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The aim of the text is to present a historical foundation of the changing conceptualization of citizenship and to outline the present trends in citizenship theory from a social and educational perspective. Based on a 132literature review from the 1990s and the first decade of the new millennium, an attempt is made to describe possible changes in school curricula in order to demonstrate the diversifying content and role of civic education. These considerations must be placed in a broader context of the transforming content of current public debates on citizenship and nationhood, including the increasingly ethnicity-oriented views of nationhood in many European and non-European countries, accompanied by the rise of anti-immigrant discourse.

The changing articulation of citizenship is traced, both in relation to the national and the global. Conceiving of citizenship as an incompletely theorized contract between the state and the citizen, and locating her inquiry at that point of incompleteness, the author opens up the discussion to the making of the political. The central thesis is that the incompleteness of the formal institution of citizenship makes it possible for the outsider to claim for expanded inclusions. It is the outsider, whether a minoritized citizen or an immigrant, who has kept changing the institution across time and space. Times of unsettlement make this particularly visible. The current period of globalization is one such period, even though this is a partial unsettlement. New types of political actors are taking shape, changing the relationship between the state and the individual, and remaking the political.

Comparative education has typically focused on differences across countries and sought to explain these differences as a function of differences in historical legacies, in societal prerequisites (as in variants of functionalist analysis), or in internal patterns of competition and conflict across social classes and status groups. In these studies the independent and the dependent variables of interest are endogenous characteristics of national societies. The latter are presumed to operate mostly as “closed systems” with their past trajectories (think path dependencies) and their present states (think present system needs or current power configurations) shaping the educational outcomes of interest. These endogenous characteristics may depict properties of the economy, e.g. degree of industrialization, the polity, e.g. democratic versus authoritarian regimes, the culture, e.g. Confucian group centric versus Protestant individual oriented, etc. or the educational system itself, centralized versus decentralized. The latter, of course, may be viewed both as a dependent variable influenced by the degree to which the polity is centralized or decentralized as well as an independent variable, influencing the growth of enrollments. In the classical Collins (1979) formulation the comparatively greater growth of post-primary enrollments in the United States was an outcome of status competition which itself was made more likely by a decentralized educational system. The latter in turn reflected and was shaped by a decentralized political system.

The prevalence of anti-EU integration and anti-immigration rhetoric across the continent, the increased presence of Eurosceptic parties in the European Parliament, and most importantly Brexit suggest that the European Union is having an existential crisis. This chapter debates the role of the EU citizenship regime on this crisis, by resting its central thesis that there is a fundamental mismatch between the way that EU citizenship is at present derived from Member State citizenship, and the transnational affinity of the EU citizenry that is invited by the internal market and migration. As a remedy, the chapter projects a supranational EU citizenship regime that coexists with the current EU citizenship regime. Focussing on the social and political imperatives, the chapter brings forward tangible policy recommendations for the proposed EU citizenship regime and expounds how it can be an effective policy instrument for the EU’s internal and external struggles.

I want to thank the respondents for their observations and critiques. It is impossible to address the many points raised in these five responses. Here I will limit myself to some of the issues which are emblematic of the diverse interpretive tools of each author and may or may not contain a foundational disagreement.

Citizenship reemerged as a topic of major academic and policy interest from the 1990s, and as extensive and passionate as that debate has been, Saskia Sassen's commentary illustrates why we have not fully unlocked its importance. Citizenship, in Sassen's thought-provoking argument, articulates the relationship of the individual and the state, and the national and the international. The articulation here is, as I read it, both in the meaning of, first, “makes sense of,” conceptualizes and gives voice to a set of relationships, and second, facilitates the facile movement between different parts. In this latter sense, citizenship is the “joint” or nexus that articulates between social and political parts, much in the way (metaphorically speaking) our bodies have articulating joints.

In this chapter, the revocation of citizenship laws in three democratic countries – Canada, Israel, and the United States – are compared. At first glance, it appears that in each of the countries, there is one common factor that provides the pretext for expatriation – the particular conception of citizenship and nationhood (usually highlighted and constructed during military conflicts). This explanation accords with the existing literature on citizenship. This chapter shows that there is another principle that all countries share that plays a role in the perception of citizenship and its revocation. Forced expatriation as a policy became more widespread with the institutionalization of the national world order which does not tolerate multiple national allegiances.

The purpose of this paper is to compare the curriculum developments of civic education in three emerging Chinese societies: China and two Special Administrative Regions of Hong Kong and Macao, which are increasingly under the impacts of globalisation in this information world.

The analytical method is used and the following are identified: active and global civic education-related learning units and key themes and main contents in official curriculum guidelines and updated textbooks related to civic education.

A major finding is that elements of both active and global citizenship, such as participation in the community and understanding about the world and thus forming multiple identities, can be found alongside their emphasis on enhancing national citizenship. Thus, ideas of global citizenship and multiple levels of citizenship from local, national to global start to develop in these three Chinese societies.

The implications of such findings of both active and global citizenship, as well as multiple identities, found in these three Chinese societies could be huge for informing civic literature and sociological point of views, in particular, pointing to the next generations receiving a broadened and transcended notion of multiple levels of citizenship, apart from local and national citizenship.

The significance of this paper is that it argues that ideas of active citizenship in terms of community participation and global citizenship have been found in China, Hong Kong and Macao civic education curriculum and textbooks because of the expectations placed on students to compete in a globalized world, though national citizenship and patriotic concerns have been primary concerns. Globalisation makes the world society by impacting on these three Chinese societies for active and global citizenship, though they still retain their particular curricular focusses.