1 Reacting to Liberal Nominalism without Giving in to Conservatism

In this perspective, it is necessary to take manifestations of conservative nationalism seriously, as reactions to an anomic division of labour that tends to disembed the economy from national society. It is therefore necessary to think of the three motifs constitutive of modernity– liberal, conservative and socialist – together for, while they oppose each other, they also contribute to defining the present situation. Typically, national-conservative reactions, often xenophobic, could indicate that interdependent relationships have increased on a global scale; thus the national-conservative reaction might indicate a certain success of the liberal motif, which values globalisation and blurred borders in the name of the principled autonomy of individuals. The challenge is then to draw an alternative, socialist response to this liberal motif, which, associated with economic neo-liberalism, has increasingly obvious limits.

According to Karsenti and Lemieux, this requires serious thinking about the nation and bringing the national idea to life through education, providing an increased ability to grasp oneself within a totality, in order to perpetuate and transform it. Therefore, the authors question the disembodied trans-national. If the idea of a European cosmopolitanism is not an empty word,

it is to the extent that Europe was built on the basis of internationalism, that is, as an association of nations […]. As such, it is not an exaggeration to say that Europe matters even more than the UN [of which UNESCO is a part]. Because the United Nations are in this way fundamentally different from Europe: as a supranational entity, it brings together all states indistinctly, liberal and democratic or not, fully assuming the gaps that may exist between ‘facticity and validity’ and limiting itself to formulating ‘idealising assumptions’. In the case of Europe […] the gap between facticity and validity is not allowed for any of its constituent parts.

(Karsenti & Lemieux, 2017, p. 98)

The specificity of the European model is therefore that its implementation is constantly judged by its results. In addition, it is today the regulation and integration of the division of labour within it that is one of the conditions of its survival. The resulting socialism is therefore intimately linked to national realities and even to national-conservative expressions as a reaction, perceived by Durkheim, to a pathological division of labour. Strikingly, the authors go so far as to write that socialism

is quite comparable, and in some respects identical, to reactionary thinking. Only to the extent that it succeeds in transmuting this primary attitude into a will of social science, in order to allow effective political action, does socialism separate itself from reactionary thinking and finally come to occupy a position that is diametrically opposed to it.

(Karsenti & Lemieux 2017, p. 48)

How then can we transmute this reactionary thought, some aspects of which, in particular the will to think the totality, are identical to socialism? For Durkheim and many of his followers, only the state is likely to ensure a ‘normality’, understood as avoiding the pathological, by making society aware of itself and, consequently, of new rules and standards corresponding to the irreversible deepening of the division of social work.

2 Overcoming Plain Liberalism: Yes, but How?

These avenues must now be put to the test. This requires pointing out the blind spots of Karsenti and Lemieux’ position: for though their purpose is politically lucid, it nevertheless remains fragile from an epistemological point of view.

First, the authors accuse ‘liberalism’ of abandoning the idea of social totality, thus legitimising their search for an inseparably socialist and sociological third path. However, the typically liberal edifice of John Rawls would collapse if he did not refer to a social totality in reference to the idea of people. Furthermore, political liberalism is constantly evolving internally; it is therefore important not to freeze its reading. In other words, “instead of mobilising our prior conception of what liberalism is to understand Rawls, we should better mobilise Rawls to develop a new conception of what liberalism could be” (Laden, 2006, p. 342).

Moreover, the authors of Socialism and Sociology exaggerate by imagining that sociology – once freed from the ‘mental grip’ that methodological individualism supposedly exerts on it – would be a more socialist discipline and, therefore, more democratic than anthropology (too conservative), history (too individualistic) and the law (too contractualist and therefore liberal). Does this thesis not telescope too much the political, ontological and epistemological levels? Only a fixed reading of ‘liberalism’ makes it possible to oppose ‘socialism’ and legitimise the said ‘sociological’ path which would be in ‘elective affinity’ with the latter. To be convincing, Karsenti and Lemieux would have had to distinguish the ontological register from the political one. And once these different registers at stake are unfolded, which is the least one can do when one intends to find ‘elective affinities’ between a discipline such as sociology and a political current such as socialism, then it becomes difficult to play Socialism, supposedly in ‘elective affinity’ with Sociology, against Liberalism that would parasite the latter.

However, a closeness exists between our approach and that of the authors of Socialism and Sociology. If they do not focus on the divides between liberalism and republicanism, but between liberalism and socialism, the fact remains that their reflection integrates a third common term: nationalism. They stress that it is precisely the denial of nationalism, as a properly modern phenomenon, that prevents the formation of a real socialist path. Furthermore, relying in part on the spirit of the nationalist demands – as reactions to unbridled liberalism – can bring out the socialist third way, nationalism being in part the expression of a need to integrate and regulate the division of social work.

Therefore, the Durkheimian gesture suggested in this book gives critical republicanism a new meaning, by thinking its articulation with the holistic perceptive, at the ontological level (collective entities such as the nation as a modern form of society), as well as at the political level (its affinities with socialism). It is to try, through a research on citizenship education, to grasp the social aspirations emerging from the deepening division of labour, 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, 2018), promoting new professional rules.

