1.1 The Overlooked Reckoning of Individualism as a Value

Indeed, if the ‘global community’ is the educational horizon (“help students develop an identity and attachment to the global community”), it remains that the relationship of choice with regard to identities (co-construction, co-creation, fluidity, etc.) does not take place within the framework of such a vast totality as the global community. Rather, it happens within a more restricted entity that provides its grammar, such as the characterised American political community, in a manner similar to the societies of Western Europe, through hyper-individualism and the cult of the person referred to by Tocqueville, Durkheim and Dumont.

Admittedly, individuals may choose identity elements (cultural, etc.) from all over the world; but the world community, assuming it exists (as Banks argues it does), is not individualistic to the same degree, nor in the same way as societies of Western Europe and North America, unless western individualism is projected onto the world community, at the risk of adopting a colonial perspective under the guise of diversity. Moreover, to choose elements of one’s identity (such as cultural), is to have towards them an individualistic relationship, thus standardised by a liberal society. The identities of which Banks speaks, are in fact transcended by the individualistic ideology that makes up the body of our particular societies: these identities have become objects that one can choose.

Therefore, Banks’ educational model presents a gap between the totality and its parts. The national totality provides one side of the argument, making it possible to place identities under the sign of individualism; while the other side of the statement features a world community that is not characterised by the cult of the person, typical of western societies. This hiatus is certainly not prohibitive; on the contrary, it might be fruitful. Nonetheless, is it enough to approach it by invoking a vague balance between unity and diversity?

Balancing unity and diversity is a continuing challenge for multicultural nation-states. Unity without diversity results in hegemony and oppression; diversity without unity leads to Balkanization and the fracturing of the nation-state. A major problem facing nation-states throughout the world is how to recognize and legitimize difference and yet construct an overarching national identity that incorporates the voices, experiences, and hopes of the diverse groups that compose it. Many ethnic, language, and religious groups have weak identifications with their nation-states because of their marginalized status and because they do not see their hopes, dreams, visions, and possibilities reflected in the nation-state or in the schools, colleges, and universities.

(Banks, 2008, p. 133)

It is hard to disagree with these generous words. However, they do not suffice to dismiss the ideal of political liberalism, which Banks criticizes for too often implying ‘assimilationism’. Indeed GCE takes, under his pen, a pseudo radical appearance, dismissing “assimilationist, liberal and universalist” approaches, accused of not taking sufficient account of the migratory processes and of requiring citizens to “give up their first languages and cultures to fully participate in the civic community of the nation-state” (Banks, 2008, p. 130). However, by failing to scrutinise the conditions that make individualism possible – and though this provides the basis of the argument on postmodern identities – it becomes difficult to identify the originality and coherence of the multiculturalist path advocated by Banks in the field of GCE (Levinson, 2010).

1.2 Multiculturalism’s Propensity for Nominalism

Granted, universalism, liberalism and assimilationism can go hand in hand and it is legitimate to denounce any assimilationist perspective that dons the robes of universalism, in order to better hide its conservatism. However, if the word liberalism has any meaning, it seems unlikely that it could be both assimilationist and liberal, or assimilationist and universalist, or liberal while requiring that citizens abandon their first languages and cultures. Banks implicitly concedes this point, suggesting the impossibility of circumventing the liberal values of his own nation: “The national community should embody democratic ideals and values, such as those set out in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights” (Banks, 2004, p. 299).

However, failing to further conceptualise the civic community (ultimately referred to as the world community), Banks’ multiculturalist apparatus leads him to portray a fairly individualised global-citizen commitment. For it is the individual himself who in the end is supposed to become the promoter or even the guardian of world justice, from the moment he has acquired the expected skills in terms of global citizenship and has carried out his work of identity co-construction. It is why Banks embraces a de facto nominalist perspective. This is a recurring problem in the postmodern current with which the author sides. Indeed,

The postmodern perception of culture, nation or even society as potentially essentialist is based on their definition as a collection of identical individuals, a radically individualistic and reductionist definition. Because it is then within the individual body that the different cultural traits (ideas, subjective morality, relationship to objects, and even physical physiognomy) can mix.

(Vibert, 2015, p. 129)

This point must be emphasised because it is customary to think that multiculturalism is necessarily anti-nominalist. Does it not consist in recognising collective entities such as cultural, religious, ethnic communities, etc.? Certainly, but authors who start from a postmodern postulate, such as Banks, take for granted the radical individualisation of identities (while admitting the existence of tribalisation phenomena as a perverse effect of hyper-individualism). Therefore, under the guise of talking about groups, they refer to differences that can be expressed on the surface once the value of moral individualism has been fully shared.³

As we have seen, this value is truly societal, even if its content refers to the individual. Failing to realise that may entail the risk of portraying a non-social individual, typical of postmodern multiculturalism. The communities referred to by Banks, promoter of GCE who succumbs to the nominalist bias, are thus collections of primarily non-social individuals.

The concept of ‘community’, far from being an outdated archaism, therefore follows as its shadow – a shadow that appears intermittently – the process of individualisation that characterises the deployment of “modern ideology” [Dumont, 1983], a set of representations and value-ideas centred on the primacy of a moral, autonomous and primarily non-social individual.

(Vibert, 2004, p. 362)

Essentially, postmodern multiculturalists, as well as nominalist liberals, stage a posteriori collectives (Kaufmann, 2010) whose political realities are reduced to the interplay of intersubjective and therefore inter individual relations. In doing so, they conceal the a priori collectives that nevertheless make the very notion of the individual imaginable, notion that Durkheim saw emerging in the cult of the person, proper to modern societies.

