The articulation between philosophy and sociology – without reducing one of these fields to the other – suggests that true interdisciplinarity is possible if the philosopher agrees to pay attention to the methods of social sciences and the sociologist, exercising or not in the field of ETS, agrees to appropriate descriptive and normative concepts developed in philosophy. These cross-over attempts are not always encouraged, because of the separation of disciplines in the academic world. They exist nonetheless, including among renowned authors: the philosophers Michel Foucault and Ian Hacking clarified their theses with numerous empirical data; the professor of education science and sociology Emile Durkheim, as well as the philosopher-turned-sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, tried to reword Kantian issues,¹ etc. The questions of secularism, republic and diversity in education require more specifically the use of political philosophy, which already maintains a dialogue with social sciences including ETS.

By putting this ambition to work, several questions emerged in the first part of the book. They are vast and difficult. From the point of view of political philosophy, how can we relate to the empirical contributions of social sciences, whilst maintaining a conceptual reflection on principles (liberalism, republic, secularism)? From the point of view of social sciences, how can one interrogate the researcher’s relationship to an object, on questions that inevitably engage a normative judgment, if only because they are legally codified? Though these complex questions do not receive a definite answer in this book, vigilant attention marked the endeavour: though political philosophy would benefit from using social sciences, of which ETS are a part of, social sciences themselves remain powerless regarding certain controversial issues without the contribution of political philosophy. Moreover, they risk dissolving into social criticism, expertise and/or a posture of false neutrality easier to proclaim than to achieve depending on the issues addressed.

Hence the challenge of interdisciplinarity: to clarify conceptual questions, analysed in political philosophy, while confronting them with social phenomena as they occur, that is to say, in a complexity that inevitably goes beyond the delineated theoretical constructions. Accordingly, this book shares the ideals of educational internationalism, that of the IBE extended by UNESCO. It is a matter of taking seriously the idea that education, considered internationally, has a role to play in bringing to life the ideal of a united humanity, one that could eventually share a global citizenship.

However, our particular relationship to this educational horizon is mediated by history. The history of the IBE, as a matrix of educational internationalism, shows how generous slogans clash with the reality of geopolitical power relations, how what is claimed to be neutral is not, and to what extent an endeavour, presented as essentially federative, is the object of disagreements. These difficulties must be admitted, but do not lead us to abandon the project of attaining a GCE.

Rather, they invite us to frame it with the strongest possible tools. These come from the humanities and social sciences – social philosophy, political philosophy, sociology, anthropology – at the service of a research and training project in ETS. This project is materialised by GlobalSense, which both shows how student teachers are driven by a desire to project themselves towards a global citizenship, and highlights the national parameters (cultural, political and related to training) that leads them to adopt a reflexive and collaborative posture on their work.

These elements, taken together, take meaning in a renewed Durkheimian framework, which allows to think all at once the division of social work, cosmopolitanism as an ideal specific to complex societies with a strong organic solidarity, and new working methods at the service of international collaborations that are both committed to a common ideal and respectful of local specificities (curriculum, etc.), as well as the political conceptions of the student-teachers themselves. This last point is crucial since, as we have said, it is not up to researchers to instruct student teachers on what global citizenship is (since the definition is subject to debate, as admitted by UNESCO), but rather for the latter to appropriate a new framework of work which, by its international and collaborative character, follows the contours of the cosmopolitan aspirations of the modern, marked by moral individualism over the deepening of the division of social work, unavoidable according to Durkheim.

We have also taken seriously the fact that citizenship, secularism, non-discrimination, freedom (etc.), as political and legal principles, are embedded in societies. Pettit’s social philosophy is not a fruitful path since his holism is relatively insensitive to social sciences (Urfalino, 2022), but his reflections on freedom, as part of his political philosophy, are more interesting regarding our statement on citizenship. For the author, individuals are free if they form a people where non-domination is guaranteed by a state. The challenge then, in the second stage, is to ensure a non-domination between these agent-groups that are states.

How to apply neo-republican thinking to the international realm? This question needs to be addressed against the background of empirical assumptions about the sort of order that is feasible across the globe […] I consider the question here on the basis of th[e] assumption [that an order of states of the kind with which we are all familiar is more or less bound to continue in existence] because it is hard to see how the world could cease to be organized on a state-bound motif. The concept of freedom as non-domination that is associated with neo-republican theory provides a guiding ideal in the global, not just the domestic arena, and does so even on the assumption that there will continue to be many distinct states. It argues for a world in which states do not dominate members of their own people and, considered as a corporate body, no people is dominated by other agencies: not by other states and not, for example, by any international agency or multi-national corporation.

