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European Integration, 1999, Vol. 21, pp. 307-341 Reprints available directly from the Publisher Photocopying permitted by license only
C 1999 OPA (Oversew Publishers Association) N.V. Published by license under the Harwood Academic Publishers imprint, part of The Gordon and Breach Publishing Group. Printed in Malaysia.
THE EUROPEAN UNION AND THE 'EUROPEAN DIMENSION' IN SCHOOLS: THEORY AND EVIDENCE TOBIAS THEILER Faculty of Social Studies, University of Oxford This article examines how the European Parliament and the Commission sought to use education policy as a tool to strengthen popular support for European integration. It first proposes a conceptual framework to show why and how mass education can lend itself as an important instrument to foster public consent for political and economic integration. Then it traces EP and Commission-led attempts over the past two decades to introduce a 'European dimension' into the school curricula of the EU member states, pursued in the hope that this would enhance the Union's popular standing. They included proposals for the teaching of European 'civics', the 'correction' of history textbooks and the display of Union paraphernalia in classrooms. As is shown, however, most of these attempts have either stumbled over resistance by some national governments or led to little more than educational exchange programmes. I argue that the Union's far-reaching failure to leave its imprint on the school curricula of the member states bints at some of the wider obstacles it faces in its attempts to enact policies aimed at securing lasting public support for integration. Keywords: European Union; education; 'European dimension'; 'European identity'; Political legitimacy
INTRODUCTION Sparked by such phenomena as a steadily diminishing turnout for elections to the European Parliament and the groundswêll in popular opposition to the Maastricht Treaty in the early 1990s, issues of legitimacy, identity and popular consent in the European Union (EU)1 have recently attracted a very large amount of scholarly attention. So numerous have the
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contributions dealing with those issues become that Joseph Pfeiler considers them to have laid the foundation for a 'third debate' in European integration studies.2 Different 'third debate' contributions are divided by philosophy and outlook, but most have at least two elements in common. First, they tend to revolve around a shared central question which can roughly be stated as follows: What if anything could ensure that the EU acquires the degree of underlying legitimacy and popular consent necessary for its stability and survival in the long term? Second, in addressing this question most 'third debate' participants stay exclusively on a theoretical level and stand out by a corresponding lack of policy focus. Thus, for instance, while many writers speculate on whether the Union could hope to enhance its popular appeal through policies in areas such as cultural policy and education, few have paid much attention to what it has already done or attempted to do in those fields, and whether those efforts had the potential to be effective if evaluated against a given set of theoretical criteria.3 This lack of policy focus in the 'third debate' literature cannot be attributed to a lack of relevant policies by the Union or, more precisely, not to a lack of attempts to initiate such policies. In fact, since the early 1970s both the European Parliament and the Commission have sought to enact a wide range of measures in such fields as culture, audio-visual policy and education whose (at least partial) aim it was to enhance the Union's popular appeal. They ranged from the designation of a European flag and anthem to attempts to introduce a European lottery, 'European rooms' in national museums, youth exchanges, a European television channel, and a'European dimension' in the school curricula of the member states. These efforts suggest that from relatively early on the EP and the Commission saw the maintaining of popular consent for integration to pose a potential 'problem' which they were determined to 'address'. This article centres on such efforts by the EU to initiate support generating policies. Because of limited space but also because of the importance of that particular field I restrict my discussion to education policy I first propose a theoretical framework to illustrate how in a setting such as the EU stable popular consent for integrative institutions and practices depends on them acquiring legitimacy, why mass education can be an important tool in creating legitimacy, and what kind of educational measures would be the most effective ones in such a quest. In the main part of the article I trace efforts, driven primarily by the European Commission and Parliament, to
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introduce a 'European dimension' into the school curricula of the EU member states. Relevant proposals sought to foster the teaching of European 'civics', the 'correction' of history textbooks, the display of Union paraphernalia in classrooms and pupils' celebration of 'Europe Day'. I conclude, however, that the 'European dimension' in schools has remained largely elusive. A shifting coalition of national governments either rejected the proposals on its behalf from the outset, or consented to them in the form of non-binding resolutions which they subsequently failed to implement. The few measures that were adopted and put into practice centred on student exchanges and language learning rather than on the insertion of 'European content' in school curricula. My discussion has two broad aims. First, by examining the EU's activities in a policy area that has thus far attracted relatively little attention, it seeks to contribute to the existing empirical literature on policies and policy making in the EU. But this account, I will aigue, also carries some wider significance. It is linked above all to the observation that many national governments did not cease to protect their educational prerogatives jealously against Union encroachment, even though they allowed for significant progress in economic and to some extent also political integration. This not only bears witness to the difficulties the Union faces in its attempts to implement policies aimed at strengthening mass support for integration. It may also convey some insights into the underlying nature of the integrative process in Europe.
INTEGRATION, LEGITIMACY AND EDUCATION My theoretical point of departure is not controversial. Economic and political integration as it is currently unfolding in the EU framework, regardless of what one conceives its precise nature and likely 'end product' to be, entails a wide range of economic, political and social transformations. These occur at the level of prevailing norms, institutions and practices, and in many instances make themselves felt in the everyday lives of the citizens in the different member states. For European integration to continue and survive in the long term, a majority of those citizens must support or at least be willing and able to tolerate those transformations to which it is linked. Different factors may induce an individual to support or at least tolerate and comply with a given framework of norms, practices and institutions,
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or changes therein. They include coercion, apathy and instrumental (or utilitarian) considerations.4 As regards European integration, instrumental motivations in particular are widely recognized to have thus far played a significant role in sustaining public support for it 5 Yet instrumental support is 'soft' support. By definition it is vulnerable to changes in the perceived cost/benefit ratio offered by the erstwhile support object Ultimately, thus, if the EU is to attain a level of support that is 'hard' and durable rather than 'soft' and vulnerable to changed expectations of utilitarian gain, it must come to enjoy a condition that is best characterized as one of legitimacy. Legitimacy Legitimacy is a notoriously elusive concept and different writers have used it to describe different things.6 Before looking at how legitimacy emerges and how the education system can contribute to its emeigence, I thus need to clarify what precisely I mean when using that term in the present context. First, I use legitimacy in a way that sociologists as opposed to political or legal philosophers typically use i t That is, I treat legitimacy as a condition that pertains to how the institutions and practices in question are perceived in the eyes of those subjected to them. Such a subject-centred conception of legitimacy • is well captured in Seymour Martin Lipsetfc often-cited definition that people "regard a political system as legitimate or illegitimate according to the way in which its values fit with theirs".7 Second, I adhere to a very restrictive definition, of legitimacy as it underlies, for example, the work of the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu. According to this definition, legitimacy represents in the first instance a 'prereflective' concept8 Accordingly, to say that individuals regard something as legitimate or illegitimate does not necessarily imply that they have developed a set of standards of what constitutes legitimacy (linked to principles such as, for example, democratic accountability, rootedness in tradition or divine commands) against which they have consciously evaluated the institution or practice in question before deciding whether or not to deem it legitimate. Instead, legitimacy in this rendering is in the first instance a concept applied by the outside observer to describe a particular relationship between the individual on the one hand and the institution or practice concerned on the other. As I show below, this relationship is defined notably by the former having internalized the latter and as a result treating it to some extent as natural and self-evident.
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The final point is that legitimacy should not be treated as something that is necessarily marked by an all-or-nothing presence. For not only can conceptions of legitimacy differ from one individual to the next, but any wie individual may also regard something as more or less legitimate, depending on, as we shall see, the extent to which he or she has internalized it. The answer to the question of whether a given institution or practice has acquired sufficient legitimacy overall to retain the consent of those subjected to it depends in the first instance on the degree to which those subjects are aware of its existence, and to which they consider it significant Applied to European integration this translates into the notion of a necessary balance between, on the one hand, the pace of integration (defined as entailing, among other things, an increase in the powers and visibility of EU-related institutions and practices) and, on the other hand, the rate at which it can be legitimized. This notion is well encapsulated in the classic neo-functionalist concept of'authority-legitimacy transfers'.9 As long as EU-related institutions and practices assume a low degree of authority and visibility in relation to their national counterparts, legitimacy can remain vested predominantly with the latter The more their authority and visibility increases, however, the more urgent becomes the need for corresponding 'legitimacy transfers' to ensure their popular backing in the long term.