This inability to consider a priori collectives invites us to wonder if global citizenship education is not a vague slogan, at the crossroads of different discourses that can be mobilised, among others, by government lobbies that have an interest in highlighting two elements. On the one hand, the inevitability of globalisation as it has occurred (since citizenship is called ‘global’ under the aegis of a ‘world community’ that supposedly already exists); and on the other hand, the importance of training citizens adapted to this new reality, from a cultural and economic point of view. It may then be that GCE, in some of its versions,

ironically turns out not to be a global project for all, but a more localised political project, led by some countries promoting the social imaginary of globalisation for their own purposes […] by transcending and concealing other local alternatives and perspectives: non-global or anti-globalisation.

(Mannion, Biesta, Priestley, & Ross, 2011, p. 450)

2.1 Legitimate Reminder of the Political Society

The principle of the welfare state is often invoked in this regard. By guaranteeing a certain fairness on a territory, thus being an undeniable lever of true citizenship, this principle involves reciprocal social compensation, depending on each person’s contribution, that is to say on the contribution of each fellow citizen as an identifiable member of the political society. As a result, social aid granted to certain categories of economic migrants is based on the principle of reciprocity between contribution and compensation in variable territories. These are sometimes European (hence the idea of European citizenship) and sometimes global but, in the latter case, there are also conditions of competence and/or financial autonomy as in the typically globalised Australian, Canadian or British point systems (Joppke, 2021). The contours of national and federal political societies, and the shadows they cast on a global scale, are clearly outlined here.

Acknowledging this association between citizenship and territory, itself a reflection of a historical and political sedimentation, the conservative motif in citizenship education hardly consists in ‘recognising’, and even less in ‘validating’, students’ identities. The question is first to admit the principled fact of the nation-state, itself likely to spare the expression of cultural and ethnic identities within the framework of a more general system of rights and duties: non-discrimination, freedom of thought, freedom of worship, compulsory schooling under so-called national values, etc.

Let us be clear: conservative does not necessarily mean right-wing, xenophobic or assimilationist. The retained meaning, more nuanced and deeper, is Mannheim’s: it is a question of preserving the ‘social’ as modernity threatens to break it down. The conservative motif is therefore properly modern in the sense that it attempts, like the socialist and liberal-nominalist motifs, to understand and accompany the social. A conservative stance, in this sense, is not necessarily conservative in the strictly political sense.

The question then remains to what extent the culture associated with the state can be ‘preserved’ and legitimately recognised. If the proponents of the conservative motif criticise the notion of global citizenship because it operates a denial of the national totality, it remains to be seen how they give consistency to the latter, not only from a descriptive point of view, but also normative.

2.2 Illegitimate Reminder of the Ethical and Cultural Community

As in the previous section, the point here is not to synthesise the debates, but to focus on a typical author whose work has undeniable resonance: in this case, David Miller. Being a philosopher gives him an external position to social sciences, from which he rejects the idea of global citizenship, because of the primordial nature of the duties due to one’s co-nationals as members of the same ‘ethical community’, separate from human beings as such who are outside of it (Miller, 2002). The conservatism of the argument is fully revealed in its appreciation of the majority religion that the state would be entitled to recognise as a symbolic guardian of its legitimacy, including in the eyes of religious minorities who, according to the philosopher, would perceive the recognition of a particular religion by the state as an act of esteem towards religious values in general (Miller, 2020).

Although this argument is presented as belonging to liberal nationalism, which is enduring in the Anglophone context, it is similar to the so-called French ‘republican’ arguments of Pierre-André Taguieff and Dominique Schnapper, already criticised in their time in the name of a critical republican perspective (Laborde, 2001). In fact, just as Miller assumes that the nation-state can explicitly rely on a majority religious identity, the French republicans who advocate the conservative motif have hardly taken note of the catholic-secular imbalance, favourable to compromises with Christianity (private schools under contract with the Ministry of education, exceptional status of Alsace-Moselle) but much stricter regarding Islam, especially since the prohibition of the ostensible wearing of religious signs by students of publics schools (Laborde, 2008). Thus, figures of French classical republicanism,⁴ despite their displayed secular commitments, join arguments expressed in the name of liberal Anglo-Saxon nationalism. For the former as well as the latter, adopting the same conservative motif, citizenship can in no case be global.

The Conservative argument is not irrelevant. Its advantage is that it is factual, precise and careful in its choice of terms, especially with Miller as an analytical philosopher. The factual background provided does not make it easier to identify these ‘global’ citizenship and community that some claim to seek and/or bring about – not to mention those who believe they have already found a global community. Indeed, lawful and regulatory systems are at best federal or inter-national. One can deplore this reality: is it not despairing that states, even associated, are not able to ‘globally’ face global challenges? However, does this current disability in itself prove that another (global) scale would be more relevant?

Liberal nationalists have doubts about this. In 2019, Yael Tamir published a book entitled Why Nationalism? Her answer was clear and provocative: because nothing else work.

Though it seems reasonable to assume that global challenges demand global institutions, in reality, international collaboration starts with the state. To begin with, it is important to note that presently, there are no effective global institutions. […] The fact that no state is powerful enough to make a global difference does not prove that any other political entity can replace it.

(Tamir, 2020, p. 540)

Certainly, GCE proponents do not argue that a global entity should ‘replace’ nation-states. However, Tamir’s argument that “international collaboration starts with the state” reminds us, against the nominalist motif, that the main actors at the global level are not individuals but states. On the other hand, if burning problems have a global dimension (wars, climate change, nuclear proliferation, migration, access to water), then it is these problems, not citizenship, that are global. Thus, they deserve to be treated on a global scale, which is why citizens around the world need to be sensitive to them, becoming globally concerned citizens – but not global citizens.

