Conceptions of citizenship education are always constituted by ideals about how a community ought to be. In pluralist democracies, the politics of citizenship education are thus bound to be controversial (Biesta, 2011; Gutmann, 1999). Yet, following WW II, European citizenship education research and policy have been affected by the general strive to shift the educational debate from goals to governance (Gunter, 2015; Plank & Boyd, 1994). Consequently, citizenship education has generally come to be portrayed as an authoritative instrument conveying universal and seemingly uncontroversial values such as “freedom, equality, tolerance and non-discrimination” (European Commission, 2017, p. 17).

Educational theory shows that, despite being couched in a-political terms, citizenship education remains inherently normative and open to interpretation (Davies, 2006; Simons & Masschelein, 2008). The politics and history of education, however, suggest the debate might not only be about interpretation. The current upsurge of right-wing radicalism provides only one topical indication that ideas deviating from liberal and humanistic conceptions of citizenship did not disappear after 1945.

This symposium wants to bring such heterodox ideals of the community, and corresponding educational views and practices, back into our theorisation of citizenship education. It thus asks: what heterodox forms of community and citizenry have collective actors imagined in the post-war period? How do such imaginaries relate to actors’ ideas about citizenship education, and how have these actors sought to introduce their ideas into the educational debate and implement them in practice?

The symposium uses this common set of questions to investigate the ideals and politics of citizenship education of different collective actors operating in post-war Europe, and thus intends to advance the theoretical discussion in two fields. First, by focusing on citizenship goals and means elaborated by often neglected actors advocating heterodox community ideals, it provides new knowledge into the relationship between politics and education. The contributions have been selected to represent a geographically, ideologically, and organisationally diverse set of cases, including: West-German financial-sector associations, the Free Trade Union of Hungarian Teachers, the French and Italian far right, as well as civil society organisations in transitioning Spain. Like any other movement or advocacy group, these actors have targeted education to advance their community ideals. At the same time, they represent a community in themselves, and thus provide education both to their participants and the broader public (Niesz et al., 2008)

Second, by investigating the strategies and means devised to put these educational ideas into practice or introduce them into the larger public debate, the symposium aims to contribute towards a history of post-war European citizenship education which is not limited to public institutions, but which integrates the potential contribution from outside states and supra-national organisations. This approach promises to reveal the contingency of, and politics behind, understandings of citizenship education, including those dominating the current debate.

Methodologically, by focusing on contentious rather than institutional politics, the panel takes on Seddon and Niemeyer’s (2018) challenge of integrating ideas about “Europeanisation outside of Brussels” (762) into European education research. By investigating a diverse set of cases with two shared research focuses, the symposium also represents an attempt to avoid the development of parallel historiographies biased by “methodological nationalism” (Wimmer & Glick Schiller, 2002). Instead, this proceeding is designed to allow for comparing different approaches, so as to create a common ground in view of a more comprehensive mapping of the collective actors engaging in European citizenship education. It also promises to generate initial hypotheses on how community ideals and education interact, as well as to spark a discussion about what this implies for our understanding of citizenship education in democratic societies.

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