(Pettit, 2016, pp. 47–48)

The influence of Pettit’s work undoubtedly explains the reasons why this book examines the ideal of global citizenship education in order to distinguish various components (prescription, ideal, slogan, academic notion, educational ethics) and dig a Durkheimian path. To do so, the book tries to shed light, around this vast object, on all the themes addressed by Durkheim as an essential figure in sociology, philosophy and ETS.

This is why several investigations had to be conducted simultaneously: holism, collective entities, ideology of the modern, collective representations, organic solidarity, the state, individualism, cosmopolitanism. For to study citizenship and its education is necessarily to think of society itself, in all its components and in its aspect that is non-reducible to aggregated individual phenomena.

The stake is vast, but to have it fully in mind is already a first step, and this, with the help of the many works of neo-Durkheimian authors who, opening multiple and sometimes very different paths, have nourished the present reflections, from the nominalist micro-holism of liberal inspiration (Gilbert) to the holism displayed as being socialist. These elements help establish a crystallisation point, that of a cosmopolitan neo-republicanism at the height of sociological stakes. In this regard, one of the most crucial questions was: what status should the nation be granted?

Cosmopolitans in global citizenship education tend to respond that if citizenship is global, then nations are logically secondary elements. And why not? This position corresponds perfectly to the ideology of the modern, as Descombes, who remarked that

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, a global society.

(Descombes, 2013b, p. 214)

Except that, according to Dumont and Descombes, one should not confuse the normative individual and the empirical individual, at the risk of suggesting that humanity is essentially composed of individuals, according to a sociological nominalism that is not really recognised but which, nevertheless, runs through the idea of global citizenship as soon as it is approached without the necessary reflective distance. Yet, the idea of global citizenship is available in the holist tradition in philosophy and sociology. In essence, a truly cosmo-political citizenship education must make GCE a slogan, and it is the holistic tradition in philosophy and sociology that allow this. This perspective leads, as mentioned, to socialism, of which critical republicanism is a part.²

Thus, two pitfalls are avoided. The first one is that of permissible partialism, taking note of the fact that the preference for the nation is in tension with the moral equality of people in general: the identification with the nation, even patriotism, is then permissible strictly to the extent that it does not contradict cosmopolitan morality. The problem is that moral impartiality towards all is impossible to maintain. It would forbid us from preferring to help close family rather than the whole of humanity. More crucially, permissible partialism sees patriotism as a matter of individual preference. However, “to take patriotism as optional, or simply permitted, undermines the commitment to see the wrongs committed by one’s own state as falling under one’s own political responsibility” (Erez & Laborde, 2020, p. 194).

The second pitfall avoided is that of globally responsible nationalism, which echoes the conservative positions mentioned above (Miller, Schnapper). Of course, the nation is an ethical community and it is only through this path that individuals can be held responsible for the actions of their state (whether single or pluri-national). If it commits injustices in the global framework, its subjects must feel connected to it in order to counter its actions. Globally responsible nationalism would therefore seem an interesting middle way between abstract cosmopolitanism and narrow nationalism, but the problem is that strong identification with the nation is a mechanism that reinforces the denial of injustices. One thinker will produce a narrative saying that the French Empire is not really responsible for the current problems of formerly colonised countries, while another will claim that the dominant national group is in fact the real victim.

The neo-republican approach is more nuanced. Of course, it is the belonging to a political society that awakens the commitment to defend individual freedoms. In this sense, neo-republicans are patriots. They echo Durkheim’s intuition that it is modern societies as such, marked by the integrated and regulated division of social work, that celebrate the cult of the human person. This cult is therefore a collective ideology, even if its object is the individual. Nations, in turn, are judged by individuals according to this collective ideology; that is why criticism of the nation does not imply the rejection of patriotism but is a constitutive part of it. Neo-republicanism nevertheless pays attention to groups’ claims that they are dominated because it defends, more precisely, the idea of an enlightened self-interest. This is crucial: the best way to defend one’s own freedom is to support public institutions that defend the freedom of all.

This neo-republican path, which poses at the same time the necessity of what is collective, or even societal (patriotism), and the critical skills resulting from our modern ideology (the cult of the individual that Durkheim spoke of) is thus also a neo-holist path. This is the missing piece to dispel the confusion that haunts part of the debates on GCE, between nominalism and conservatism. Acknowledging the urgency of clarifying the complex relationships between national and cosmopolitan ideals, social and political philosophy offers social sciences a lexicon referring to collective entities that frame republican principles, while erecting safeguards against any instrumentalisation of these entities in the service of an intellectual and political agenda that undermines individual freedoms. Thus, the cosmopolitan patriotism that Durkheim called for is updated. Its relevance has been confirmed by the Globalsense research program, and could lead to other avenues of work in education and training sciences.