Finally, while some subjects need to be dealt with on a global scale, others are likely to be better dealt with on a national scale, allowing for instance the levying of taxes intended for the redistribution of wealth, the construction of public infrastructure, and even the development of armies capable of defending liberal countries (and therefore liberal principles).⁵

I do not want to deny that the responsibilities of citizenship change as we move into a world in which co-ordination at a global level on issues like climate change becomes increasingly vital. So we do need to reconceive citizenship, though not, I have argued, by changing the central arenas in which it is practiced. Not the global citizen, but the globally concerned citizen, is the ideal we should be aiming to promote.

(Miller, 2012, p. 242)

However, the argument has its limits, because this “central arena” of citizenship depends on how states are able or not to defend individual rights. What are the duties towards the nation as an “ethical community” (Miller) if the nation fails to respect the rights of minorities because of their ethnicity, their (non-)religion or their sexual orientation? The conservative motif here reveals its weaknesses. What to do when social aspirations are not satisfied with ‘liberal nationalism’, as practised in a given state? The nation-state is in fact only one ‘ethical community’ among others and this is reinforced by transnational flows of people promoting commitments to transnational communities.

Hence, what is lacking in the conservative motif is the dynamics of modern societies and the evolution of the aspirations of their members under the effect of deepening individualism. The conservatives fail to grasp the status of the state as an organ of social thought and not as a mere community, elements that the members of the French School of Sociology had however perceived.

3.1 Making Multicultural Education Coherent

The socialist motif in GCE appears as we unfold the apparent paradox between individuation, totality and plurality, in a Durkheimian vein already established in political theory (Guérard de Latour, 2014). To approach the socialist motif, we must first refuse the conservative reaction. The identities of which Banks speaks (multiple, diverse, hybrid) do not reveal a maladjusted relationship to national citizenship that the conservative motif intends to restore under the auspices of (a more or less liberal) nationalism. The profusion of identities in question rather attests to the deepening of individualism specific to modern societies: to be able to choose one’s identity. However, before being the sign of alterities that the teacher should recognise and validate (as advocated by Banks), identities can only take place within the framework of the totality, that is, the political society, which makes them possible as individual attributes. Indeed, “we are told that our identities are plural. But I can only have several identities if it is me – one and only individual – who owns them” (Descombes, 2017, p. 17).

This is precisely what Banks’ approach fails to emphasise, and is the reason multicultural education remains a “conceptual mess” (Levinson, 2010, p. 428). Brought to fruition, the logic of the recognition and ‘validation’ of identities reduces social relations to intersubjective relationships (Rochex, 2020), which refers, despite the insistence on ‘communities’ and ‘cultures’, to a liberal-nominalist approach. It is therefore necessary to prioritise the objectives of this type of educational approach. What would the criteria be for ‘validating’ the identity of students “coming from a culture that values ‘assertive’ or ‘macho’ boys but denigrates girls for being ‘authoritarian’ or ‘aggressive’?” (Levinson, 2010, p. 431). Counter-intuitively, ‘recognising’ and ‘validating’ minority cultures could be easier in culturally segregated environments, since the teacher can then adapt to their audience; while “the more a class of students is culturally diverse, the harder it becomes to teach in a culturally congruent manner” (Levinson, 2010, p. 431).

Certainly, any multicultural thinker would be highly dismayed by the argument that (ethnic and/or social) segregation might actually facilitate multicultural education. However, it is the conclusion that logically imposes itself as long as we consider individualism more as a given than as the product of a political society – or even a societal culture if we follow Louis Dumont. By failing to grasp this reality, the risk is to project oneself onto a totality that does not exist (the world community) and to find on arrival what had been “postulated at the beginning: the global individual, detached, free, light … and empty” (Vibert, 2015, p. 129). In short, a global individual, but not a citizen.

Thus, the question shifts. As presented by Karsenti and Lemieux, the socialist motif, as a reaction to the two other constitutive ideologies of modernity, offers an additional reflexivity. How can it be implemented? First, by admitting that students already know how to distance themselves from society to feature (cultural, ethnic, etc.) sub-groups to which they belong or wish to belong. In doing so, they are in line with individualism as a value making up the substance of our liberal societies, whilst testing the current framework of citizenship. Being in line with ‘a whole’ on the one hand, putting it to the test on the other: holding both sides of the problem is not easy. This is evidenced by the fact that this tension, explored by Durkheim, has been concealed in sociology, a discipline that has largely embraced nominalism (Callegaro & Giry, 2020; Rochex, 2020; Urfalino, 2021).

In summary, the risk with ‘identity recognition’ and the vague promotion of ‘diversity’ is of reducing social relations to inter subjectivity. Therefore, one must overcome the opposition between, on the one hand, liberal-nominalists forgetful of the ‘third-party registry’ under the pretext of identity recognition, and on the other, conservatives hypostasising this reality in the form of identity nationalism.

3.2 Reflexive Postures in GCE

We have emphasised above that GCE is not particularly multiculturalist, neo-liberal, Marxian, postcolonial, religious (etc.), since approaches to global citizenship extend across the spectrum of political opinions. In this, Banks’ approach is not sufficiently reflective, because it equates GCE and multiculturalism. Admittedly, politically, it is better to be open, tolerant, to fight injustice and accept ‘diversity’ than to be neo-liberal – although these various orientations can also be combined (Joppke, 2017). However, on a conceptual level, associating GCE with the multiculturalist ideal is confusing. How is neo-liberals’ approach of citizenship less ‘global’ than Banks’? To solve this sort of problem, social science research might explicit its specific socialist gesture, especially when it comes to thinking about education.

Sociology, in France at least, has seen its destiny linked to pedagogy and education. Durkheim was a teacher of pedagogy throughout his career, which is not a coincidence. […] In this regard, the extreme modernity of socialism lies in the fact that its educational ambition is to ensure that every individual, whatever their place in society, is able to study the practices of the groups in which he or she participates, with an autonomous judgment oriented towards the question of social justice. The ambition is also that, by doing so, this individual is able to demonstrate a minimum of reflexivity on his or her groups and on those of others. Thus conceived, access to education becomes the means for all to learn to distance themselves from the heritage received – not in order to reject it, but to relate to it differently.