The Process of Legitimization How, then, as political and economic integration progresses, can its legitimization be secured? And, in particular, how can mass education contribute to this? At a rather high level of abstraction, many sociologists depict the process whereby an individual comes to see as legitimate a given set of practices, norms and institutions - be they linked to a tribe, a state, a religious order, a supranational organization, a system of class divisions or any other type of social arrangement - as, in the first instance, one of socialization into and internalization of those practices, norms and institutions. The result of such an internalization process is what Beiger and Luckmann call a "symmetry between" objective and subjective reality",10 or what Bourdieu refers to as a "correspondence between the objective classes and the internalized classes, social structures and mental structures".11 If this correspondence is achieved completely (and in reality it never is), the 'what is' is at once the 'what can be' and the 'what ought to be'. There is no 'gap'
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between them that could lead the individual to question the practices, norms and institutions concerned. These in turn take on the appearance of being natural and self-evident rather than socially constructed; their existence and functioning is taken for granted.12 In order to become legitimized a given institution, norm or practice must either undergo this process itself (which leads to 'prerefiective' and thereby the most solid form of legitimacy possible, since it means that for the affected individuals the very question of legitimacy does not pose itself) or, at the very least, it must be able to justify its existence in terms of other norms, practices or institutions which for their part have become widely internalized and thus subject to shared acceptance through the mechanisms just discussed. This process of internalization-c^OT-naturaUzation-cMm-legitimization transpires through two overlapping mechanisms. First, through the effects of familiarization and adaptation, individuals' mere existence in a framework of norms, practices and institutions contributes to them internalizing these and thus to their coming to see them as legitimate.13 But, second, the legitimization of a given social and political order can always be traced in part to efforts by dominant agents within this order to complement and reinforce the effect of familiarization with that of inculcation. And such efforts take on a particular significance where, as is the case for instance during integration, the practices, norms and institutions that are to be internalized and legitimized are themselves undergoing a rapid transformation. For this is bound to reduce the relative importance of the familiarization effect in fostering that process. The precise cognitive and emotional - as well as social and political developments to which such a legitimization strategy is linked are much debated and cannot be taken up here in detail. What is commonly accepted is that the centrepiece of that strategy is the designation and transmission of symbols (defined in a very broad sense) which are 'tied' to the social arrangements in question and, in various ways, facilitate their intemalization.14 There is similar agreement, moreover, that an important institutional tool by which such a strategy can be advanced is mass education. Education and Legitimization Going back to Durkheim, a large body of sociological literature has treated mass education as one of the most important socialization and legitimization devices.15 This stems, first, from the large amount of time individuals
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normally spend passing through the school system. Also, their motivation to absorb school-transmitted knowledge tends to be strong as it is linked to their prospects for social and economic advancement. Furthermore, in so far as the education system is subjugated to political poweç educational content and method can be centrally steered and adapted relatively quickly by those who hold such power to meet the needs of their particular socialization and legitimization agendas (e.g. through state-run curriculum development and assessment agencies, examination boards, and the like). Yet the most important factor as far as integration is concerned is that individuals start to undergo schooling at an early age. For in the case of adults who have been socialized in a pre-integrative (i.e. in our case national) setting, the best integration-prone elites can hope to achieve is their re-socialization into an emeiging integrative (i.e. in our case EUrelated) context. Yet such re-socialization is bound to remain partial, since what has been acquired during early socialization can rarely be completely 'de-internalized'. The individuals concerned thus remain a potential source of opposition to the EU, as latent national 'memories' are prone to become, as it were, 'reactivated'. Children, in contrast, stand out by the comparative absence of previously internalized national representations.16 Consequently, they are especially susceptible to acquiring representations of supranational legitimacy, and, once acquired, these are bound to be of a particularly stable and enduring quality. A good illustration of education's role in securing popular acceptance of political and economic integration - albeit in a national rather than in a supranational setting - is offered by large parts of the historically oriented literature on the origins and dissemination of nationalism and national consciousness, which is worth consulting in this context (It is important to stress at this point that such a comparison between European integration on the one hand and historical examples of 'nation-building' and national consciousness formation on the other does not imply that the two are qualitatively the same. It does not suggest, for instance, that the EU, if it is to survive, will inevitably become a nation-state-type entity. What it does presuppose is merely that in some aspects the two phenomena are sufficiently similar to render a comparison between them meaningful. This condition is, I believe, amply fulfilled.17) Much of this literature on nationalism convenes in arguing that their grip on emerging mass education systems - and especially elementary schooling - provided aspiring national elites with a formidable means to pursue their national socialization-cK/w-intemaUzation-a/OT-legitimization
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agenda against efforts by rivalling agents with competing agendas, such as the church or local feudal regimes. Indeed, the impression conveyed in some cases is that the emergence of nationalism as a mass phenomenon was crucially linked to the rise of popular education systems.18 As one writer, commenting on the role of mass education in this context, observed: The 'greatest function' of the modern school was to teach a 'new patriotism ...'. The school was first a socializing agent The message was communicated most effectively together with reading and writing. The school's task included not only national and patriotic sentiments but establishing unity in a nation long divided by region, culture, language, and persisting social divisions of class and wealth. Learning to read and write involved the constant repetition of the civic national catechism, in which the child was imbued with all the duties expected of him: from defending the state, to paying taxes, working, and obeying laws.19
To the extent that one shares this notion of the potency of mass education as a socialization and Iegitimization tool which underlies such an account, it is not far-fetched to assume that similar educational strategies could, over time, have a comparable effect in an EU setting as well. Evidently, this would presuppose that they were backed by a sufficiently strong elite commitment so as to be pursued with the required intensity and persistence. Measures such as, say, the mandatory display of the European flag and map in every classroom, daily European pledges of allegiance, the frequent singing of the European anthem, and the teaching of myths about 'Europe's founding fathers' in the context of 'European civics' or history lessons are but some of the most crude and obvious examples (some taken from actual proposals as they are discussed in the next section) of what potential school-centred legitimization measures in an EU setting might include. While each of them seems somewhat trivial by itself, the cumulative effect of these and/or many other related measures could be expected to resemble, over tune, that which actions of a similar type once had in socializing individuals into their emerging national contexts. One final point: In order to contribute to the legitimization of European integration in all its dimensions, mass education would need to do more than to try and improve horizontal perceptions between the different populations involved, be it through educational exchange programmes, lessons about the history and culture of other member states, language teaching, and similar measures. And the claim that such horizontal visibility and contact enhancing measures are by themselves insufficient can be upheld even if one assumes that they are necessarily effective in improving transnational images; a thesis which itself is not uncontested but which cannot be further examined here.