There is no doubt that global citizenship is linked to the context of globalisation, in which Western education systems are inserted and which Western universities try to grasp as an object of research and training, whilst being impacted by this object. Completeness on the subject is out of reach here, but here is a summary of the situation in broad strokes with a focus on themes touched on in GlobalSense: migration, climate, relations between nations and minorities from post-colonial immigration. As members of modern societies, we tend to be aware that events taking place thousands of kilometres away are nevertheless part of our close reality. When the Amazon forest goes up in smoke, we know that it has an impact on the global climate. When migrant boats sail on the Mediterranean, we know that our European states can decide, depending on the elected governments, to welcome or reject them, and under what conditions. When Islamist attacks tear apart Africa and the Middle East, we assume that it has to do with decolonisation, with the strategic and commercial links established between our states and certain dictatorships, and with our consumption of fossil fuels that contribute to the revenues of well-known companies and diplomatic relations between our states and authoritarian regimes.

3 Moral Individualism as a Collective Ideology

People may of course interpret these elements differently. Has decolonisation not already taken place? Is the Amazon not situated in Latin America? Can and do we really want to welcome migrant boats? Is our consumption really in question, knowing that the 10% richest people on the planet emit almost half the greenhouse emissions? As a citizen, any answer to those questions is possible. However, few pre-service teachers and teacher trainers would deny their relevance. This is already a way of recognising the global scope of the themes that should be taken into account in citizenship education.

Though Durkheim had not perceived the ecological question, which connects people’s subjectivities around the planet, he did sense a growing cosmopolitan feeling as the deepening of the integrated and regulated division of labour produced organic solidarity. This important idea emphasises that the perception of these new connections between people, potentially global, is a product of the ideology of the modern. Thus, if I think that the fate of the Uighurs concerns me because they are my fellow beings, it is due to the fact I perceive them from the point of the collective ideology that Durkheim called (with no pejorative connotation) the cult of the human person.

It is therefore an ideology with an individualistic content, but which nevertheless remains, as has been said, formed at the societal level. Without an integrated and regulated division of labour and without organic solidarity, it would be hardly viable and therefore not widespread beyond particular individuals. Indeed, the idea of a humanity composed of fellow beings is found in many societies; but it is in only some of them, at a given time, such as the France described by Durkheim and the United States described by Tocqueville, among others, that this idea became a collective representation.

That is why, contrary to what a superficial analysis of the global citizenship slogan might suggest, humanity is not itself a community, and each nation relates to the world differently. Insofar as it is of interest to our research, we note that the teacher trainers and pre-service teachers within GlobalSense are members of ‘modern’ countries and are, therefore, marked by the collective ideology of the cult of the human person. Thus, they are aware of the importance of citizenship education from an international perspective.

However, official national requirements remain to some extent marked by an earlier stage in the division of labour that confers the quasi-exclusive framework of training of the citizen to the nation. This is not a problem in itself, but we can hypothesise that individuals marked by moral individualism, in increasingly differentiated societies, have new aspirations in this field.

In which case the researcher’s role is to promote their conscious expression, possibly leading to the creation of new rules within self-regulated (professional) secondary groups. For division of labour creates eminently practical problems, that professional corporations, according to Durkheim, are best able to respond to. If the word ‘corporation’ strikes strangely on the ear, one can also mention professional associations, unions and, more occasionally, some research-training projects, such as GlobalSense, whose aim it is to promote the reflexivity of future teachers and their trainers.

4 The State at the Service of Social Thinking

The Durkheimian approach thus contributes to the transformation of practices, without becoming prescriptive. Indeed, though the role of the state is not to summarise society’s thought, but to “add to it a more meditated thought”, as Durkheim said, it remains that the latter is anchored in secondary groups. Society’s thoughts are mediated by the state in a continuous communication process, clarifying the obscure feelings that affect society to help it achieve a higher degree of reflexivity (Steiner, 2018). Nevertheless, nothing is so simple. We have already suggested above that the Durkheimian sociology of the state is as innovative as it is ambiguous. Therefore, before putting it to the test, let us answer some of the criticisms against it.

When social conflicts are important and hinder the healthy deployment of organic solidarity, Durkheim does not imagine that the state can forge privileged links with certain groups more powerful than others: “the existence of classes or castes such as those with high socio-economic inequalities have no influence in his eyes on the nature of the state, which probably derives its ‘strength’ from its rationality alone” (Birnbaum, 1976, p. 252). Similarly, when Durkheim theorises democracy as a process of communication between state and society, “he does not take into account the possibility of a strategic manipulation of the second by the first” (Sintomer, 2011, p. 408).

Conversely, while the state becomes a “hotbed of new, original representations, which must put society in a position to behave with more intelligence than when it is simply driven by the obscure feelings that impact it” (Durkheim, 1900/2020, p. 150), society is not really a counter power, but rather a space where ‘counterweights’, such as professional corporations, become partners, which the state must enter and control – the crucial question being: to what extent? The emancipation movement is therefore carried out preferentially from the state to society: “Individuals can, without contradicting themselves, be the instruments of the state, because to realise individuals is what the state’s action tends towards” (Durkheim, 1900/2020, p. 127).

In short, the development of professional corporations is both a guarantee of democracy (as intermediate forces between the state and individuals) and a potential limit to it. If Durkheim is in favour of them, it is because they exercise, through their trade, what is an already social way of thinking, while he distrusts groups of individuals gathered under the aegis of a common interest (local communities, social movements, social classes). The fragility of the Durkheimian edifice is thus revealed. Rather elitist, it requires an educator-state to prevent political communication from society overwhelming it. Indeed, the state is supposed to ensure its mission through a completely neutral body of officials, in order to strip them of their personal interests and put them at the service of this highly elaborate concept that the state is.

