions that are at the heart of the debates on GCE, by exploring the dual aim of the International Bureau of Education (IBE), in the interwar period, in connection with the League of Nations (which became the United Nations). A precursor of UNESCO, the IBE was first a technical bureau dedicated to education in 1925 before being fully integrated into UNESCO in 1969. This historical origin was already fraught with tensions. Indeed though the neutrality of Switzerland, where the IBE was established, was initially beneficial since peace could mean not taking sides, it proved to be complex at a time when it could be seen as a compromise, since it allowed relatively close relations with authoritarian or even totalitarian regimes (Fascist Italy, Nazi Germany). Nevertheless, the actors of this part of History were more or less aware of these problems that also refer to conceptual tensions, requiring the lens, in particular, of political philosophy as a lever for ETS.

Therefore, taking note of the differences between philosophy and ETS, we question in Chapter 2 the identity of the latter and their place in social sciences. ETS are a part of human and social sciences (HSS) because they face the same questions and challenges. Furthermore, ETS can accompany the transformation of educational action driven by a political concern, in the sense of a political philosophy. Ultimately, the question is to grasp how ETS, being external to sociology and philosophy, can question the relations between them and, while focusing on a particular object, contribute to this common movement within HSS of providing individuals with the conditions of their autonomy.

This brings us to propose a critical approach in comparative education. Comparing the French approach of ETS shows that it is more integrative than in Germany notably, or the UK. This integrative aspect however renders a distinction between ETS and contributory disciplines difficult. It requires the institutionalisation of ETS, defending them against criticism and giving them their own identity through epistemological reflection. ETS being made of a plurality of scientific disciplines, it is difficult to unify them. Whilst a rapprochement with older disciplines or rewarding professional fields might be tempting, the risk is to put ETS at the service of expertise activities rather than actual research activities.

Therefore we need to reconnect the field with its contributive disciplines in a reflective way. More specifically, articulating political philosophy with sociology ensures the avoidance of prescriptive considerations on questions approached here regarding secularism and religion, which are key issues in the development of political liberalism. More specifically, the view adopted in this book is one of critical republicanism, as an updated version of political liberalism. It is an interdisciplinary approach that aims to distinguish the political proposal inside Global citizenship education, and spell it out. In other words, we aim at making our relationship to values explicit, focusing on political liberalism as a core framework for global citizenship education. Its principles are discussed and we focus on the debate between liberalism and republicanism, which notably highlights the relationship between religion and secularism. The meaning of secular liberalism is to consider all religions equally. It is possible to consider religions as equal under the common criterion of liberal principles, for liberalism is just as compatible with Islam as with Christianity for instance. Political liberalism does not belong to a specific culture or religion. If religious people must translate their thoughts into a secular language in order to be understood by all (Rawls), this does not ipso facto mean they are treated worse than non-religious people.

Hence, following Philip Pettit, we assume a renewed republican approach as part of a larger liberal framework. Accordingly, religious phenomena should be approached through non-religious categories, with tools from law and political theory. These can help disaggregate religion into three components and lead to the frame that a religion that belongs in the public sphere must make intelligible epistemic propositions, non-encompassing conceptions of the good life, and non-divisive collective identities. This approach can be adapted to non-religious phenomena, i.e. disaggregation symmetrises religious and non-religious phenomena. These elements form the framework of a relationship to values that we make explicit in favour of a transparent conception of political liberalism, inseparable, as we shall see, from the notion of global citizenship.

Chapter 3 focuses on the question of citizenship in social sciences. It relies on sociology of beliefs and social philosophy to question what social totality is, and distinguish what characterises collective decisions (one that people feel compelled to respect). The chapter references Margaret Gilbert’s definition, on a political level, of society as a collective of members engaged by an act of will. Nevertheless, since there must be uses and social relations that pre-exist the establishment of this collective, the choice made in this book is to rely on Durkheim’s holism: society makes people, not the other way round; furthermore, the modern society is mainly centred on the nation, though according to Durkheim it can have a cosmopolitan aspect. This frames the question of the empirical reality of global citizenship, with no territorial anchoring, common morals or government. Through an approach based on critical republicanism, the chapter delves into the relationship of individuals towards the nation-state.