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To better understand this point one must consider that the EU is at least as much a 'vertical' undertaking as it is a 'horizontaP one. One of its central features is the formation of a - however constituted - political system that embraces and transcends the individual member states, and the resulting rise of new institutions, norms and patterns of authority and compliance. While, as we saw, these need to be legitimized, there is little to suggest - either conceptually 01; relying once more on the 'nation-building' literature as a standard of comparison, historically20 - that an improvement in mutual perceptions between the populations involved in the integrative process (or, for that matter, even a partial social and cultural amalgamation) must necessarily accompany their legitimization. (Similarly, consider the reverse scenario in which an individual passionately rejects a given authority-holding institution as illegitimate even though he or she feels an equally passionate bond with the other individuals that are subjected to that very same institution, and in which the awareness of such shared rejection may even itself have a solidarity enhancing effect). In short, for schools to be at their most effective in helping to legitimize the EU, they would need foster the legitimization of state-transcending authority rather than merely a sense of state-transcendingj'rate/7HYH. Having looked at how mass education could help secure popular support for European integration, I now go on to examine the educational policies of the European Union. More specifically, I trace attempts by the European Commission and Parliament to add a 'European dimension' to the educational experience of young Europeans in the hope that this would enhance the Union's popular standing. I focus, in the first place, on the type of measures envisaged in the various 'European dimension' related policy initiatives. Further, I look at the extent to which the Commission and the EP managed to have those initiatives adopted by the member states, and, most importantly, implemented in classrooms and textbooks throughout the Union.
THE 'EUROPEAN DIMENSION' IN SCHOOLS Under its founding treaties the powers of the European Community in educational policy were extremely limited. Subject to relevant decisions by the Council of Ministers, it could become involved only in those parts of the educational domain that touched on its broadly defined economic mandate.
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These included vocational training (Art 128 EEC), the Community-wide recognition of professional qualifications (Art. 57 EEC) and, on a more limited scale, the promotion of scientific research (Arts. 7 and 9 EURATOM).21 And during the first decade and a half of the Community's existence, neither the European Commission nor any of the member states challenged its constitutional limitations in the educational domain. The few educational initiatives launched in this period were strictly confined to vocational training and the improved Community-wide recognition of diplomas.22 They were justified, moreover, with economic arguments rather than with the desire to use education as a tool to strengthen popular support for the Community. Yet in the early 1970s the Commission's earlier lack of proclaimed interest in the non-vocational aspects of integration gave way to a sudden rise of ambition in the field. This, as we shall see, occurred against the backdrop of what not least the Commission itself perceived as a danger of growing public alienation from the integrative process. And it was fuelled by a belief that educational policy could be a potent means by which to counteract this danger. Reflecting the expected sensitivity of the issue and the Community's lack of formal competences, however, the Commission proceeded cautiously. Rather than starting out by putting forward its own set of policy proposals it appointed, in July 1972, an advisory panel, led by the former Belgian education minister Henri Janne. It had the task of defining a set of basic objectives that were to guide the Community's future educational activities, and released its report in February 1973.23 The Janne Report The official title of what is commonly referred to as the Janne Report is For a Community Policy on Education, and the report's title foreshadowed its content: Much of it revolved around the attempt to devise potential rationales for why the Community's educational involvement should be extended beyond the domains of vocational education and diploma recognition into that of 'general' education where no treaty-based mandate existed. In trying to justify such an expanded Community involvement the Janne Committee relied on two lines of reasoning. The first centred on its claim that "the economic (and therefore "professional" [i.e. vocational]) needs for training are not separable from the education system in general". With the former domain having been entered by the Community already,
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the latter allegedly could (and thus, according to the somewhat eccentric logic that marked the Janne Report's chain of reasoning, should) no longer be kept completely beyond its reach. Second, however, for the Janne Committee a future Community involvement in 'general' education was not ' just logical-cwH-inevitable: it was also necessary. It was required, according to the report, in order to add a 'European dimension' to the educational experience of young Europeans, and in so doing help them develop what it described as 'positive attitudes with regard to Europe'. The Europeans' feeling of political, social and cultural belonging can no longer be exclusively national if a part of the attributes of the nation-state has been tested in the Community: the territory in as far as the frontiers disappear the transfers of powers of decision to supranational bodies, the supranational jurisdictions, the right of establishment of foreigners, etc. This being so, is it possible to escape from the idea that education should comprise a European dimension wherever this is possible?
The Janne Report then identified a range of concrete elements which should constitute this 'European dimension'. They included: (i) insertion into teaching practices of a suitable proportion of examples and illustrations as well as reading texts... tending to increase knowledge of Europe and the other peoples which are members of the Community; (ii) Continuation of the 'correction' of history textbooks with a view to expurging or amending nationalistic, biased passages or those of a kind which would create hostile or erroneous judgements;... (iv) Use of geography to transcend national frontiers and to mark the relative nature of the differences and similarities of human groups; positive influences of the frontier regions; (v) Creation of linguistics teaching, throwing light in particular on the common structures of the European languages; (vi) Prudent and gradual teaching of European 'civics' to be based mainly on Community practices and institutions, on pluralism and on democracy; (vii) Examination of the opportuneness of creating an 'agency' at [the] Community level to produce (or to promote the production of) didactic equipment... with a view to supplying teaching establishments... with instruments of study of high pedagogic quality and creating or strengthening positive and well-informed attitudes with regard to Europe.
In important respects the relevant recommendations contained in the Janne Report thus lived up to the criteria specified earlier for an educational strategy aimed at promoting the legitimization of European integration in all its dimensions to be potentially effective. While some were of a predominantly 'horizontal' orientation in that they aimed to improve pupils' perceptions of other member states, others had a 'vertical' outlook. Their aim was to increase the perceived legitimacy of political practices and institutions in the EU, especially through measures under the proposed rubric of 'European civics'. And even though the Janne Report was advisory only, it represented an important initial step in what was to become the Commission's protracted fight on behalf of the 'European dimension' in school curricula. Not least, the timing of its release was significant: it roughly coincided with a
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redistribution of responsibility for the educational portfolio within the Commission itself. This upgraded the status of educational policy by placing it under the auspices of a new Directorate for Education and Training, integrated within the equally new Directorate-General for Research, Science and Education (DG XII).24 Perhaps of still greater importance was the fact that the new Directorate-General became headed by Commissioner Ralf Dahrendorf, who is widely noted for his enthusiasm in seeking to expand the Community's educational role at the time. With Dahrendorf in charge of the education portfolio, the Commission became quick to translate the educational agenda compiled in the Janne Report into concrete policy initiatives with which it could confront the Council and the individual member states.25
The Action Programme in Education A few months after Dahrendorf s accession to the helm of the education portfolio the Commission issued a set of detailed proposals for a Community action programme in education, titled Education in the European Community?*' As far as the 'European dimension' in school curricula was concerned, it largely reiterated the recommendations made in the Janne Report. Shortly afterwards, the Commission tabled a draft resolution 'for cooperation in the field of education'.27 It called upon national governments to, among other things, expand the share of 'European content' in their school curricula, and issued a range of concrete proposals to that end which again roughly mirrored the suggestions contained in the Janne Report. Yet despite the Commission's cautious way of proceeding, it soon became clear that its 'European dimension' plans were not unanimously welcomed by the governments of the member states. Indeed, when their education ministers met - under their habitual formula of the 'Council and the Ministers of Education Meeting within the Council'28 - in order to debate the draft resolution, they failed to adopt it. All they could agree on was to invite a newly created Education Committee, composed of representatives from the national education ministries and the Commission, to draw up a blueprint for a comprehensive Community action programme in education. The action programme, would cover the entire spectrum of education policy, ranging from vocational training to educational provisions for 'guest worker' children and the mutual recognition of educational qualifications, and also contain some elements pertaining to the 'European