This is why, seeing that civil servants embodying the state are also private persons, Durkheim considered that they should neither unionise nor go on strike as mentioned previously, thus constricting them to his political sociology. This view disregards unionism’s political power to challenge the possible arbitrariness of the state administration, allowing it therefore to assume this role of ‘counterweight’ of which Durkheim speaks. Nonetheless, the author does not choose this path, instead depicting democratic deliberation as being disentangled from the social context. Can democratic deliberation, once rid of private interests thanks to the supposed impartiality of the state, truly reflect ‘society’?

These fragilities are the reasons why the Durkheimian proposals must be read today in a more liberal, pluralistic perspective, adapted to modern democracies (Guérard de Latour, 2014). This is all the more feasible because criticisms of Durkheim’s political sociology are not necessarily salient regarding the object considered here. Teacher training indeed remains a state prerogative, one that Durkheim fulfils in Chapter IV of Education and Sociology, a course addressed to pre-service secondary teachers at the Faculty of Literature of Paris University. In short, though Durkheimian political sociology is a bit fragile, its assumptions around a state-led teacher training could be tested accurately, especially since we now benefit from a Rawlsian rereading of his work.

5 A Two-Fold Rawlsian Reading of Durkheim

How can secondary groups create new rules in close connection with the state, without enduring its weight? Here appears the usefulness of the sociologist Anne Rawls’ reading of Durkheim in a liberal perspective. The proximity between her father John Rawls and Durkheim lies, among other things, in the Rawlsian distinction between summary and constitutive rules. The former regulate activities that already exist (cooking recipes, traffic regulations); the latter are institutional facts, in that they create the possibility of carrying out the activity in question, such as playing chess or making a promise.

Let us illustrate this point. Though one can cook without following a recipe, and drive without following traffic regulations, one cannot keep a promise for utilitarian reasons: the result may be the same, but it will not be a kept promise. Indeed, one can only keep a promise if the action carried out, is carried out because of the promise made, not because of external and contingent circumstances (such as usefulness) on which the promised action depends. Yet this distinction intersects the Durkheimian distinction between mechanical and organic solidarity. In modern societies, summary rules still exist, but increasingly give way to constitutive rules.

As Anne Rawls strongly emphasises, contrary to current interpretations, Durkheim did not cease to emphasise that, in modern societies, differentiated, diversified, individualised, upset in their morphology by the division of social work, collective consciousness can no longer – and must no longer – […] rely on the primacy of this first type of [summary] rules. […] A form of social solidarity has become necessary (and desirable), which now proceeds from below and not from overhanging institutions, that does not depend on the authority of collective beliefs, but rather on a shared commitment towards ‘practices’ – as understood by John Rawls – based on forms of internal, horizontal self-regulation, in short on constitutive rules.

(Chanial, 2019, p. 21)

This is where the well-known Durkheimian proposal of professional corporations, as secondary, self-regulated groups, interwoven between the state and individuals, makes sense: the corporate model that Durkheim advocates for must bring together workers from different companies – or working in the same workplace – who share common work practices (Rawls, 2021). These aspirations are perceivable in the students’ self-reflections.

By being a part of a global community, we are able to share our interactions with various institutions and how they affect our classrooms, and how they can affect those in other places. Additionally, this showed me the importance of teaching cooperatively. As seen with this particular activity, we are able to teach students about a global issue, such as migration, by working with others who experience it differently. (Blake, pre-service teacher in social studies, TUP)

The objective, according to Durkheim, is for the state to assume its role as the social brain (cf. Chapter 4), formalising the constitutive orders that emerge in society as the division of labour deepens. In this sense, as has been said, the state is primarily an organ of thought; if it must act, it is to ensure the necessary conditions for the deployment of constitutive practices: cooperation, reciprocity, equality of access, communication, internal self-regulation of practices. From a methodological point of view, an interactionist interpretation of Durkheim’s approach emerges, and the inquiry consists in asking whether people are able (or not) to produce social facts recognisable by all, under the conditions that are theirs. That is the meaning of the adjective ‘constitutive’. The rules constitute social facts, just as the rules of chess constitute the collective action of playing chess.

To produce social facts in this way, it is necessary, to varying degrees, to establish trust (Garfinkel), a working consensus (Goffman) and a joint commitment (Gilbert). These models, purified and anchored in the sociological tradition (not only Durkheimian but also interactionist), reveal the capacities to create social facts which, deployed by members of secondary groups, are essential in societies marked by the rapid deepening of the division of labour. Sociology is in charge of studying these capacities and new forms of social facts; the state is in charge of formalising the new constitutive rules – according to Anne Rawls – elaborated by secondary groups. This interpretation of the Durkheimian perspective extends the gesture of political philosophy. Indeed, Durkheim insisted that sociology was not intended to discover an existing but unexplored continent (the ‘social’, le social), since it was motivated by an already political intention: to study the ‘social’ was also, ipso facto, to constitute it (Callegaro & Marcucci, 2018).

However, we must take care to not misinterpret the notion of state. The point is not to evoke a hypertrophied macro-actor, or a neutral and reasonable power that would turn the confused feelings of the people into ‘clear’ thoughts and speeches. Birnbaum and Sintomer’s aforementioned criticisms, as well as Cuin, Déloye and Dubet’s remarks about Durkheim must therefore be taken into account. Moreover, a state is not exclusively national. A challenge for GlobalSense is, precisely, to activate an interstate lever, if only as a co-financer (the European Commission), in order to develop a new framework that matches the latent aspirations of society, such as the cosmopolitan patriotism Durkheim already sensed as a European horizon calling for a new form of government. In this perspective, we want to capture “that part of the unconscious that first escapes the state because it refers to the changing aspirations of political society impacting the law” (Callegaro, 2018, p. 220).