Admittedly, critical republicanism is not quite holistic, since Pettit for instance believes individual freedom is derived from freedom as non-domination, making it a negative freedom, therefore a version of political liberalism. However, if political liberalism defines freedom as a natural, individual power that determines the role and limits of the state, critical republicanism derives freedom from a political status, itself framed by the state. Thus with this version of political liberalism, the notion of global citizenship can make sense; it consists in identifying universal human faculties, then deducing from them a universal society that would be global. However, with critical republicanism, the idea of global citizenship requires thinking more resolutely about the state.

In the second part of the book, which is longer that the first one, we present a Durkheimian approach on GCE. Durkheim’s intuition was that since what modern societies have in common is that they are deeply affected by liberalism, then collective consciousness can be linked to social brain, for unity; and division of labour can be linked to organic solidarity, for pluralism. In this perspective, Chapter 4 presents GlobalSense, its challenges (such as those linked to the ambiguity of the umbrella notion that is GCE and how members of the team interpret it differently), and the pedagogical design of the training device. It delves into the importance Durkheim’s theory gives to secondary social groups such as occupational groups, which must be organised on a national level, in order to integrate groups and individuals, the state being too far from them to do so. The secondary groups studied in this book are the professional groups of teacher-trainers and pre-service teachers, in a context of Europeanisation and globalisation of higher education and of international recommendations on citizenship education.

The GlobalSense project insists on the relevance of studying GCE at an international level, to compare the ways each state tends to address these ‘global’ themes in a culturally and politically specific perspective. Furthermore, the point of training pre-service teachers on this topic is to enable them to reflect on the complex relationships between a nation and the liberal principles that form the substance of the idea of citizenship. To avoid hyper-individualism, which according to Durkheim is one of the main pathologies of the division of social work, cosmopolitanism must not just be about individuals developing competences in sustainable development, global citizenship and well-being. Rather, ‘educations towards’ global citizenship gives a political meaning to knowledge and values. Therefore, the ultimate goal is not to make students understand what GCE is; but to restore political sense to educational work and encourage pre-service teachers to analyse the GCE slogan, its aims and values.

Ultimately, it is through these critical questions, potentially carried by pre-service teachers, that curriculum guidelines make it possible to consider the transition from a recommended curriculum to a real curriculum. Throughout Chapters 5 and 6 notably, we propose illustrations related to the five countries involved in the GlobalSense research. We focus in particular on the preliminary conceptions that the participating student-teachers (also alternatively called pre-service teachers throughout the book) have regarding GC and related topics (notably migrations), as well as on their perceptions of their participation in this international training device. We show how these perceptions seem to relate to their local and/or national context of training.

The aim of Chapter 5 is to develop a sociological theory regarding global citizenship. If being a citizen means taking part in the goals of a collective entity such as a nation and being obliged by its decisions, then what does citizenship become if one tries to broaden its scope (internationally) or even reformulate it (GCE)? Our answer is Durkheimian. It consists in stressing that a non-pathological division of labour deepens the autonomy of individuals, whose social aspirations are in turn likely to challenge the established order. This holistic line, considering that society is at the principle of deepening individualism, provides a guideline for thinking cosmopolitanism. Specifically, Chapter 5 underlines how critical republicanism considers patriotism as the first step to cosmopolitanism. This chapter explains that conservatism, which can sometimes be national-conservatism, is a reaction to liberal nominalism, the expression of a need to integrate and regulate the division of social work as a reaction to unbridled liberalism. The challenge is to draw an alternative, socialist response to the (neo)liberal and nominalist motif that values globalisation and blurred borders in the name of the principled autonomy of individuals.

