Civic Identity, Citizenship and Foreign Language Education

Foreign language education is one important strategy among others for enhancing people’s identities as global citizens. Yet while cultivating a sense of global citizenship is often heralded as vital to meet local and global challenges faced around the world, the role of citizenship in this concept is not straightforward. Instead, citizenship plays a paradoxical role here, as citizenship often implies national boundaries, while global citizenship ideals intend to critically challenge or interrogate these same borders. This chapter explores the theoretical foundations for understanding global citizenship in literature on civic identity and citizenship and cosmopolitanism. It reveals that historically and today these concepts are fluid and contested. In relation, patriotism, nationalism, and what it means to be a good citizen are contentious. This makes these ideas difficult to use within the context of discussing and teaching for global citizenship. The implications for what it means to be a global citizen, in terms of attitudes and understandings, approaches and practices, is therefore not pregiven, but open to a range of interpretations. This chapter thus discusses the historical and philosophical roots of concepts underpinning major approaches to global citizenship today, exploring how they unfold into different visions of global citizenship education and foreign language education for global citizenship.