The simple fact of internationalising teacher training, within the framework of GlobalSense, is a way of supporting the division of labour, since higher education is becoming Europeanised, as evidenced by the European Commission framework Cooperation partnerships in Higher Education. To use the terminology of Anne Rawls, the objective of training-research is to provide actors with an updated professional framework for the creation of social facts according to constitutive rules. This is a partly spontaneous order, just as in the corporations of which Durkheim speaks, since the pre-service teachers, in principle at least, are fully interested in this device and benefit from huge flexibility to suggest ideas and express their aspirations.

Yet it remains to be seen how constitutive rules can be promoted whilst avoiding any prescriptive imposition on the part of the state and/or supranational bodies, thus ensuring the conditions of self-regulation of the professional group(s) composed of pre-service teachers and teacher trainers. It also remains to be seen what the place of the recapitulative rules is (as opposed to constitutive ones), since habits, grammars of citizenship, and conceptions of the profession are very prominent.

This liberal interpretation of Durkheim provides a methodological framework to clarify the vagueness of the GCE slogan. As the debates about it show, global citizenship does not really make sense in the current state of things, except as a distant and abstract ideal. Durkheim had perceived, as suggested in the second part of this book, that in order to be truly coherent, a cosmopolitan citizenship would require imagining humanity itself organised as a society. However, Durkheim considered this idea so unimaginable that it did not even come into play. Whatever one thinks of his pessimism or his realism, the crucial point is that the sociologist-philosopher and professor of education science did not abandon the ideal of a finally unified humanity, because he knew that this was the ultimate ideal of the modern.¹

Indeed, the irreversible deepening of the division of labour parallels the increasingly demanding affirmation of the cult of the human person: organic solidarity no longer requires similarities between individuals and it is the individual, as an ideal, who ultimately remains an object of worship.

In modern societies, individuals, Durkheim judged, are constantly differentiating themselves, to the point that they potentially only have one thing in common: the fact that they are human beings. The moral foundation of these societies could therefore, in his eyes, only be individualism, understood as the sacralisation of the human person. Yet, this individualism implies “sympathy for all that is man, a wider pity for all pains, for all human miseries, a greater need to fight and soften them, a greater thirst for justice” [Individualism and intellectuals], which potentially has no limits. The result is that the moral individualism of modern societies leads to the rise of a “broad conception of humanity” [The division of labour], that is, of a moral cosmopolitanism.

(Truc, 2012, p. 61)

Under these conditions, the professional groups directly involved, including pre-service teachers and their trainers, anticipate the stakes of the GCE if only because they know, more or less confusedly, that

1. –Citizenship is a human ideal rather than a narrowly national one;
2. –The boundaries between states are arbitrary regarding the worship of the human person;
3. –Students and their families nowadays can identify with extra national and/or transnational communities;
4. –Ecological issues are inherently global (etc.).

This implies a new international division of labour in citizenship education. However, it is necessary to accompany this process in order to avoid a pathological division of labour (anomic or constrained), contrary to the development of organic solidarity that secondary groups are supposed to promote. This is why the promotion of ‘good practices’ and non-reflexive training engineering are not solutions but obstacles (Barthes, 2017a). To avoid them, GlobalSense must return to the sociological tradition, itself anchored in political philosophy, and examine certain concrete conditions that might allow professionals to establish new constitutive rules in favour of citizenship education in an international perspective. In particular, we are interested in collectivisation procedures: modes of cooperation, communication tools, spaces for discussion, exchanges of practices, joint work.

That being said, the ‘social facts’ thus created cannot hide other more massive and more durable phenomena: historically and culturally settled definitions of citizenship, habits, conception of the profession, its reality in a given society in terms of esteem, prestige, status, recognition … The Rawlsian interpretation of Durkheim is therefore an interesting tool, but it cannot hide the persistence of summary rules or even mechanical solidarity in our modern societies (Mauss, 1968, p. 105).

6 Cosmopolitanism: A Modern Ideal

Using Durkheimian tools updated by socialists (Karsenti, Lemieux), republicans (Pettit, Guérard de Latour) and liberals (Rawls), we can return with more precision to the debates on GCE. Let us first give an illustration of the French case, which is the country where Durkheim’s thought was first developed. As Durkheim is a founder of sociology, this specific illustration can be insightful to clarify the debate on GC, which occurs in other countries. In France, some versions of the republican project tend towards authoritarian nationalism, if not racialism (Fassin, 2013). This raises concerns that call for a cosmopolitan ideal. Yet this process can lead to an under-theorisation of the totalities, often national, at the principle of the deepening of the ideal of individual autonomy. In Dumont’s words, mentioned above, the nation is a global society composed of people who consider themselves as individuals.

However, is the Dumontian remark still valid today? Is it not obvious that the nation-state is less powerful today under the combined effects of world markets, international treaties, relations of worldwide economic competition, communication networks whose speed far exceeds that of the 20th century? Therefore, can we still consider the nation-state as the ultimate framework for autonomy? In short: is the holistic approach still relevant? Yes, because it evolves; moreover, regarding our research more specifically, we can see that it is not necessary to go beyond the national framework to understand curriculum changes regarding citizenship in an international perspective. The national French curriculum, which we have outlined above (concerning the level of collège, i.e. middle school), includes elements on global citizen engagement (global issues, global engagement). Though this is not specifically global citizenship, which in any case is ‘only’ a horizon, this French curriculum does have a global perspective. Indeed, it takes note of the insertion of the nation-state in frameworks that go beyond it and could even possibly ‘threaten’ it: ECHR, UN, NGO s and international conventions.