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dimension'.29 After this, events moved relatively quickly: the Education Committee reported to the ministers in 1975, and an 'action programme in education' was passed in February 1976.30 As had been anticipated, the action programme included a host of provisions in areas ranging from the schooling of migrant children to the mutual recognition of educational qualifications. Yet as far as its provisions for the 'European dimension' were concerned, it proved a major disappointment for the Commission which had ferociously lobbied on its behalf both inside and outside the Education Committee. For all the action programme contained in this regard was a pledge by the member states that, "[i]n order to give a European dimension to the experience of teachers and pupils in primary and secondary schools in the Community", they themselves (and not the Community) would promote and organize short study visits and exchanges for teachers, with special emphasis on student language teachers; development of the national information and advisory services necessary to promote the mobility and interchange of pupils and teachers within the Community; contacts between the authorities of establishments concerned with teacher training; educational activities with a European content
There were no furtherguidelines on what these 'educational activities with a European content' (or, for that matter, this 'European content' itself) should consist of, and their promotion was to be left in the hands of national governments alone. In sum, what was left of the 'European dimension' in the action programme was either of a purely exchange and circulation enhancing nature, or, as in the case of the recommended 'educational activities with a European content', so vague that no concrete policy commitments could be extrapolated from it. And indeed, as far as its impact on the school curricula of the member states was concerned, the action programme was to have very little effect, as is shown below. The Commission's 'Educational Activities with a European Content' Proposals While the action programme thus represented a setback for the Commission's efforts to bring the 'European dimension' into national school curricula, it did not permanently stifle them. Two years later, the Commission launched a renewed attempt on behalf of the 'European dimension' in the form of a 'Communication to the Council' titled Educational Activities with a European Content: The Study of the
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European Community in Schools?1 It referred to the passage in the action programme in which the member states had pledged to promote and oçanize 'educational activities with a European content', only to note that few such activities had hitherto taken place. Even though the Commission claimed to have found traces relating to the 'study of Europe' in the curricula of all the member states, it had detected only a few instances in which "either in curriculum planning, in the preparation of official examination syllabuses or in the work of schools [efforts] to bring into close relationship with one another the various elements needed to establish the European dimension" had been made. This meagre record the Commission blamed on the failure of educational authorities in the member states to show sufficient interest in the 'study of Europe', on a lack of help available to teachers wishing to teach the subject, on a shortage of appropriate teaching materials, and on the absence of coordinating strategies. European pupils, it complained, were not "given a coherent programme [for the "study of Europe"] during any one year, let alone an intelligible and progressive sequence of learning throughout their school career". Professing that it viewed this situation "with considerable concern" the Commission then tried a new to define a range of changes which the member states should carry out on their school curricula to ensure that they would give greater weight to the 'European dimension'. First on its list of priorities figured the adoption of curricular themes that portrayed "the Community in its European context: the historical and political context which gave rise to the creation of the Community; the objectives of its founders...; the Community as a framework for common action while preserving human, cultural and national diversity...". A further object of study was to be the institutional makeup of the Community, and how the latter "affects the lives of its citizens". Attention, finally, was also to be paid to the study of the Community in a global context and its relations with other countries and the UN. The Commission's 1978 proposals were clearly more ambitious than the 'European dimension'-related passages in the preceding action programme. At the very least, what the Commission proposed amounted to more or less well-defined and tangible changes in curricular content as opposed to mere educational exchanges. Moreover, while the primary responsibility for implementing those measures was to reside once more with national governments, the Commission now added some provisions which it hoped would increase pressure for compliance. For instance, after
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three years the member states would be required to account to the Education Committee for the progress they had made in introducing the 'European dimension' into their school curricula.32 Yet the Commission's 1978 'European dimension' initiative, too, remained dead letter. In fact, the Community's entire educational programme was thrown into doubt when Denmark and France made it known, from 1977 onwards, that they had grown weary of the compromise formulaunder which the education ministers had met as the 'Council and the Ministers of Education Meeting within the Council'? 3 Both governments now argued that official meetings of the national education ministers to debate matters pertaining to 'general' education, even if held under the 'mixed' (i.e. semicommunity related, semi-intergovernmental) formula, carried too strong an allusion to Community competencies where none in fact existed. It is difficult to assess the extent to which this retreat into a position of complete non-cooperation by Denmark and France enjoyed the tacit support of other member states. Since the former two (and especially Denmark) seemed so staunchly set against the Commission's 'European dimension' aspirations, governments which shared similar reservations could afford to exercise restraint in their display of overt opposition and yet be assured that the Commission's efforts would remain fruitless. Not least the widespread failure by most member states to even begin implementing the 'educational activities with a European content' provision to which they had agreed in the action programme, howevei; suggests that such opposition extended well beyond the Franco-Danish axis. Sceptics included notably the UK (which nevertheless took a generally low profile in the debate at the time) and Germany. Increasingly, the German government's position on the issue was influenced by Länder fears of a Community-driven encroachment into their educational prerogatives, which included the power to set curricular content.34 It took three years of intensive negotiations and pleas by the European Commission and Parliament (and a low popular interest in and turnout for the first direct elections to the European Parliament in the spring of 1979 to add a sense of urgency to their pleas) for a renewed meeting by the education ministers to go ahead in June 1980. It, however; produced little more than a decision to procure yet another report from the Education Committee.35 Rather predictably, this report reiterated the Commission's earlier findings that the member states had hitherto done very little tobring the 'European dimension' into their school curricula. The Commission^
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educational ambitions were further frustrated by a partial reversal of the administrative reforms of 1973. As of January 1981, the education portfolio was moved out of the Directorate-General XII and into DG V (Employment and Social Affairs).36 This represented a setback to attempts spearheaded by Commissioner Dahrendorf in the 1970s to evolve education into a field of Community activity in its own right instead of treating it as a mere auxiliary instrument to help the Community achieve its economic objectives, as a strict interpretation of the founding treaties demanded. Save for the 'Solemn Declaration on European Union'37 which was issued at the Stuttgart Summit in June 1983 and contained an exceedingly vague and entirely non-binding pledge by the heads of state/government to promote student and teacher exchanges, language learning and 'a European awareness', it was not until the Fontaine bleau Summit in 1984 that a new sign of movement in the field of education policy began to emerge.38 Under the fresh impression of a low voter turnout for the 1984 European elections and considerable pressure by the European Parliament and the Commission, the heads of state/government professed to consider it "essential that the Community should respond to the expectations of the people of Europe by adopting measures to strengthen and promote its identity and its image both for its citizens and for the rest of the world". At the same time, they set up an ad hoc committee composed of representatives of national governments and chaired by the Italian representative Pietro Adonnino. To it they gave the task of working out proposals for measures in the fields of cultural policy, the creation and promotion of European symbols, and education which would help the Union to increase its popular appeal.
The Adonnino Report and the 'European Dimension' The Adonnino Committee (also known under its official label as the 'Committee on a People's Europe') presented two reports39 of which the second dealt in part with education. Like the action programme some decade before, the Adonnino Report reflected an underlying (and, if our initial theoretical discussion is taken as a guide, erroneous) belief that the fostering of public support for integration was laigely a matter of increasing transnational contacts and of promoting 'a practical knowledge of the languages, cultures and living conditions of the other Member States'. To this end it issued a host of proposals that covered the already familiar spectrum ranging from the promotion of language learning to school and
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youth exchanges and pan-European youth work camps. Some proposals in the Adonnino Report, however, did pertain to the 'European dimension' in school curricula. They were subsumed under the heading the 'European image in education' and included (i) the creation by each Member State, wherever this has not yet been done, of centres whose task... it would be to facilitate the work of schools and teachers and inform and help them from an educational viewpoint; (ii) the preparation and availability of appropriate school books and teaching materials; (iii) confirming 9 May of each year Europe Day with a view to creating awareness and giving information in schools in particular as well as on television and in the other media.