(Karsenti & Lemieux, 2019, pp. 157–158)

The socialist motif differs here from the liberal-nominalist one, emphasising “the heritage received” that governs modern societies. However, these elements of totality are not rigorously conceptualised in Banks’ work, even though they underlie his model, exposed from then on to the severe criticisms of Levinson. Conversely, conservatives do not accept that one can distance oneself from the national heritage received. One can note this in Miller’s support for the recognition by the state of a majority religion. It can also be found in Schnapper’s backing – as president since 2018 of the Council of Elders on Secularism (French Ministry of National Education) – of the prohibition of ostensible wearing of religious signs by parents accompanying school trips, thus supporting a majority heritage rigidified by the state.

However, leaving the field of GCE to find reflexive resources pointing to the socialist motif is unnecessary. They primarily involve a critical relationship between researchers and trainers themselves, with respect to the categories they use. Such an approach comes from the Palgrave Handbook of Global Citizenship and Education, which consists in recalling that global citizenship, often legitimised by the cosmopolitanism of Diogenes, has local roots, not only Greek, but also marked by the perspective in I of the famous sentence attributed to the latter: “I am a citizen of the world”. The subject of the sentence is centred on the (European) individual who is supposed to integrate the world from his own perspective. The cosmopolitan paradox here is obvious. It consists, from a localised point of view, in separating the world into several categories. On the one hand, individuals who claim to not be rooted, and on the other, rooted individuals. Yet, is cosmopolitanism not about bringing people together? Let us be clear, this is not necessarily an impasse, but it is at the very least a serious paradox that needs to be dealt with as such.⁷

Moreover, the focus of many GCE currents on migration and the right to universal hospitality ignores the fact that

I owe to some arrivals more than hospital treatment; furthermore, the framework of hospitality obscures what we might owe to those who, having remained rooted, are never met [by the cosmopolitan] as newcomers […]. Cosmopolitan reflections around hospitality fail to ask research questions that would challenge both narcissistic and empathetic identifications of the western ‘I’ (self-described or self-prescribed as nomadic) with the fellow traveller (the moving other).

(Papastephanou, 2018, p. 182)

This critical analysis alone cannot resolve the tensions mentioned above. However, the point of it is to question internally, in the Handbook dedicated to the subject, GCE itself, by asking: to what extent could GCE be the fruit of a particular vision of the world? The question therefore is not about being for or against GCE, because such a question replays the foreseeable oppositions, perceived by Karsenti and Lemieux, between proponents of the liberal-nominalist motif and the conservative motif. As a way out of this quarrel, it is necessary to include the prescriptions and recommendations on GCE and their promoters in the analysis.

4.1 The Social Totality as an Engine of Pluralism

Finally, the critical republican position is to say that school education is a focal point for shaping society. If Durkheim did not believe in the return of mechanical solidarity, deeming the division of labour irreversible, he stressed however that one cult brings together the humans of modern societies: the cult of the individual, also called ‘cult of the human person’. Moreover, this cult is similar to mechanical solidarity. It certainly has an increasingly focused content: as Durkheim says, the collective consciousness tends to be reduced to it. Nonetheless, it remains anchored in a concrete social reality, especially the nation, as the author affirmed in Individualism and Intellectuals.

The individualist, who defends the rights of the individual, defends at the same time the vital interests of society; for he prevents the criminal impoverishment of this last reserve of collective ideas and feelings [whose object is moral individualism] which are the very soul of the nation.

(Durkheim, 1898/2020, p. 286)

The socialist motif and its critical republican declination thus make it possible to give coherence and consistency to the multiculturalist version of GCE. On the one hand, the too rapid projection into a non-existent ‘global community’ explains why the proponents of the conservative motif reject the very idea of GC and rightly recall the principled reality of the nation. On the other hand, the conservative motif, in which classical republicans and some proponents of liberal nationalism are inscribed, does not sufficiently admit the reflexive scope of social sciences. Indeed, is the ideal of GC not already an integral part of ordinary conceptions of citizenship?

The socialist way, as Karsenti and Lemieux point out, responds simultaneously to the two preceding motifs: before recognising identities, it must be admitted that they derive from the ‘cult of the person’ specific to modern societies. This cult of the person is not a given, because it requires the inclusion of citizens in a political community, which is de facto national and is important to promote (Laborde, 2001; Levinson, 2010), whilst taking into account the reflective capacities of actors. This includes those of researchers and trainers, who themselves redefine and question the traditional frameworks for exercising citizenship from a possibly global perspective.⁸

4.2 The Presence of the State in Teacher Training

The Durkheimian gesture makes full sense in a research on teacher training, of which the state remains the privileged body, even if its reality is diffuse, contested or adapted to local contexts. Indeed, the state, in the Durkheimian approach, must not be reduced to its central organs such as the government, the National Assembly or the judicial system. Its presence is also manifested in everyday life, in France certainly, with flags (school façades, charter of secularism in blue-white-red colours), the symbol of Marianne (in town halls, on postage stamps, in administrative documents) or, in the GlobalSense research, through prescriptions, circulars and national examinations. The fact that the state also passes on international recommendations does not change this reality.

The presence of the state is one of the most salient issues in the GlobalSense research. The goal is to set up a training device that is common to the five countries, under the disputed label of GCE. However, each team has more or less leeway to do implement this device, depending on the local relationship of trainers, but also of pre-service teachers, to the state. Thus, the national civil service entrance examinations remain significant in France, with direct consequences on the relationship between the professional groups constituted by teacher trainers and their students, who are pre-service teachers and future senior education advisors (conseillers principaux d’éducation).

