Governance and the learning citizen : tensions and possibilities in the shift from national to post-national identities

Abstract

The movement towards a European civil society has been on the policy agenda for some time. At one level, it can be said to have at least been implied in the original Treaty of Rome, with its stated desire to facilitate a political as well as an economic Union. The idea acquired added momentum during the employment crisis of the 1970s, as is witnessed by the rapidly growing significance of the European Social Fund and the ‘Document on European Identity’ approved by the foreign ministers of the European Community in 1973. As an explicit element in policy discourse, however, the linked ideas of a European civil society and a European citizenship really came to the fore in the period between the Single European Act and the completion of the Single Market in 1992. Significantly, this period also saw dramatic steps in the Europeanization of policies for education and training, a process in which ideas of a shared civic identity played an important role (Field, 1998). While talk of European identity, culture and citizenship is a relatively recent phenomenon, it nevertheless reflects a logical development in the movement towards European integration. It shares with the integration project as a whole a deep underlying tension between the desire to benefit from a steep increase in the economies of scale, and the corresponding opportunities that this presents at the social and cultural level, and the constitutional obligation (and desire) to maintain national sovereignty as a keystone of the Union. In the orthodox doctrines of the European political class, this is presented as a positive conception of the emerging ‘European society’ as a society where citizens will have ‘the feeling of belonging to the European Union’ while at the same time being ‘rooted in regional traditions and cultures’. This statement also reflects the formal EU position on European citizenship, one that is concerned in practical terms with the difficult compromises and shifting alliances involved in carefully negotiating subsidiarity and the myriad sensitivities revolving around national traditions, cultures and notions of citizenship. It has been increasingly accompanied by reforms of governance that are designed to bring the EU closer to its citizens, as well as new approaches to social partnership that seek to engage the Union’s decision making structures with the representatives of non-governmental actors and civic movements alongside the more conventional players (governments, employers’ associations and trade unions). Yet in recent years, this vision of a shared European citizenship and civil society has been confronted by new populist movements that express considerable scepticism over the claims of the European political elite, and often articulate hostility towards large parts of the European project. Surveying a range of evidence from surveys conducted between the 1970s and the late 1990s, Martin Kohli asserts that ‘Europe is indeed an elite project, especially so in the less developed countries’ (Kohli, 2000, p.113). The losers of internationalisation— according to Kohli, people in rural areas, those with the lowest income levels and above all those with the weakest educational qualifications—are empirically far less likely to identify positively with the Europeanising project. While a whole host of issues rear their heads in debates over EU citizenship, what concerns this paper is the significance of education and training in any future shift to at least a partial identification by individual citizens with the notion of a European civil society. We particularly seek to understand the process of constructing a European identity within the context of the developing lifelong learning agenda within Europe, which is itself one example of the process of deepening the Union and to some extent is also bound up with enlargement. Given the bleakness of institutional governance without a corresponding demos, can the partial legal competence of the EU in education and training potentially be harnessed as a means of facilitating the construction of a post-national citizen identity at the EU level? The following brief discussion highlights some of the initial tensions and possibilities inherent in the combination of EU governance, learning and citizen identification.