The Adonnino Report was formally consented to by the heads of state/government at the Milan Summit in 1985. And this strengthened the Commission's hand in pushing through a range of educational initiatives in the second part of the 1980s. While these stood out by a relatively high visibility and a previously unmatched level of funding, they also had in common that they were almost exclusively exchange or language learning oriented. In 1987 (after a series of disputes regarding its funding and legal foundations) the Community set up the ERASMUS programme.40 It sought to enable higher education students to unde^o part of their studies in another member state, primarily through mobility grants. In 1988, there followed the 'Youth for Europe' programme which sponsored youth exchanges.41 Similarly inspired by the Adonnino Report was the LINGUA programme to promote the teaching of Community languages.42 When it came to the insertion of a 'European dimension' into national school curricula, however, what the Commission was able to achieve in the aftermath of the Adonnino Report was again much more modest In September 1985, the 'Council and the Ministers for education meeting within title Council' reached preliminary "conclusions on the enhanced treatment of the European dimension in education".43 These largely echoed the relevant passages in the Adonnino Report. There followed three years of negotiations which transpired in the triangle between national governments, the Commission, and the Education Committee as well as a specially instituted sub-committee thereof.44 In 1988, this culminated in the adoption by the education ministers of a new resolution on the 'European dimension'. The 'European Dimension' in the 1988 Resolution The declared objective of the 1988 resolution on the 'European dimension in education'45 was to "strengthen the European dimension in education
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by launching a series of concerted measures for the period 1988 to 1992". In keeping with the pompous rhetoric that had become a standard feature of Community pronouncements of the sort, these measures were proclaimed as intended to "strengthen in young people a sense of European identity and make clear to them the value of European civilization and of the foundations on which the European peoples intend to base their devel^ opment today...". Further, they were to "improve [...pupils'] knowledge of the Community and its Member States in their historical, cultural, economic and social aspects and bring home to them the significance of the cooperation of the Member States of the European Community with other countries of Europe and the world". In terms of concrete action, the member states pledged, "within the limits of their own specific educational policies and structures" (and without committing themselves to implementation deadlines or quantitative targets) to, among other things, "include the European dimension explicitly in their school curricula in all appropriate disciplines, for example literature, languages, history, geography, social sciences, economics and the arts". They also promised to organize seminars on the 'European dimension' and to encourage 'school twinnings', the formation of 'European clubs' in schools, educational activities as part of 'Europe day' (9 May) and transnational cooperation in school sports. Furthermore, the 'European dimension' was to be introduced in teacher training. Yet the 1988 resolution, too, failed to establish an effective mechanism by which the member states could be held accountable for their record in carrying out the agreed-upon (but, as always in the case of resolutions, legally non-binding) auricular changes. As the European Commission and Parliament found themselves once more deprived of effective means to enforce compliance, they could rely on nothing more than the hope that this time round national governments would be more inclined to make their deeds live up to their words than they had been with regard to similar commitments in the past. Yet as is shown below, for the most part such hopes proved illusory once more. The 'European Dimension' in the Maastricht Treaty and After At first glance the Maastricht Treaty46 might well be taken to represent a veritable breakthrough for the EP's and the Commission's educational ambitions. For it contains a new Article 126 which gives the Union, for
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the first time, a limited constitutional standing in the realm of 'general' education. The Community shall contribute to the development of quality education by encouraging cooperation between Member States and, if necessary, by supporting and supplementing their action, while fully respecting the responsibility of the Member States for the content of teaching and the organization of education systems and their cultural and linguistic diversity.
Such Community action, according to the treaty, should be aimed at developing the European dimension in education, particularly through the teaching and dissemination of the languages of the Member States; encouraging mobility of. students and teachers, inter alia by encouraging the academic recognition of diplomas and periods of study; promoting cooperation between educational establishments; developing exchanges of information and experience on issues common to the education systems of the Member States; encouraging the development of youth exchanges and of exchanges of socio-educational instructors; encouraging the development of distance education.
Decisions under Article 126 must be adopted in accordance with the co-decision procedure as outlined under Article 189b. It involves, notably, consultations with the Economic and Social Committee and the Committee of the Regions, and requires approval by the European Parliament.47 Yet while the Maastricht Treaty has enhanced the legal status of education policy in the EU, it has not strengthened the Commission's and the EP's ability promote the 'European dimension' in national school curricula in a significant way. First, as we saw, the latter does not figure among the areas which the treaty lists as subject to potential Union involvement Legal opinion diverges as to whether the enumeration in Article 126 is of exemplary or exhaustive character.48 But even if it were judged to be merely exemplary, and thus the Community deemed as in principle entitled to pass curriculum-related initiatives, these could at the most be of a 'soft' and non-binding type, similar to the many resolutions and declarations on the subject passed over the preceding two decades. And this is not only due to the "while fully respecting the responsibility of the Member States for the content of teaching" clause in Article 126, but above all because the same article does not give the Union any competences in the domain of general education of a kind that would enable it to define and enforce legally binding standards. Instead, it stipulates that the Council "shall adopt incentive measures, excluding any harmonization of the laws and regulations of the Member States" (emphasis added). The Council may also issue 'recommendations'. While there is some ambiguity surrounding many of those terms, it is clear that under the Maastricht Treaty the Union's role in 'general' education is essentially restricted to that of
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encouraging cooperation between the member states which, depending on the legal interpretation one follows, could potentially include non-binding agreements on a range of objectives in areas such as curriculum design. Those areas, in any case, remain within the exclusive control of the member states. As hitherto, the Community lacks formal powers of enforcement. In line with this assessment of the educational provisions of the Maastricht Treaty, developments since 1993 leave a mixed impression. On the (from the Commission's and the EP's perspective) positive side, education policy now has a full-fledged Directorate General XXII for 'Education, Training and Youth',49 and the Union has enacted a host of educational initiatives to which it has allocated previously unmatched levels of funding. On the other side, however, these very jnitiatives have concentrated on those areas in which the member states have, since the 1970s, been the most receptive to Union involvement, and that are at once the furthest removed from the curriculum-based 'European dimension'. They include the mutual recognition of diplomas, contacts between educational institutions, and better educational provisions for 'guest worker5 children. Furthermore, the Union has strengthened its existing exchange and languageteaching programmes along the Unes of ERASMUS, LINGUA, and '\buth for Europe'. All three were expanded in 1995, and the former two placed under the umbrella of the SOCRATES programme.50 SOCRATES, moreover, now contains a new programme item called COMENIUS which is dedicated to primary and secondary education. Howevei; COMENIUS, too, has primarily a 'horizontal' outlook. It centres in lajge part on the exchange of pupils and teachers and on contacts between schools from different member states, rather than on the insertion of 'European content' into school curricula.51 As for the Commission, its post-Maastricht pronouncements on the subject suggest that it has, as it were, internalized the constraints which the member states imposed on its educational aspirations during the preceding two decades. It, too, has come to conceive of the 'European dimension' as little more than a label for educational exchanges. The 1993 green paper on the 'European Dimension in Education'52 already heralded this shift. While still insisting that education should be used to contribute 'to European citizenship', the Commission at once maintained that this could be achieved through mere educational exchanges, language teaching and transnational awareness-boosting measures. 'Education for citizenship'was defined to entail: "experiencing the European dimension through learning
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languages, working on a joint transnational project; knowledge of other countries...". Similarly, a "socialization in a European context" was now to be achieved through nothing other than transnational exchanges. And its most recent educational discourse suggests that the Commission has now completely abandoned the 'European identity' theme. In its place have come frequent allusions to what the Commission refers to more or less interchangeably with terms such as 'active citizenship', 'modern citizenship', or 'active (or modem) citizenship in the Union'. "Learningfor active citizenship", so the Commission in a recent working document, "can be described as a process of critical accompaniment in which individuals are offered structured opportunities - at cognitive, affective and pragmatic levels - to gain and renew the skills of self-directed participation and to experience the negotiation of social purpose and meaning".53 Yet once the Commission's 'active citizenship' rhetoric has been stripped of such accompanying jargon one is left with a rather more prosaic concept Teaching 'active citizenship' then reveals itself as little more than a strategy to encourage labour mobility, to, as the Commission puts it in the same working document, give pupils "access to the skills and competencies that young people will need for effective economic participation under conditions of technological modernisation, economic globalisation, and, very concretely, transnational European labour markets". The promotion of mass loyalties towards supranational political practices and institutions, of 'vertical' legitimacy for the Union as we defined it, is clearly not part of the Commission's current 'learning for active citizenship' definition.