In the meantime, the margins of manoeuver towards GCE are greater in Germany. This is due in part to the regulations already covering this subject, but also to the proximity to these professional groups of the federate states, who have their own Ministry of Education. Nonetheless, proximity is not necessarily synonymous of simplicity. The German GCE is driven by the Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development, and the translation of requirements to the Ministries of Education come with its challenges.

The modern state is therefore not univocal and its sociological definition includes people’s reflexivity. Exploratory interviews with the trainers enlisted in GlobalSense from a teacher-training college of Nantes University in France show how the state is:

1. –On the one hand, a legitimacy framework that justifies the action of civil servants, even embodying their presence: engagement letters, circulars, etc.;
2. –On the other hand, an object from which one must distance oneself, either as a researcher (a History teacher-trainer shares with her students her historical awareness of the arbitrariness of the state), or as a professional preparing students to pass the entrance examination, but is keen nevertheless to show that this examination is one thing, and the teaching profession is another.

We will see that the relationship to the state, at least the national conception of citizenship and the division between private and professional spaces, is apparent when preparing students for the GlobalSense training scheme. To show this, we will present here a part of the device in chronological order. As an introduction to the entire educational process, the consortium of five countries chose to ask the pre-service teachers (primary and secondary levels) the following series of questions:

1. What is your full name?

2. Tell the story of your name, as best you understand it.

3. Thinking back to what you wrote, to what extent does your name reflect your heritage?

4. If anything, what do you know about the story of how your family came to the country where you currently reside?

5. What does it mean to be a global citizen?

6. Do you see yourself as a global citizen? If so, how does this manifest in your everyday life?

7. Thinking of your role as a future teacher, do you think you will address such topics of global citizenship? If so, in what ways?

This list of questions is a compromise: the research and training teams from Nantes and Brussels had contested questions 2 and 3. Firstly, they argued that inviting students to explore plurality of identity by means of a surname seemed simplistic. Secondly, that since surnames are generally patrilineal, this question renders the feminine ‘inheritance’ invisible by arbitrarily focusing the attention on fathers.

These reservations explain the compromise made in the third question, which nonetheless does not change the fact that the device is introduced with a link to the respondents’ names, suggesting a pedagogical link between surnames and pre-service teachers’ inheritance. That being said, the barrier turned into an opportunity, as students’ responses revealed their differentiated reflexivity and critical abilities.

We can thus study the effects of this approach in GCE, thanks to a written and oral feedback that the pre-service teachers and senior education advisors from the five countries provided us with. Within the limits of this book, many aspects will not be mentioned, such as the lesson plans they produced; the interactions between them (in small groups) to develop these locally; the interactions between students from the different countries during two-hour long videoconferences; interviews with the Nantes University students who travelled to Germany and worked on lesson plans with peers from Weingarten University of Education; teacher-trainers’ reflective reports; and the cross-interviews between teacher-trainers from the different countries. The focus, concerning the future teachers and senior education advisors, will centre on the prompts (i.e. the common documents that they filled out before working on the lesson plans) and the self-reflections (or feedback interviews) they wrote right after the zooms. We will start by an analysis of how the participants from Nantes University dealt with the device, before comparing this to their peers from the other countries.

4.3 The Nantes Appropriation of the GlobalSense Protocol

Certain situations, during the training protocol, made the Nantes pre-service teachers and their trainers react. As previously suggested, they were interested in the GlobalSense protocol and quickly perceived its central issue. Its aim, at the very least, is to decentre (national) citizenship in order to make it fit its ideological content. Indeed, it should not just concern nationals, seeing as in our modern, individualistic and differentiated societies, citizenship in the full sense of the term is potentially open to all, contradicting the idea of a citizenship reserved for a predefined (national) group. This is due to the deepening of moral individualism, according to which, on a strictly ideological level, nothing decently allows the attachment of the individual to a particular nation:

the normative individual, by definition, has no other social ties than those to which he has consented and from which he can always emancipate himself …. The true ‘society of individuals’ can only be, potentially at least, a global society.

(Descombes, 2013b, p. 214)

However, as soon as the Nantes students had read the aforementioned questions on inheritance and surnames, several of them had strong reactions, that are interesting to grasp in an ethnographic way. One of them was called Lemarchand (a typical French name, meaning the merchant) but, as his name does not suggest, he had dark skin (Métis type according to his testimony). However, of the two criteria (surname and skin colour), the second one is the most important to him, especially in daily interactions. Moreover, he explained that he did not see this ethnic criterion as a legacy, but rather as a stigma placed on him in certain contexts. In short, the student vaguely understood the intention of the questions asked, which were intended to explain the cultural identity of pre-service teachers through their name. However, he could not answer these questions without deconstructing them, and as a result, felt suspicious towards the GlobalSense protocol. His trainers tried to defuse this suspicion, by stressing that it is nevertheless interesting to see how citizenship education can have a different inspiration when it is internationalised.

Therefore, while researchers, members of GlobalSense, wished to take the pre-service teachers as their object, at times it was them who analysed the protocol and, by extension, the researchers. We will see below that in general, the question on names reflecting a so-called legacy was not well received in France, probably due to a republican conception of citizenship, a firm distinction between private and public spaces, and an approach to Moral and civic education through knowledge (more specifically History and Geography). However, this question was not better received in Brussels, probably, among other things, because civic and citizenship education is approached through Philosophy. Hence, the importance of taking into account the fact that the place of ‘education towards’ is not obvious depending on the country, “particularly in secondary schools where [the teacher] is recruited on the basis of their college education, is specialised, has expertise, and is legitimate because institutionally certified and … passionate about their field” (Barthes, Lange, & Tutiaux-Guillon, 2017, p. 11).

