Questions of citizenship have taken on increased prominence across the humanities and social sciences in the context of European integration and enlargement. In educational research, questions regarding citizenship are often addressed in terms of the moral values we should encourage through education, the relationship between the state and the individual and the negotiation of the nation-state/European state tension. The analysis offered in this paper is not directly concerned with the construction of European citizenship in particular policy documents or processes. Instead, I will focus on a specific aspect of the way in which citizenship is studied. The purpose of this paper is to question the basis of the understanding of citizenship that is found in Anglophone liberal political theory. The state and the individual are often assumed as unproblematic starting points for the analysis of citizenship and the role of education. In this paper, I am concerned with the understanding of the individual from which an analysis of the way we as individuals are made subjects by current European policy discourses might start. To this end, I aim to develop an understanding of citizenship from the perspective of Foucault’s work on ethics, critique and subjectivity. The paper consists of three main parts. First, I consider liberal political theory as a dominant mode of analysing citizenship within the philosophy of education. I refer to the work of John Rawls as an example of such theory that has been highly influential in recent debates. I then outline critiques of Rawls’ position made by Charles Taylor and Michael Walzer (classified by Mulhall and Swift (1996) as ‘communitarian’ critiques). Second, I discuss Taylor’s and Walzer’s critical essays on Michel Foucault. I argue that these are based on some misreading of Foucault’s work. I will illustrate this with a number of examples and offer my own reading of Foucault. I argue that the misreading I identify indicates assumptions about the human subject in such theory, which persist in the study of citizenship and education in this vein. Third, I show how Foucault’s thought enables a reconsideration of the understanding of citizenship. I argue that Foucault’s understanding of critique and subjectivity not only raises questions about the implications of dominant approaches to the study of citizenship but it also, therefore, problematises the relationship between citizenship and education currently constructed in European policy.

I take a philosophical approach to the analysis of liberal political theory, informed by the work of Michel Foucault.

I will show how Foucault's understanding of subjectivity problematises the centrality of the individual as a basis for the analysis of citizenship. I will show that this has implications for the current construction of the relationship between citizenship and education in European- and national-level policy making.