The last decade has seen the recrystallisation and increasing salience of right-wing political beliefs especially in liberal democracies culminating in — and further fomenting through —a series of global level sociopolitical transformations such as, the global financial crisis of 2008-9, and its fall out, the election of Trump in 2016 and 2024, the exit of the United Kingdom from the EU in 2020. This shift has been motivated by rightist discourses arguing for a return to imperialist visons of the past veiled in the rhetoric of national identity politics. This period is also characterised by an ever-increasing gulf between academic, policy and popular understandings of democracy and education. These developments disproportionally threaten the rights of minorities, migrants, LGBTQ+ people, girls and women, and contribute to social unrest amidst increasing inflation, increasing inequality and falling standards of living within Europe (EU 2024)[1].The anti-democratic promise of challenging status quo can be particularly attractive to youth whilst also being extremely deleterious to their socio-cultural, emotional and economic lives. The impact of such forces is sobering when one considers that the 2023 global ‘Democracy Index’ recorded the lowest average score for democratic health in Europe, since its inception in 2006[2]. Education has long been recognised as critical to democracy and particularly promoting appropriate democratic qualities among young people. The importance of citizenship education is recognised in European policy, by including for instance citizenship competence as one of the 8 key competences for lifelong learning (EC, 2018) as well as in UN policy. Worryingly, however, despite these European and international wide policies for education, the impact of anti-democratic forces are impinging on curricular policies across the region. For example, the Bulgarian government has recently banned content based on non-traditional sexual orientation in early years education[3]. Conservative political forces in the UK advocate against the teaching about colonial history, racism and white privilege, arguing for the political neutrality of curriculum[4].  From a policy perspective, these discourses and reforms stand in contradiction to the principles of solidarity and ensuring that all education is non-discriminatory, as enshrined in the recently adopted UNESCO “Recommendation on Education for Peace, Human Rights and Sustainable Development[5]”. This not only works against the intent of European policy on citizenship education, but further risks eroding values of democracy among future generations of European citizens by, in the case of the examples given, restricting the curriculum which they experience diversity through and refusing to challenge anti-democratic ideology framed within a neoliberal ‘depoliticization’ of educational policy.[6]

It is clear that there exist mismatches in European and national educational policies and decisions, as well as incongruencies that distort the aims of citizenship education. The impact of neoliberal economic ideology in limiting the scope of citizenship education is troubling. Educational research, particularly in critical scholarship and curriculum studies, has emphasised this for several decades however, there exists a significant issue in the uptake of this research in curriculum and policy across Europe. The OECD, in 2022[7], highlighted that despite the proliferation of educational research in the last two decades, the transfer and mobilisation of the produced knowledge is limited and often fails to be integrated appropriately in areas such as curricular reform. Altogether, these related issues may restrict the potential of realising an appropriate response to the rise of anti-democratic beliefs, through democratic citizenship education across educational sites and curricula, undermining broader European policy and solidarity, and leading to continued social fragmentation, unrest, and potentially violence, through a neglect of the political needs of students.

This symposium of papers includes explorations into new ways of approaching policy and curriculum-making faithful to the ideal of a democratic Europe.

EU (2023) Living conditions statistics at regional level, Eurostat, June, 2024 https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php? title=Living_conditions_statistics_at_regional_level Economist Intelligence. (2024). Democracy Index 2023: Age of Conflict. https://www.eiu.com/n/campaigns/democracy-index-2023/?utm_source=eiu-website&utm_medium=blog&utm_campaign=democracy-index-2023 Dukovska, D., & Zheleva, N. (2024, 2024/08/07/). Parliament Bans Propaganda of "Non-traditional" Sexual Orientation in Pre-school, School Education. Bulgarian News Agency, NA. https://link-gale-com.may.idm.oclc.org/apps/doc/A804195493/STND?u=nuim&sid=bookmark-STND&xid=b8fc23c0 Murray, J. (2020). Teaching white privilege as uncontested fact is illegal, minister says. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/oct/20/teaching-white-privilege-is-a-fact-breaks-the-law-minister-says UNESCO. (2024). Recommendation on Education for Peace, Human Rights and Sustainable Development: an explainer. https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000388330?posInSet=7&queryId=636cf2db-ec7e-4b33-a608-8321f94f3923 Delahunty, T. (2024). The convergence of late neoliberalism and post-pandemic scientific optimism in the configuration of scientistic learnification. Educational Review, 1-23. https://doi.org/10.1080/00131911.2024.2307509