The neo-Durkheimian approach is not, in fact, incompatible with the common idea in GCE according to which global citizenship does not replace national citizenship. Nevertheless, although this idea is obvious, it is very diversely interpreted; so that holism will lead us, infra, to challenge the ‘nominalist motif’ in GCE. Revisiting classical sociology implies relying on a theory of modernity, rendering useless the hypothesis that we have entered a radically different ‘new era’, a ‘new world’ and a ‘new civilizational situation’, to use expressions used by postmodern thinkers. Indeed, the truly modern ideals (freedom, autonomy, emancipation, equality, etc.) still animate us, including in GCE, and that is why it is important to continue to use classical sociology.

In this case, by explaining the fundamental modernity of the cosmopolitan attitude, Durkheim avoids the nominalist pitfall oblivious to the (often national) totality, by following the principle of individualism as a value. However, this oversight is precisely what favours the instrumentalisation of the cosmopolitan ideal, in favour of market ideologies of a globalisation without borders (Nussbaum, 2019). The question that remains is: how does the cosmopolitan ideal manage (or not) to project itself onto a global citizenship (as an ideal or a reality) that legitimises GCE? In some of its influential versions, the multiculturalist ideal in GCE is fundamentally nominalist, preventing one from thinking about citizenship in a satisfactory manner. However, it is also important to reject the conservative response that denies any relevance to the notion of global citizenship. In doing so, it is possible to sketch out a third educational path and its practical consequences in a particular environment.

ETS are a privileged actor of the training of teachers and educational staff, and as such are at the crossroads of these issues. They embody a project of society, more or less related to state prescriptions, whose expected results they seek to translate and/or criticise, whose declinations they wish to trace, whose modalities of circumvention of national rules they try to identify, whilst themselves being framed by international recommendations, inter-state treaties, etc. ETS thus handle various orders of discourse – administrative, political, scientific – whose respective specificities they must understand, from the perspective of an articulation closer than in other disciplines, with ethical and socio-political questions, in terms of aims and social projects (Albero & Barthes, 2022). This justifies the mobilisation of several disciplines by returning to their foundations in order to unfold the many registers around the notion of GCE.

7 Escaping the Consensus Rhetoric

Durkheim also formulated a social project. It took into account both the national totality and the processes of individuation in modern societies, through the notion of organic solidarity. The more differentiated the functions (especially professional ones) are, the more people are united, because they need each other within the framework of an important division of labour, provided that the latter is integrated and regulated. The European pre-service teachers and senior education advisors – as opposed to the US and Israeli participants – mention how taking part in GlobalSense has led them to this realisation:

In France global issues are usually taught by history/geography teacher, but now I see it can be taught by other teachers. Bringing teachers and students around a global issue […] could bring cohesion. (Eline, senior education advisor, NU, France)

It is important for a teacher to be aware that their students come from different backgrounds. As a teacher of English and German, I will address these topics in my classroom. But talking to the philosophy teachers has made me aware that it can be difficult. (Sofia, pre-service teacher, WUE, Germany)

As a future English teacher, I don’t feel I have the necessary training to go in depth in global issues, and I need the help of a rhetoric/philosophy teacher. However, it is still an interesting topic for English classes and can help sensitise students. (Zineb, pre-service teacher, FUB, Belgium)

The quotes illustrate Durkheim’s theory on the organic solidarity that emerges from interdependence. Teachers from various disciplines, such as history/geography, English, German, and philosophy, collaborate and learn from each other. This cross-disciplinary interaction fosters a collective understanding of global issues and promotes a sense of cohesion, reflecting the organic solidarity Durkheim describes. The shared learning experiences contribute to a more comprehensive and interconnected educational approach, reinforcing the idea that the collective knowledge of educators enriches the overall educational system.

In practice, cross-disciplinary collaboration among educators reflects Durkheim’s organic solidarity theory. This fosters cohesion and a collective understanding, while Durkheim’s theory underscores the state’s role in acknowledging and embracing societal differences. Indeed, far from homogenising the social body, the state as a social brain was destined, as an organ of thought, “to concentrate the diffuse psychic life at work within society by supplementing the form of unconscious regulation which operates there through a conscious regulation [and thus to render] society conscious of its own diversity” (Guérard de Latour, 2009, p. 226). Thus, to use the title of the work quoted here, Durkheim gives a nod to The Republic of Differences.

These are intra-national differences, recalling that neo-Durkheimian republicanism is in no way opposed to a multicultural society; but what about the supra-national level? How can the republican ideal, which centres on the notion of state, hold in a cosmopolitan perspective that transcends state borders, in a far more globalised era than that of Durkheim? Many solutions have been proposed within the French School of Sociology, including by Mauss who envisioned an organic solidarity between nations. In addition, many important authors who do not explicitly subscribe to holism, such as Deweyan pragmatists and liberal sociologists, continue to think of citizenship essentially within the national framework, despite what they may say.

And this is hardly surprising if we recall the observations made above: insofar as modern ideology is individualistic, it is natural to make its collective dimension implicit. This we have seen, with Dumont and Descombes, in the introduction of this typescript and we extend these remarks here by briefly echoing Kitcher’s general comments on education, also mentioned at the beginning of this book.

8 Return of Collective Entities

The term ‘realistic’ is used here with a double meaning. The first consists in refusing a closely nominalist posture that strips of their reality certain collective entities (political society, nation). We wish to underline that in sociology, the realistic posture is opposed to nominalism. The nominalist academic, such as the French sociologist Raymond Boudon, will say that ‘the State’, ‘the socialist party’ and ‘the Church’ neither think nor act for themselves. The reason for this being that these entities are not truly real since they are solely names, used out of convenience. Only individuals who are members of these fictional entities can think and act. On the contrary, the realist, such as Emile Durkheim, will say that collective entities are endowed with a capacity to think and act of their own.