Another important reaction, in Nantes but also in Brussels, revolves around photos (see box below) submitted by the GlobalSense consortium to pre-service teachers in order to raise awareness about migration. In France, the secondary school teachers most concerned by citizenship education, via Moral and civic education classes, are historians and geographers. Therefore, they do not really understand the point of these photos that are not contextualised but rather display a type of dichotomy: migrants, some apparently rejected versus others apparently welcomed. The French students, commenting on what they perceived as the device’s artificial aspect, therefore considered it as an object to be analysed: what use are the photos if you do not know who took them, where and when, for what purpose, for what media, etc.?

In this way, the Nantes University pre-service teachers and senior education advisors were able to make sense of the GlobalSense training device, because doing a background research is part of Moral and civic education. Indeed, according to the curriculum, this type of research is part of the ‘culture of judgment’, essential for exercising an enlightened citizenship: contextualising information, identifying the author’s intention according to the context, deconstructing false information, etc.

Hence, it was possible for the Nantes pre-service teachers to find the places where these photos were taken: one in Toronto in December 2015, the other on the border between Greece and Macedonia in February 2016. According to the publication contexts provided by CNN and the Canadian Encyclopedia respectively, the first photo represents a family of migrants, while the other represents a group of migrants. This is why some students went further by questioning, in the feedback interviews, GlobalSense trainers’ intentions, as will be seen in the comparative analysis below.

These illustrative testimonies already show that these professional groups in the making (pre-service teachers and future senior education advisors) are looking for a way to self-regulate. We can see traces of this process in all the aforementioned international data that remain to be further analysed (notably the videoconferences and the lesson plans). Our objective is to test a new division of labour that would accompany, in a punctual and circumscribed way, the deepening and deployment of the cult of the human person (in Durkheim’s words), for which citizenship and its education can no longer be exclusively national, but must be projected – as much as possible and without cutting corners – at a global level.

As mentioned previously, so far, 36 two-hour zoom sessions have been recorded, in which 312 students from the five countries have participated. In addition, thirteen focus groups of around ten students each have been held, with a total of 62 students providing in-depth feedback. Furthermore, interviews have been conducted with four Nantes pre-service teachers during their trip to Weingarten. In addition, we have the answers of 151 students to the prompts (including the photos above), the lesson plans themselves (106), and 212 self-reflections. Moreover, six cross-interviews have so far been conducted between trainers from the different countries.

Although it is under development, we will present here a salient part of the GlobalSense material corresponding to the first stage of the work provided by the pre-service teachers and future senior education advisors, namely the answers to the prompts. This is the most direct way to see international differences since all students answered the same questions. These concern four out of the five countries: though the German team did fill the prompts, the trainers did not consider them as an analysis material, but simply a pedagogical material for putting the trainees to work. Therefore the answers of the German students were not recorded and do not appear here.

4.4 The Student Teachers’ Perspectives on GC

The analysis proposed here is only meant to illustrate the general trends and does not disentangle the variables that might explain the data collected (this will be done in further articles). Indeed, participants’ responses to prompts can be influenced by many factors, such as the national culture, initial training, the discipline studied, prescriptions; but also by the trainers themselves during the seminars they gave, in the context of GlobalSense, on citizenship education, hence the importance of the cross-interviews between trainers. This is the objective of Workpackage 4 (WP4) ‘Towards meaningful practices’, which will be completed by late 2024. It unfolds the communication process between trainers from the different countries involved, in order to precisely co-analyse the different contexts and better understand the data in return.

That said, the ‘raw’ corpus is no less instructive. A striking first fact, from our local point of view (Nantes and France), is that in Philadelphia, unlike in other countries, pre-service teachers hardly ever talk about ecology or climate change. Conversely, the Philadelphia corpus contains original approaches to global citizenship, in the sense that they do not appear in the answers provided by pre-service teachers from other countries. Thus, according to US respondents, GC consists in “stay(ing) up to date with the world news” and, more rarely, in consuming global cultural products.

In my opinion, to be a global citizen is to be an informed and aware person. You have an understanding and respect for the cultures around you and strive to learn more about them. I do see myself as a global citizen. I believe that this manifests itself in my life through my engagement with current events and world news – I try my best to stay up to date on what is going on. I also hope to travel internationally one day to enhance my passion for other cultures and experience them firsthand. (Meghan, TUP, USA)

I would like to say I am a global citizen, as I make an effort to keep up with international affairs and news. In my everyday life, I find myself reading articles about people and events from other places around the world outside of the US. I also consume various media (music, shows, art) from around the globe. (Alexis, TUP, USA)

I have not been far from the east coast of the United States, but I would say yes, I see myself as a global citizen. I use the internet everyday and listen to music from countries all around the world. (Dylan, TUP, USA)

The complexity of the data is not fully restored here since we focus, for comparative purposes, on the elements that do not appear in other countries. How can they be understood? First of all, Temple University students wish to obtain a Pennsylvania Certificate in Social Studies or in Citizenship Education that will allow them, according to their specialisation, to teach several subjects in secondary school: ‘civics and government’, ‘world history’, ‘geography’, ‘economics’. However, we must also take into account more general parameters linked to the American nation: several students, sensing its isolationism, wish by contrast to look towards the world: “I try to be a global citizen. I make an effort to try to stay informed about the world and not just the USA bubble” (Evan). That being said, by the students’ admission themselves, trying is not always the same as succeeding.

I definitely understand the importance of globalism and being a global citizen, yet I think that my understanding of history has been quite centered on America, so it makes me feel like I’m living in a bit of a bubble. I don’t have family/friends that live outside of the country, so in that way I don’t see myself as a global citizen, but I understand the importance of being one. (Leah, TUP, USA)

Despite this mixed feeling that emerges in US responses about being truly a global citizen, the vast majority of the Philadelphian pre-service teachers say they understand the point and importance of the notion of global citizenship, even if they sometimes define it in a very specific way: “stay up to date”, “events happening globally”, “travelling”, “internet”, “consume music and art from all the world”. This is not the case for Belgian students, who specialise in philosophy in view of teaching Philosophy and citizenship classes.