The 'European Dimension' in Educational Practice Thus far our account has concentrated more on policy formation and formulation than on policy implementation. It has sought to trace the fate of the 'European dimension' in schools by, in the first instance, looking at the content of the various resolutions and declarations passed on its behalf. By contrast, it has paid less attention to the extent to which the 'European dimension' has actually made its way into the school curricula of the member states. This final section will shed some light on the latter question and, in particular, on whether the 1988 resolution on 'educational activities with a European content' has had a tangible impact upon the educational practice of the member states. In particular for this purpose two country-by-country surveys are useful, one released by the Association for Teacher Education
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in Europe (ATEE)54 and the other in a volume edited by Cremer and Schmuck.55 Even though these studies are relatively dated, they nevertheless give an approximate insight into the status of the 'European dimension' in the Union's schools; a status which, for the reasons suggested below, is not likely to have changed much in the few years since. For some countries, moreover, these surveys can be usefully complemented with additional material, some of which is of a more recent origin. Turning to the situation in individual countries, the best range of systematic quantitative surveys on the 'European dimension' has been compiled in the Netherlands. A 1990 study of Dutch textbooks and teaching syllabuses (which focused on the subjects of geography, history, economics, social studies, and 'civics') found that in geography, 48% of all textbooks and 83% of syllabuses dealt with questions pertaining in one way or another to the EC. Yet the proportion of time and space devoted to the EC was a mere 3.9% in textbooks and 3.3% in syllabuses. In social studies, 45% of Dutch textbooks dealt with the EC and so did 50% of syllabuses, with the proportion of time and space devoted to the Community a tiny 1.9% in both textbooks and syllabuses. In history the picture is more or less the same. 59% of all textbooks and 80% of syllabuses dealt with EC questions, yet the share of space and time devoted to them was only 2.6% in textbooks and 2.5% in syllabuses.56 The ATEE study came to similar conclusions regarding the presence of EU-related material in Dutch textbooks. It further observed that what treatment there was of European integration was "below standard with respect to content"57 The situation was similar in the Irish Republic. The contribution on Ireland in the Cremer and Schmuck volume found little evidence of there being "in the curriculum at the primary or secondary levels a particular interest in EC-related themes".58 Overall, it concluded that Ireland's joining of the European Community has not enhanced its treatment in Irish curricula. "In the list of international organizations [featured in Irish textbooks] the EC still comes last".59 The ATEE report on Ireland came to similar findings: It detected elements pertaining to the EC and Europe throughout Irish textbooks and syllabuses, yet found that the emphasis was typically on ""foreign" languages and on "other" countries [i.e. on] "them and us rather than us" ".60 Similarly, "the history of Europe is not painted or portrayed as "our history" but rather as the history of "other countries" ".61 This 'us and them' matrix prevailed in Spanish schools as well. While 90% of all Spanish history and social science syllabuses mentioned
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'Europe', "many of the themes devoted to Europe do not really take a European perspective. Most are dominated by the history of Spain in the context of European history, especially between the 16th and 18th centuries, and often amount to pure descriptions of historical facts. Though these themes provide a wealth of information about Europe, much remains to be done to get from this nationalistic approach to a European one".62 There are no official guidelines for the treatment of the EC in schools. In France, too, the status of the 'European dimension' in schools is generally precarious. The contribution in the Cremer and Schmuck volume63 notes the continued strong presence of national elements in the French 'éducation civique' which is explicitly aimed at engendering 'republican loyalties'. When it comes to 'European content' in French curricula, however, no comparable ambition exist. What traces there are of it are primarily factual knowledge oriented and confined to history and geography lessons. The ATEE report confirms this impression. It sensed in France a "brickwall of fundamental scepticism" towards the inclusion of a 'European dimension' into school curricula and found that "the study of foreign languages, mother tongue and art hardly take account of the European dimension".64 And further, "the syllabuses for the initial training of teachers are not formulated in a way which gives young teachers a European spirit to supplant that of the hexagon".65 The picture worsens when one turns to the UK. In the 1970s, an attempt to increase the presence of 'Europe' in British education led to the introduction of 'European Studies'66 as a separate subject in some schools. But 'European Studies' generally enjoyed a low academic status, often seen as an easy alternative to 'serious' language studies for the linguistically less talented pupils.67 When the first national curriculum came into force in England in 1988 under the Thatcher government, the 'European dimension' found itself largely excluded. And the revised National Curriculum of 1995 "had virtually eliminated the European dimension",68 even in its most prosaic, factual information related aspects. Now the term 'European Union' is excluded from all curricular subjects other than geography. Consequently, in history "[t]he study unit entitled "The Twentieth Century World" does not include the establishment of the European Community or Union".69 But even in geography, where the EU does receive a formal mention, "the Union is not identified in any of the three maps provided - of the UK, Europe and the World".70
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In Danish schools, too, the 'European dimension' has remained a scarce entity. The ATEE study concludes that on the available evidence "it will take considerable time before the European dimension and European awareness... become part of the Danish education system".71 The contribution in the Cremer and Schmuck volume found that what little mentioning there is of the Community in Danish schools is often embedded in a 'discussion of contemporary problems' framework. There the Community tends to surface in relation to unflattering topics such as unemployment and the fisheries crisis. Meanwhile, 'civics' lessons in Denmark are concerned almost exclusively with Danish society, institutions and political processes, and "only a very small proportion of teachers believes that schools should be used to generate among pupils positive attitudes towards European integration".72 Overall, the study concluded that in Denmark it is "politically still unthinkable to introduce the fostering of a European consciousness as a declared educational objective".73 In Germany, the responsibility for curricular content rests largely with the Länder. And although they have committed themselves to improve the standing of the 'European' Dimension' in their curricula, this has yielded only modest results. A content analysis of German 'political studies' {Politikunterricht) curricula found that while all but one Land included some elements pertaining to European integration, the priority they attached to it was often very low. Moreover, "in most school curricula European themes are "taken care o f under broader subject headings (e.g. "inter-national relations"). Europe enjoys a much lower priority than other topics dealt within political studies".74 Similarly, in German political studies textbooks 'Europe' only occupies an average of 3% of space, and there is a tendency in discussing the EC to concentrate on economic aspects.75 As in many other member states the Greek education system is heavily and explicitly instrumentalized as a national consciousness-raising tool. According to the 1985 education law, pupils are to be turned into "free, responsible democratic citizens, [willing] to defend national independence, the country's territorial integrity and democracy, imbued with love towards human beings, life and nature, and faithfully committed to the fatherland and to the true Christian Orthodox tradition".76 When it comes to the EU, no comparable ambition exists. Much in line with this, the "examination of the Greek curriculum and materials showed that only two subjects in the sixth grade of the primary school in Greece have devoted
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some time for teaching about the European Community. These subjects are history and social and political education. All other textbooks present the concept of Europe via war events, conflicts, aggression, as well as by geophysical and geopolitical aspects".77 Further, "[a] more in-depth content analysis of both subjects revealed that in history, approximately 12 minutes of instructional time has been allocated for teaching about the EEC. The situation is worse in social and political education, since only four lines constitute the total amount of instructional time that has been allocated. No other learning activities could be found in the written curriculum and materials that focus on the European Community".78 To such findings, which very much echo those for the other member states, one could object that most of the research on which they are based is by now somewhat dated, and that in the meantime the 1988 resolution on 'educational activités with a European content' might well have developed a greater impact. Given the dearth of very recent studies on the subject such speculation is hard to verify. Nonetheless, to the extent that an improvement in the status of the 'European dimension' in national curricula has taken place, it is likely to have been relatively marginal. In the first place, the few more recent studies that are available for some countries79 suggest no significant progress. Moreover; as we saw, the years since have seen a marked decline in the Commission's eagerness to pursue its earlier curriculum-related ambitions. Indeed, the Commission's actions since Maastricht suggests that it has understood the "while fully respecting the responsibility of the Member States for the content of teaching" clause in the Maastricht Treaty (and arguably also its anti-harmonization provision) as a signal by the member states that the setting of curricular content is one area of education policy in which they do not want the Community to become involved and that it is willing to abide by this wish, not least so as not to hamper its more exchange and language-learning centred educational projects of the ERASMUS and LINGUA type. Accordingly, it has not proposed a follow-up initiative to the 1988 resolution that would have been aimed at reinforcing it and at increasing compliance with its provisions. All along one could make out some exceptions to the widespread absence of the 'European dimension' from the Union's classrooms. In 1986, for example, the European Parliament began to allocate funds for the distribution of geographical maps of the Community to schools. By the end ofthat decade the Community had handed out 2,800,000 such maps.80