For Durkheim, only the state¹ can ensure a ‘normality’ by making society aware of itself and, consequently, of the new rules and standards that correspond to the irreversible deepening of the division of social work. Relying to some extent on the spirit of nationalist demands can help bring out the socialist third way. Therefore, the Durkheimian gesture suggested in this book is to articulate critical republicanism with the holistic perceptive and try to grasp the social aspirations emerging from the deepening division of social work, making it possible to raise awareness of its expression at the state level. This implies developing, in teacher training, new working methods at the service of a communication circuit between societies and states (Callegaro & Marcucci, 2018) that promote new professional rules.

Chapter 6 focuses on the role of states in adapting globalisation policies in education. In the GlobalSense (GS) project, all countries are from the global north, but official requirements, such as a framework for citizenship training, remain marked by a national level. If Durkheim was in favour of secondary groups, it is because they exercise, through their trade, what is an already social thinking. The state then mediates social thinking in a continuous communication process. In this spirit, GS has the goal of promoting the expression of new aspirations in the field of cosmopolitan patriotism of two professional groups, teacher-trainers and pre-service teachers, while taking into account the fact that they are marked by moral individualism. GS uses a sociological approach rooted in political philosophy to examine the concrete conditions that might allow these professionals to establish new constitutive rules in favour of citizenship education in an international perspective, whilst taking into account these secondary groups’ national contexts, with each state then formalising the constitutive rules.

If the aims of education systems can converge under the effect of globalisation policies, this chapter wishes to consider how societies, as interpretive communities, react to these policies. This requires taking into account the reality of teacher training in the different countries, by not assuming the inevitability of globalisation processes and by emphasising the various ways in which actors interpret, appropriate and even circumvent ideas that circulate in a transnational way.

Chapter 7, centred on ‘The progress of modernity’, does not argue for or against GCE, but rather for the inclusion of prescriptions and recommendations on GCE, as well as their promoters, in the analysis led in GlobalSense. The point is to identify the political criteria that give substance to the vague notion of GCE, in order to prevent its co-optation by interests and ideologies. Based on the three typical motifs of modernity sketched by Mannheim (liberal-nominalist, conservative, and socialist), this chapter argues that the socialist one is better suited to analyse GCE, for its educational ambition is to ensure that every individual is able to study the practices of the groups in which he or she participates. For the socialist motif, people’s profusion of identities is not a reaction to national citizenship, but a deepening of individualism specific to modern societies.

In fact, the higher the division of labour, the more people need to be recognised as individuals. Durkheim saw the deepening of the ‘cult of the human person’ as a matter of social totality via organic solidarity that was supposed to reconcile differentiation and interdependence. However, this ‘cult of the person’ must be acknowledged as being specific to modern societies. Furthermore, it requires the inclusion in a political community, de facto national, of citizens who have reflexive capacities. The chapter proceeds to compare how the secondary groups of teacher trainers and pre-service teachers in the different countries receive and analyse the GlobalSense protocol. This comparison is linked to the presence of the states (rules, administration, curriculum) in teacher training. The methodology puts the overall framework to the test on different levels (student-teachers’ reactions, designing of lesson plans, international encounters, self-reflections, collective reflections) and paves the way for a renewed approach to GCE.

The conclusion underlines the potentialities of fruitful collaboration between philosophy and social sciences, in order to confront theoretical constructions with the complexities of social phenomena. This interdisciplinarity can help in the difficult task of studying stabilised political principles and their translation into real-life situations, whilst also offering a balance between collective entities and individual freedoms. This is crucial for the study of GCE in its historical complexities throughout the 20th century (International Bureau of Education, UNESCO), which are also conceptual complexities. Data analysis shows how pre-service teachers are sensitive to the concept of GC and aspire to be cosmopolitan. However, many of them are also conscious of the limits of GC, such as the fact that this concept is situated nationally and socially within societies that promote a collective individualistic ideology. Therefore, a conundrum arises from understanding that it is specifically the belonging to one’s society that makes one receptive to the concept of globalised citizenship, which by definition overcomes national citizenship.