I don’t have any precise idea of what it means to be a global citizen. I guess today it means something like speaking English and being plugged on the internet. I consider myself [not as a global citizen but] as an European or occidental citizen, because I’m working everyday in the world of this culture: reading Greek, Latin, German, French and English classics and discussing them in an absolutely traditional Aristotelian style. I would like to help my students to think about the questions of today. One of them is the ‘globalized’ aspect of our world, and the NOTION of global citizenship, the way it is used and the institutions which use it. (Martin, FUB, Belgium)

The Belgian remarks’ content is sometimes similar to their American counterparts’ (the reference to the Internet for example) except for their irony. This is obvious in Martin’s response who reduces the notion of global citizenship to “something like speaking English and being plugged on the internet”, in order to better deconstruct it: “the way [the NOTION] is used”.

We see the same approach in Djavanchir’s answers to the prompts. He highlights his Persian origins (his father fled the Islamic revolution in 1979) and replies that the notion of global citizenship means “maybe being part of a growing system claiming to become universal or global”. By emphasising that global citizenship would consist in being part of a system that claims its globality, this student marks a strong critical distance that never appears in the US responses. And reserves are just as present in Matsitsta’s answers: she is a resident of Brussels whose bumpy migration path makes it difficult for her to project towards global citizenship.

My family is in the Democratic Republic of Congo. I am the first to immigrate. For me, this notion [global citizenship] seems very vague and confusing since simply based on the legal framework, I am resident in Belgium but I do not have access to certain rights since I am not a Belgian citizen. How then can I feel like a global citizen? (Matsitsta, FUB, Belgium)

The Brussels pre-service teachers are ultimately the most critical of GCE, as presented to them by the GlobalSense consortium. As for the Jerusalem pre-service teachers, who follow a course in ‘civics and social science’, they are generally convinced, like the Philadelphians, of the relevance of the notion of global citizenship. However, unlike the latter who bring global citizenship back to a kind of cognitive connection with the world (‘news’, ‘events happening globally’), Jerusalem students keep a potentially ambitious, idealistic, action-oriented and emotional element (‘feel solidarity’, ‘empathetic’).

As a citizen of the global [world], I don’t feel that we should live between national borders but see every human predicament as if it were mine. I will convey [in my teaching] the concept of global citizenship. I will ask the question what is the meaning to be a global citizen. What is the meaning of the word ‘citizen’ and what does the word ‘global’ mean and that one should feel solidarity towards others. (Asaf, HUJI, Israel)

To feel committed and empathetic towards those who are different from the individual. Unfortunately, I don’t see myself as a citizen of the world adequately. I believe Israel is a melting pot where the problems that occur in the country remain in the country only. (Noa, HUJI, Israel)

Jerusalem pre-service teachers also often say that, in spite of the ambition they have towards this notion of global citizenship, they (‘unfortunately’, ‘not adequately’) do not feel they are citizens of the world. Unlike Philadelphian students, they regularly mention climate, as do the Nantes students, who generally say they have little understanding of the notion of global citizenship, while emphasising its relevance in the specific case of climate change. Some Nantes students say:

I don’t find so much meaning in the word ‘global citizen’, maybe just the fact that we are the inhabitants of a single planet. I don’t feel as a citizen of the world, only on an ecological aspect of preserving the planet on a global scale. (Thibaud, NU, France)

For me, to be a global citizen is to be aware of the challenges in our society and challenges for the future. We have together a global impact for the planet and we have to build together solutions. Yes, I’m a global citizen because in my everyday life, I would like to impact climate change with my consumption and my transport plans. […] I talk with others to promote this dynamic of reduction not just for me but for, so to speak, the survival of humanity. (Léa, NU, France)

From my point of view, being a global citizen means first of all having common points, a common culture in particular, and shared objectives, particularly political ones. In my everyday life, no, I don’t see myself as a global citizen. Sometimes, in the context of targeted projects, I feel European (this summer I went to Romania as part of a European project) but I have never felt like a citizen on a larger scale, except perhaps on the theme of ecology, which is perhaps one of the subjects that can bring together the greatest number of people. (Évane, NU, France)

Moreover, the Nantes students – half of them future history and geography teachers and the other half future educational advisors – seem to need, in order to assimilate the notion of GCE, to represent a global society that, they emphasise, does not exist. This is a striking difference with the Philadelphia students, explaining why the latter, who more readily assimilate humanity to a community even if it is understood as a collection of individuals, project themselves more easily teaching GCE. Already illustrated in the previous excerpt by Évane, for whom global citizenship implies common political objectives (‘shared objectives, particularly political ones’), the Nantes students are looking for a ‘global group’, as Jessie says below, or ‘one body’ as Benjamin says, to complete the missing logical link in their eyes.