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In addition, the Commission produced a range of promotional material for general distribution, with schools being among the targets. This included a series of videos on 'European themes'81 and an increasingly prolific output of public relations-type material about the Union designed for children. More recently, the Commission has coordinated many of those efforts around its campaign to promote popular acceptance of the single currency.82 The extent to which schools and teachers in the different member states actually use such Commission-produced material in their teaching about the Union, and whether it has led to an increase in such teaching, is hard to ascertain. No systematic studies exist on the subject. "Vet especially in those member states whose school curricula are under relatively tight central control, the use of such material is bound to be limited. For in such cases even those schools and teachers that would otherwise be willing to use it have little leeway to deviate from the officially prescribed curriculum so as to provide their pupils with a greater dose of 'European content'. Finally, some 'European dimension' related educational initiatives have emerged from within the member states themselves, often devised and initiated by semi or non-governmental bodies such as teacher associations, local school boards, and even individual schools or teachers (and sometimes benefiting from material or logistical support from bodies such as the Council of Europe or the European Cultural Foundation and increasingly also the COMENIUS programme). Their presence varies from one member state to the next, with some smaller ones (such as Ireland and Portugal) but also to some extent Germany in the lead.83 Yet many of those initiatives centre themselves on the promotion of language teaching and bilateral or multilateral teacher and pupil exchanges, not on the introduction of more 'European content' into national school curricula. In sum, while the cumulative impact of those educational initiatives is admittedly difficult to ascertain, they are bound to have done little to alter the broader picture drawn above of a 'European dimension' that has largely failed to materialize in the Union's classrooms. Especially if contrasted against the fervour with which all the member states continue to design their 'civics', history, and geography curricula as vehicles to advance their specifically national socialization agendas, the 'European dimension' is still a negligible entity in the school curricula throughout the Union.
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CONCLUSION Our account of the Union's various attempts to introduce a 'European dimension' into the school curricula of the EU member states has come to a relatively unambiguous conclusion: By the mid-1990s, those attempts had yielded very few results. Most faltered because of resistance from within the ranks of national governments, or were consented to by the latter in the form of non-binding resolutions and declarations that by and large were never implemented. The few measures that were both adopted and put into practice centred on student exchanges and language learning rather than on increasing the share of 'European content' in national curricula. Indeed, so strong and tenacious was the prevailing resistance to their curriculum-centred ambitions that, by the mid-1990s, the Commission and the EP themselves had largely abandoned their push for them. The precise causes and intensity of this resistance varied at times between the different member states and between the different issues and proposals at stake. Moreover, not all member states resisted all the time. Nonetheless, seen at the broadest level, I think that the fate of the 'European dimension' in schools is but one reflection of what some observers of the integrative process have long aigued: namely, that a conception of European unification as a - in a social, cultural and iegitimative' sense state-transcending undertaking is not one which is widely shared beyond the confines of the European Parliament and the Commission. It is not, most significantly, shared by political elites in many member states which continue to bear the main responsibility for policy outcomes in the EU.84 Such an interpretation is borne out not only by the fate of the .'European dimension' in schools. For this fate closely resembled that of most other attempts by the EP and the Commission to foster mass support for integration through policies in related fields. Examples are cultural policy and the audio-visual sector, where the proposed measures ranged from the introduction of 'European rooms' in national museums to a pan-European lottery, 'Community cultural institutes' and a multilingual pan-European television channel. A few proposals in those areas were eventually implemented (such as those for a Community flag and anthem), but most stumbled over the resistance from within the ranks of national governments or, once more, led to mere cultural exchange programmes.85
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Even such an explanation still leaves room for a scenario in which governmental resistance to the Commission's and the EP's ambitions for the 'European dimension' in schools would eventually soften. For one aspect to consider is that European integration has always been, among other things, & policy pursued by national governments. As such it is, just as any other policy pursued national governments, in principle bound to be subjected to their desire to see public support for it secured. It was precisely expectations of this kind which caused the EP and the Commission to wrap their curriculum-related proposals into ever direr warnings that unless these were implemented popular support for integration in its economic and political dimensions would further deteriorate. Such an intef pretation may also help explain why nota// national governments opposed these proposals all the time. Tfet thus far the Commission's and the EP's strategy of promoting their 'European dimension' related educational agenda by invoking the spectre of dwindling public support for the EU has encountered little success, and there are few signs that they will be more successful anytime soon. To the contrary: as we saw, the Maastricht Treaty amounts in some respects to a strengthening of the legal fence that keeps the Union out of the school curricula of its member states. A second important question pertains to the possible consequences of all this. More precisely, one must ask whether in the long term the Union could sustain a sufficiently high level of public acceptance even without being able to resort to many of the policies (in the field of education but also cultural policy and, more broadly the designation and manipulation of symbols) that once helped further the legitimization of social and political integration and centralized authority structures within classical state contexts: 'corrected' history textbooks, museums and memorial days, 'civics' in schools, to name but a few of the most frequently cited examples of what such policies can and did entail.86 By asking this one moves into laigely uncharted waters, much in line with the sui generis character of the European Union itself. If one takes the concept of the 'authority-legitimacy balance' as outlined in the first part of this article as a guide, for one, the answer would seem to depend in part on the pace at which economic and political integration themselves progress and, above all, at which political authority is 'transferred' from the national to the supranational level. To put it somewhat crudely, the more the Union were to move towards becoming in certain respects more of a statelike entity, the more pressing could become the need for it to resort to
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'state-like' strategies to secure its legitimization. Beyond this, the answer will also hinge on the extent to which utilitarian - or instrumental- motivations continue to play a part in sustaining public support for integration. As we saw, up to a point such motivations can act as a substitute for the presence of legitimacy proper as it was defined in the first part of this article, and they are generally recognized to have played a role in securing a measure of public acceptance of integration in the past. For this to remain so in the future the EU would need to sustain among its citizens the impression that by and large it offers them material advantages, and/or other benefits such as securing peace or high standards of consumer protection. Whether the Union will be able to sustain this belief in most of its citizens most of the time, however, is a different question altogether. These issues go to the very heart of the European project, yet they cannot be further considered here. What I hope to have shown is that the story of the largely unsuccessful attempts to bring the 'European dimension' into the member states' schools hints at some of the difficulties that confront the European Union in its efforts to secure lasting popular support. Acknowledgements I presented a much earlier draft of this-article at the European Consortium for Political Research workshop on 'Integration and Institution Building in Comparative Perspective', held in Oslo from 30 March to 3 April 1996. Many thanks to the participants - and especially to Lars-Erik Cederman for their helpful input I am also grateful to Anne Deighton and David Glass for their comments. Notes 1. With the coming into force of the Maastricht Treaty, what had commonly been referred to as the 'European Community' (EC) or the 'Common Market' became part of the newly established 'European Union' (EU). Throughout the article I will generally use the term 'Community' when referring to pre-Maastricht events, and 'Union' when talking about developments thereafter. When discussing the Union/Community in a non-time-specific context, I use the two terms more or less interchangeably. 2. Weiler (1996). The first debate, according to 'Weiler, bore on the formal legality of the Community's constitutional premises, whereas the second debate revolved around 'deontological' questions, related to democratic decision-making procedures (or the lack thereof) in the EU. 3. Among the notable exceptions is the work by the anthropologist Chris Shore (1993; 1996). 4. Held (1988), Ch. 4.