As for Pierre Bourdieu, he was a nominalist, despite appearances and his opposition to Raymond Boudon regarding methodological individualism and ‘holism’. Indeed, the habitus dear to Bourdieu is an individual attribute (although formed in a social structure), as are people’s tastes in Distinction, as well as their cultural capital, etc. This remark may be surprising, because Bourdieu is generally thought of as a holist (are fields not totalities?). Nonetheless, this point was clarified in the introduction (regarding the notion of state). Furthermore we can for instance recall, in Bourdieu’s work, the constructivist imprint of the spokesperson creating groups since

the group does not exist before a representative emerges to become the spokesperson [within the framework of] a conception closely dependent on an individualistic ontology […] [that] reveals an originally dissocialised understanding of the individual, or that accesses the social only through the ‘magic’ of group building.

(Heurtin, 2022, p. 310)

On the contrary Durkheim, a realist, envisaged a fact such as suicide as a strictly social, non-individual phenomenon, showing that “sociological regularities do not correspond to psychological regularities […]. [Therefore] adopting a Durkheimian view on Bourdieu’s Distinction implies challenging the concept of habitus” (Magni-Berton, 2008, pp. 302, 312). Ultimately, beyond the (false) quarrels around ‘holism’ that have marked Francophone sociology, realism suggests a return to Durkheim, in order to take seriously the social realities that a reflection on citizenship in an international perspective cannot circumvent: groups, collectives, nations. These realities form the anchoring of interpretive communities, whose seriousness is essential in comparative education, especially in the so-called hermeneutic approach.

The second sense of the realistic posture claimed here consists in taking into account the reality of teacher training in the different countries by not assuming the inevitability of globalisation processes (of which GCE is a stakeholder) and by emphasising the various ways in which actors interpret, appropriate and even circumvent ideas that circulate in a transnational way. This time, realism is opposed not to nominalism, but to abstraction. In this perspective, we start from the principle already mentioned according to which GCE is a vague notion susceptible to various uses. It therefore points to a more general phenomenon, linked to changes in education systems as a result of globalisation policies. What should guide us in the first place is not so much GCE, as the observation that the school “can no longer rely on the assurance on which it was built, that of a convergence between the culture of which it is the bearer and which develops inside it, and the contemporary forms of social and political integration of individuals” (Malet, 2012, p. 75).

To refer to a student-teacher’s reflection that we have quoted previously, when a country’s civic and citizenship education curriculum is no longer entirely relevant in regards to the reality of the society in which students evolve, and the questions they ask themselves about it, it becomes, in part, up to their teachers to go beyond the curriculum in order to give their students the knowledge and analytical skills to address this reality.

GCE therefore is one way among others to promote ‘social participation’ in an evolving space-time marked by globalisation policies. Consequently, the question in this perspective is not to educate towards global citizenship as such. GCE is first and foremost a ‘narrative’ whose objectives are potentially broader (Tarozzi & Torres, 2016), falling within ‘social inclusion’ and ‘skills capitalisation’, including the ‘social and civic skills’ valued by the European Commission. Therefore, teachers and their trainers are caught up in tensions that need to be explored.

A double injunction is [indeed] addressed to them: the transmission of a common good and the fulfilment of equal rights, in an ideal of integration, and at the same time the realisation of the individual in his potentialities, in a concrete project of capitalisation of skills and social participation. The abstract ideal of emancipation is replaced by a concrete ambition for social inclusion. School and its teachers have, in short, become uncertain regarding a mission of cultural transmission, under the influence of globalisation policies […]. These inherent phenomena of mediation [and adaptation] are linked to ‘educational traditions’ and the conservatisms that impact the teachers of the countries concerned (“enable teachers to widen their perspectives to see beyond the influences that have traditionally shaped their behaviour”, CERI [Centre for Educational Research and Innovation – OECD], 1998). It is obviously a pragmatic way of setting out the issues, not to ask ourselves about meaning. What is at stake in the forms of adaptation (or inadequacy) of national schools and their teachers to globalisation policies is however more complex and is due to five sets of issues in tension, which are distinctly national even if they are declined at an international level […] [One of them concerns] the function, which is at the heart of the action of education, of linking the subject of education and training to a cultural community and of transmitting cultural goods in the project of forming an educated and critical citizenship.

(Malet, 2010, pp. 98–100)

Although GCE is part of a multi issue system, it should be noted that it is not a policy of globalisation in the strong sense of the word. GCE is rather a diffuse and multifaceted narrative that manifests itself in very different ways depending on the country. Germany and Great Britain, for example, are much more affected by these requirements than France is. Does this mean that teacher training in Germany is more global, open, inclusive, universal than it is in France? If so, should France emulate Germany?

These are not pertinent questions, but they make it possible to emphasise that, in the GlobalSense consortium, the German team is able to handle GCE vocabulary at the same time as a prescription that legitimises its educational action, an analytical tool that justifies its academic function, and as a political aim that legitimises its underlying ethics. Such a harmonious interweaving deserves to be taken as a research object since it concerns the alignment of expertise, research, policy and the role of universities (Barthes, 2017b). Let us unfold this point.