I don’t see myself as a global citizen, because I think the differences of culture, language and civilization still exist in the world and I think it’s a good thing. Granted, related to some engagements, it’s possible to see a process of globalisation. [But] in my opinion global citizenship does not exist and can’t exist for the moment because we are too different according to our countries or regions. Talking about a global group seems difficult to me. (Jessie, NU, France)

For me, being a world citizen means being one body. It means ignoring borders. So, today, no, I don’t see myself as a global citizen. As long as racism, discrimination, states that have an apartheid regime towards populations, exist, being a world citizen will not be possible. (Benjamin, NU, France)

Finally, an important aspect concerns the photos of migrants to comment (those presented above). They are taken seriously by the Temple University of Philadelphia and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem students, who are willing to comment them, while the Nantes University and Free University of Brussels students tend to be very critical of the questions formulated. The Nantes students, especially the future historians and geographers, need to know about the pictures’ context in order to carry out this task, as do the Belgian philosophers:

I have a problem pointing similarities that are abstract from their contexts. Sure I notice the absence of woman in the second picture, sure I see some people yelling on the second picture and what looks like a prison grid (or just a grid) with a barbed wire, but what does it mean? Secondly, for the similarities, how can I make guesses only by seeing? I see a lot of people, and some cameras, what else can I say more? (Victor, FUB, Belgium)

I completely lack context to understand the first picture. And ‘Resettling’ could mean things as different as accepting refugees or sending them back to where they came from. So I can’t compare those pics. (Raphaël, FUB, Belgium)

To go further, each team has shared their first analyses in the wondering report which will then allow us to cross the interpretations of this corpus and obtain additional insights into the training situations, different concepts of the teaching profession and national contexts. A text analysis of the self-reflections using the Iramuteq software is also underway, among other avenues of work. In the meantime, we can already measure how much the notion of GCE is primarily a slogan that must be clarified, re-appropriated, reworked locally to make sense in the eyes of the people primarily affected.

As for the controversial question about pre-service teachers’ surnames and how this, to some extent, reflects their ‘heritage’, all Israeli and American students took the question at face value. They tried and sometimes managed to trace this heritage, often linked to the Holocaust in Israel, and to the ancient Irish, Jewish, Polish, Italian or Hispanic (etc.) immigrations in the United States. As for the Belgians and French, their postures are more varied. If they sometimes responded, including in a precise way (for example, one student has a name that means ‘salt seller’, indicating that an ancestor probably exercised this trade), others refused to go along with this exercise (by answering ‘nothing’ or ‘joke’), or responded by pointing out that their surname does not matter.

More work is needed to interpret these phenomena in a truly hermeneutic perspective (Malet, 2011), while explaining to the consortium members, sometimes surprised by the annoyance the French and Belgian students express, why they are more critical than others are. Conversely, researchers and trainers from Nantes are eager to obtain more details from some GlobalSense members to fully understand the interest of certain issues included in the scheme. All this should emerge, among other things, during the analysis of cross-interviews between trainers.

4.5 The State as a Reflective Body

The friction between prescriptions (national and/or related to GCE), specific school subjects that the pre-service teachers are studying and their reactions encourage further reflection regarding the presence of the state. For Durkheim, the role of the state in its partnership with secondary groups was to break with the immediate practical emergencies that workers usually face: this being how they might access a more thoughtful form of thinking that the author called ‘collective deliberation’. Conversely, ETS show that what is prescribed, although shaped by the state and its administrations, is translated, circumvented, questioned by workers, in as many steps as needed prior to its eventual appropriation.

However, the ‘descent into generality’, from the state as a macro-actor towards its manifestations and incarnations in local contexts, is explicitly studied in pragmatic sociology (Linhardt, 2010). Let us return to Durkheimian intuitions in this matter: the reflective state “is closer to men” and establishes with them a “more intimate communication”.

It is not accurate to say that the state embodies the collective consciousness, for the latter overflows the state from all sides. Collective consciousness is largely diffuse; there are at every moment multitudes of social feelings, social states of all kinds of which the state perceives only the weakened echo. It is the seat of only a special, restricted, but higher, clearer consciousness, having of itself a more vivid feeling. Nothing obscure and uncertain like these collective representations that are widespread in all societies: myths, religious or moral legends, etc. We do not know where they come from or where they tend to; we have not deliberated them. Representations that come from the state are increasingly aware of themselves, their causes and their goals. They were brought together in a less hidden manner. […] Little by little, through the general movement of ideas, the state has gradually lost this sort of transcendence that isolated it. It got closer to men, and men got closer to it. Communications became more intimate. Government power, instead of remaining inward-looking, has descended into the deeper layers of society, receives there a new development, and returns to its starting point. […] We recognise from this trait one of the characteristics that distinguishes what is generally called democracy.

(Durkheim, 1900/2020, p. 115)

The state therefore is a lever of democracy, provided that it is sufficiently reflexive to restore the diffuse consciousness of society that “overflows [it] on all sides”, and that it is present in the “deeper layers of society”, otherwise it would find its “transcendence” making it – as is unfortunately too common – an instrument for controlling populations. Is the prospect convincing? We have already mentioned its weaknesses. Nevertheless, by taking the reality of the nation-state seriously, all the while considering its evolutions in the context of social differentiation, it allows us to take into account arguments in favour of GCE, as well as those opposed to it. That is why, considering the different aspects articulated by Durkheim (the individual, the political society, professional groups, the citizen, the state, the cult of the human person), the point here is to help clarify the path towards the global level envisaged in GCE.

For this horizon proceeds from realities that a superficial approach of the ‘global’ level tends to ignore. In GlobalSense, the learners targeted by GCE are not essentially individuals, contrary to what the nominal bias tends to suggest; rather they are citizens embedded in a political society with historical and cultural traits, and in an institutional reality – often that of the state – whose content must be grasped. Is this not what the exploratory empirical material above suggests?

In doing so, we hope to avoid some anti-GCE criticisms, all the more formidable because their relevance is partially admitted, as we have seen, by promoters of GCE aware of the fragility and composite character (between ethos and narrative) of their ideal. The program is colossal and this book only sets the framework for future individual and collective research. A first step will be to carry out the GlobalSense program until the end of 2024, ensuring, as leader and scientific coordinator, the complementarity of WP s under the responsibility of interdisciplinary teams: sociologists, philosophers, historians and linguists, who are sure to fuel debate and enrich our educational science enterprise. For if ETS constitute an original epistemic field, they are nothing without their contributory disciplines.