Education to 'Inter-Cultural Citizenship:' A European Perspective to Global Citizenship

The essay focuses on the mutual relationship between citizenship and education in the context of an ever-growing complexity and socio-legal and cultural diversity of our societies, with regard, in particular, to the European region. More traditional policy approaches look at cultural diversity as a “problem” to be solved. The “assimilationist” approach aims to discourage diversity and to absorb it into the cultural majority of the host country. At the opposite end of the spectrum, the “multiculturalist” approach advocates the recognition of minority groups on par with the host majority, while simultaneously sharing the same, schematic conception of society in terms of “contrast” between majority and minority. This approach differs from the first only by endorsing separation of the minority from the majority, rather than assimilation into it. New approaches, based on “interculturality”, look to diversity as a “fact” with positive potentialities to be managed for the benefit of better social cohesion and integration. In this respect, the more recent “intercultural cities program,” launched as a joint action by the Council of Europe and the European Commission, provides a good example of how to develop diversity as a socio-cultural asset that affects both citizenship and education in a double way: “education through citizenship,” enhances the educational value of citizenship as a daily practice of living together in community and “citizenship through education,” enhances the educational value of the “intercultural dialogue” at the base of an inclusive “inter-cultural citizenship”. Along this path of reasoning, the essay concludes with the idea that intercultural citizenship, as a form of global citizenship, instead of being the expression of abstract universal principles, has its roots in local territories and communities, within the framework of common shared values and principles, across boundaries that hinder the very essence of education as one of the most fundamental human rights: the right to learn to be human.