GCE is an intervention in search of a theory […] I conceptualize it as a ‘multi-vocal’ symbol. The anthropologist Victor Turner explains that multi-vocal symbols are capable of being interpreted in multiple ways by different actors and, in some cases, can become the site of conflict as different interest groups compete to have their own interpretations accepted as the dominant one. […] As a matter of fact, GCE is characterized in multiple ways. […] Who is in charge of promoting GCE and who is in charge of evaluating its effectiveness are important questions, and require an alterity between the UN system, the global system, and the nation-state systems. There are many typologies but not a single theory that can encompass all the different interpretations in a holistic way. I believe what we need now is a meta-theory.

(Torres & Bosio, 2020, p. 107)

If GCE is looking for a theory, or even a meta-theory, it is because it needs a framework to permanently unravel the intersection, or even the telescoping, between political and educational incentive, scientific challenge, political aim of a discipline (ETS), and all this according to the values of the researcher, that is to say those oriented towards truth, which give shape to four norms as specified by Merton: universalism, communalism, disinterest, organised scepticism – a set of norms deemed constraining but perhaps less so with University’s managerial mutations.

9 What Political Philosophy?

To avoid this kind of asymmetry between countries, and between national prescriptions that more or less match the rhetoric of globalisation, the analysis must refocus on the experience of teacher trainers and pre-service teachers by clearly separating prescriptions (or slogans) from research issues.

Admittedly, an educational ideal carried by ETS could be better achieved if it was prescribed by a ministry. Therefore, the point is not to reject, on principle, slogans that give substance to prescriptions. Nevertheless, ETS must be able to develop their own ideals, with full academic autonomy, without unquestioned political keywords interfering with them. This is what is at stake in our proposition to turn towards Durkheim’s approach. It allows us to re-appropriate a classical questioning, anchored in our disciplines, in order to maintain our autonomy in regard to slogans. This is the meaning of Torres’ call on the need for a (meta-)theory to channel the narrative of GCE.

Above all, if we want to seriously consider GCE as an object of study and not simply as a prescription that educators and trainer-researchers are in charge of implementing, then we must be able to dissociate it, even temporarily, from any particular political philosophy. In other words, a truly comparative approach should be able to take into account several perspectives in political philosophy.

Indeed, despite some appearances conveyed by GCE narratives, there is no obvious logical link between what is ‘global’, ‘diversity’ and ‘multiculturalism’. Neo-liberalism is also global, although not genuinely multicultural, at least not according to Nancy Fraser for example. Similarly, the Islamic State bases its actions on the (global) Ummah while offering its members a citizenship under Islamic law. Admittedly, the neo-liberal perspective should be rejected, and even more so the ideology of the Islamic State. However, focusing on the global level is not necessarily the best way to achieve this, since it does not have the monopoly on social justice, openness to others or tolerance (Joppke, 2021).

Essentially, despite what many of its proponents may say, GCE is much more about scale than it is about a particular philosophy. Here is a list, established by Oxley and Morris (2013), of currents associated de facto with GCE. A tag author is associated with each of them, in order to offer a clearer indication of these currents’ meaning.

1. –cosmopolitan democracy (Rawls)
2. –human rights (Kant)
3. –international development (Hayek)
4. –globalisation of arts, media, languages, sciences and technologies (Nietzsche)
5. –global civil society (Habermas)
6. –postcolonial agenda (Marx, Saïd)
7. –critical pedagogy (Freire)
8. –sustainable development agenda (Dobson)
9. –caring, loving, spiritual and emotional connections (Bible, Quran, religious texts).

This overview shows that the scope of GCE is about as broad as the field of citizenship education in general. Far from being limited to values of openness, tolerance, peace or connection between people, GCE is primarily a consequence of the change in the scale of action of nation-states in the context of globalisation policies. Additionally, this movement is far from unambiguous, because the nation tends to slip back in through the window when it is chased out the door, as the French saying goes.

The notion of global citizenship is not without its critics, having been criticized as being unpractical and ‘too abstract’ to generate the emotional and moral energy needed to galvanize action and make changes. The idea of a world state is further problematized, with Parekh arguing that such an entity is more likely than not to be “remote, bureaucratic, oppressive and culturally bland”. […] [The] recognition of citizenship as the primary mode of individual and collective identity and the tangible duties it entails [makes it necessary to] ground the ‘free floating’ global subject in space and time. Globally oriented citizenship thus parallels national citizenship on two counts. First, it refers to political activity and empirical assumptions to do with law, justice and rights. Second, it depends on an ‘imagined community’ of people sharing the same transcendent human values of humanitarianism, respect, justice and nonviolence […]. For some theorists this means uncoupling nationality from citizenship and promoting global citizenship and responsibility. For others it demands a deepening of one’s democratic citizenship of a nation.

(Matthews & Sidhu, 2005, p. 55)

The statement echoes previous investigations on collective entities. To what extent is it possible to uncouple citizenship from national reality, even if it is enlarged (federation, international conventions)? What are the consequences of an under-theorisation of this aspect, resulting in a GC described as “remote, bureaucratic, oppressive and culturally bland”?

Debates on the Republic, multiculturalism and liberalism revolve around these issues. Some consider that post-industrial societies are based on a new mode of integration making traditional nation-building institutions obsolete (Luhmann, Beck). Others continue to see national integration as a key element of democratic identity (Durkheim, Joppke). In GCE debates, we have the choice to explore one or the other of these avenues. However, the work tools developed in this book invite us to go down the second one. Hence, the agenda is not just to convene political liberalism to

criticise republican dogmatism in light of [post-national] identity claims. It is also a question of considering the capacity of republican thought to reveal the limits of the liberal perspective and to offer its own way to meet the challenge of multiculturalism. […] Among these works [falling under this renewed republicanism], the most relevant to clarify the nature of the ‘societal culture’ and its role in the actualisation of citizenship are those that do not dissociate the issue of ethnic [and cultural] diversity from the problem of national integration.

(Guérard de Latour, 2009, p. 24)

A general analysis of the pre-service teachers’ and senior education advisors’ reflections, after they took part in the GlobalSense exchanges, can illustrate this point by showing that the focus of these reflections tends to vary depending on the participants’ context of training. In the following excerpt from a self-reflection, a student teacher analyses the different ways they and their peers from another country (in this instance, the US) handled the instruction to imagine a lesson plan on migration:

To me it felt like the Americans were trying to stay on the surface of the matter and avoid any heated debate, where I wanted to engage my students in a core discussion, and examine the complexity of the issue. I guess the differences has to do with the question of how sensitive the topic is in the public view. (Noa, pre-service teacher, HUJI, Israel)

Depending on the countries, as has already been mentioned, participants either focused essentially on the influence of the national context on the way people approach the topic of migration (participants of NU (France), TUP (USA) and HUJI (Israel)); or on the necessity to use emotions such as empathy and sensitivity (FUB (Belgium) and WUE (Germany)).

It is interesting to underline the fact that the participants all express a certain awareness of the limits of a national framework, though those from Brussels and Weingarten are less constrained by them, going directly to an emotion-based approach indicating they do not feel limited by a strong national narrative. However, from a deeper analysis of the data consisting in noting what the participants’ second point of focus was, distinctions emerge inside these two groups. Concerning the former one, we notice that NU participants tend to mention developing their students’ critical thinking and the benefits of using an interdisciplinary approach to global issues, whereas HUJI and TUP participants rather comment on the importance of using emotion, primarily empathy, to approach global issues in the classroom. While this is in part due to an influence of their teacher training, we notice an evolution in their approaches after the international exchanges.

Nonetheless, in the other group (FUB and WUE), characterised by a main emphasis on this use of emotion, participants then either focus on the need to develop students’ critical thinking and the relevance of an interdisciplinary approach (FUB) or, in the case of WUE participants, on the importance of facts and rational thinking. The NU participants are the only ones who do not develop an emotion-based approach on migration. This is due to a specific training in disciplinary didactics linked to the fact that history and geography teachers are, in France, those usually in charge of Moral and civic education, the field that is most in line with the GCE ideals. The place of emotions is less important in history and geography than in other disciplines, which includes notably religion (WUE), social studies (TUP), philosophy (FUB).

10 Student Teachers’ Nuanced Perspectives in Global Education: Balancing Emotions and Critical Thinking across National Context

The reflections of the participants following the online student exchanges highlight a divergence in focus based on their training contexts. Participants from different countries exhibit distinct emphases: those from NU (France), TUP (USA), and HUJI (Israel) concentrate on the influence of the national context on addressing migration issues, while participants from FUB (Belgium) and WUE (Germany) prioritise the use of emotions such as empathy and sensitivity.

Exchanging with peers from other countries in order to grasp different, less local ways of apprehending global issues seems to them an interesting and stimulating idea:

I also learned from these exchanges how, considering different countries, we all deal differently facing migration issues. But in every case, it raised my views showing me different faces of these issues. On geographical, economic, political points, every country has its particularity so we can have a wider view of our own when considering the others. (Victor, graduate student in Philosophy, FUB, Belgium)

Through the international exchange, I became aware that a country’s law and morality are bound to each other and that this has to be addressed accordingly in the classroom as well. (Saskia, WUE, Germany)

Conversely, a student teacher underlines the fact that official curricula can be framed at a national or local level, giving teachers little flexibility in the content of their teaching.

The only issue is in Belgium regarding GC we have to follow programs. And they are too old for what we are facing today. I will try to even if it isn’t in the program. (Manon, graduate student in Philosophy, FUB)

An observation emerges regarding awareness of national frameworks: participants from Brussels and Weingarten see them as limitations, while those from Nantes, Jerusalem, and Philadelphia do not.

The Belgian and German focus on the use of emotions suggests their interest in approaching issues from a global scale for several reasons. By prioritising emotions such as empathy and sensitivity in approaching global issues, they indicate a recognition of the interconnectedness of diverse cultures and experiences on a global scale. Understanding and incorporating emotions in discussions about global challenges implies a desire to bridge cultural gaps and connect with individuals from different backgrounds. Furthermore, by expressing insights gained through the international online exchanges, such as recognising the interconnectedness of a country’s law and morality, they express an understanding of the global implications of local decisions and the need to address these interconnections in the context of education.

A deeper analysis of participants’ secondary focuses reveals distinctions within the two main groups. Nantes University (NU, France) participants prioritise developing students’ critical thinking and advocating for an interdisciplinary approach, whereas Hebrew University of Jerusalem (HUJI, Israel) and Temple University of Philadelphia (TUP, USA) participants emphasise the importance of emotion, particularly empathy. In the second group, centred firstly on emotional engagement, Free University of Brussels’ (FUB, Belgium) participants stress the need for critical thinking and interdisciplinary approaches, while Weingarten University of Education (WUE, Germany) participants highlight the significance of facts and rational thinking.

In short, the participants’ self-reflections reveal nuanced perspectives. Student teachers from FUB (Belgium) and WUE (Germany) emphasise a global scale through emotions, whilst also highlighting the need for rational and critical thinking. On the other hand, participants from NU (France), TUP (USA), and HUJI (Israel) focus on the national context, especially migration, while also (in the case of the two latter), also acknowledging the importance of an emotion-based approach to global issues. This diversity in approaches reflects nuanced understandings.