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336 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17.
18. 19. 20.
21.
T. THEILER See Hewstone (1986); Shepherd (1975). See for example Weiler (1996); Beetham (1991). Lipset (1963), p. 77. Bourdieu (1994), p. 127. See Pentland (1973), esp. Ch. 4. Berger and Luckmann (1991), p. 183. Bourdieu (1995), p. 164. In Bourdieu's terms, the 'recognition of legitimacy [transpires] through misrecognition of arbitrariness' (1995), p. 168. See Percheron (1985). For a classic discussion see Beiger and Luckmann (1991). Also A.E Cohen (1989); Firth (1973); A. Cohen (1969). For example Durkheim (1922). See also Percheron (1985); Bourdieu (1971). But see Piaget and Weil (1951). Both entail the rise of new institutions, norms and practices that can have a direct impact on the everyday lives of those subjected to them. In both instances these institutions, norms and practices must come to count on a measure of popular consent and compliance. In one as well as the other, finally, this cannot be achieved through material incentives or coercion alone, which in turn necessitates the acquisition of legitimacy. See, for example, Green (1990); Hermet (1996). Quoted in Guibernau (1996), p. 69. This applies most obviously to the few manifestly multicultural cases such as Switzerland. There, a strengthening of the powers and visibility of the central government, notably from the middle of the 19th century onwards, was not accompanied by a cultural or linguistic amalgamation of the different constituent populations. Even concerted attempts to improve horizontal perceptions between the different population groups (for instance by fostering greater social and cultural interaction) remained, for the most part, rather scarce and haphazard. They were at any rate soon overshadowed by efforts to ensure the stability of the system by providing for the continued cultural and linguistic separation of those groups, e.g. by applying the principle of linguistic territoriality (see Laponce 1992; Lijphart 1977). But, more surprisingly perhaps, a similar observation also holds to some extent true for cases that are often treated as prime examples of 'assimilatory nation-building'. Eugen Weber's (1979) well-known account of 'nationalization' in France is illuminating in this regard. It shows that even after the central government in Paris had more or less succeeded in establishing its authority throughout the country and in acquiring a large measure of corresponding 'vertical' legitimacy (not least by employing mass education to that end), there continued to exist for some time to come a high degree of mutual isolation and cultural heterogeneity between the different regions. Nonetheless, it is of course true that, unlike Switzerland but very much like France, 'vertical' and 'horizontal' integration do at some point coincide. The legitimization of centralized authority structures is typically complemented by a degree of social and cultural amalgamation between the groups that are subjected to them. At least it tends to be accompanied by the improvement of horizontal perceptions between the different populations, to the point where there emerges some kind of overarching 'sociopsychological community' (Taylor 1972, p. 205). However one can make out a range of possible explanations for this which do not postulate that such 'horizontal' developments are indispensable for the legitimation of 'vertical' power (though they may well be deemed helpful in such a quest). Potentially, these could revolve around the notion that they are the inevitable by-product of greater social and economic interaction between the different populations, or even around a 'modern economic systems require a unified cultural and linguistic code'-type functionalism, as developed for instance, by Gellner (Though of course these approaches are themselves subject to many potential criticisms which cannot be further discussed here.) In addition, there was the potential for involving the Community in educational domains beyond those mentioned in the founding treaties by resorting to Article 235 of the EEC
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Treaty. It authorized the Council of Ministers, acting unanimously, to initiate 'action by the Community' in areas not explicitly mentioned in the treaty, if such action 'should prove necessary to attain [...] one of the objectives of the Community and [the EEC Treaty]'. This article - whose precise legal implications remained disputed - became invoked notably as a partial basis for the ERASMUS programme which I mention further below. 22. Council (1963). 23. Commission (1973a). 24. Commission (1973b), pp. 320-321. 25. Maaß (1978) p. 10. 26. Commission (1974a). 27. Commission (1974b). 28. This formula had been agreed upon to pay homage to the fact that the Community's powers did not extent into the realm of 'general' education. It gave the meetings of the education ministers a (legally ambiguous) semi-Community related, semi-intergovernmental connotation. 29. For a more detailed description of the makeup and workings of the Educational Committee see Neave (1984), pp. 13-15. 30. Council (1976). 31. Commission (1978). 32. Furthermore, the Commission suggested that the Community be put in charge of a curriculum development scheme. It was to 'work out and apply in a number of pilot projects new approaches to the study of the Community in the schools' and would be financed in part from Community resources. 33. Janssen (1981), p. 213. 34. For a detailed discussion of the constitutional situation in Germany see Rübsamen (1978). 35. Education Committee (1987 [1980]). 36. Janssen (1982), p. 267. 37. European Council (1983). 38. Bulletin 17/6 (1984). 39. Bulletin, Suppl. 7 (1985). 40. Council (1987). 41. Council (1988). 42. Council (1989). 43. European Educational Policy Statements (1987). 44. Social Europe Suppl. 5 (1988). 45. OJEC C177 (1988). 46. Treaty on European Union (1992). 47. The EP, however, only has 'negative' rather than 'positive' powers in the matter It can seek to prevent a measure from being adopted, but it cannot adopt new measures on its own initiative. 48. Blanke (1994), pp. 69-70. See also Bekeraans and Balodimos (1992). 49. Having, in 1989, already become part of the Commission's taskforce on Human Resources, Education and Training. 50. See European Parliament and Council (1995a; 1995b). 51. See European Commission (1997) for a preliminary overview of SOCRATES' implementation. 52. Commission (1993). 53. Commission (1998b). 54. Ryba (1992) 10-24. 55. Cremer Schmuck (1991). 56. Plas (1991), p. 284. 57. Ryba (1992), p. 21. 58. Doran (1991), p. 227, my translation. 59. Doran (1991), p. 225, my translation.
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338 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77. 78. 79.
80. 81. 82. 83. 84. 85.
86.
T. THEILER Ryba (1992), p. 19. Ryba (1992), p. 17. Palacio-Vila (1991), p. 313, my translation. Hickel (1991). Ryba (1992), p. 18. Ryba (1992), p. 19. See Blackledge (1991). Goodson (1995), Chapter 4; Ryba (1992), p. 20. Morrell (1996), p. 12. Morrell (1996), p. 9. Morrell (1996), p. 13. Ryba (1992), p. 18. Kledal find Lauridsen (1991), p. 100, my translation. Kledal and Lauridsen (1991), p. 98, my translation. Renner and Sander (1991), p. 129, my translation. Renner and Sander (1991), p. 133. Quoted in Gikopoulos and Kakavoulis (1991), pp. 179-180, my translation. Flouris (1995), p. 117. Flouris (1995), pp. 117-118. For instance the updated study by Morrell (1996) on the UK, and the one by Flouris (1995) on Greece. Moreover, the Union's educational database, Eurydice, contains some data on the 'European dimension' which by and large points in the same direction. It, however, is of only limited usefulness for our purposes, not least because it operates with a definition of the 'European dimension' which is so broad as to include everything from pure language learning to educational exchanges. Social Europe, Suppl. 3 (1987), 16; Social Europe, Suppl. 8 (1989), p. 46. Shore (1996), p. 485. European Commission (1998a). See Brock and Tulasiewicz (1994); Bell (1995). See Taylor (1991); Milward et al. (1993). The literature on Union policy in those areas is relatively scarce. A good chronological overview is provided by the annual Jahrbuch der Europäischen Integration which now in most issues devotes separate chapters to cultural (as well as educational) policy Also see Chris Shore (1993; 1996) and Theiler (forthcoming). Moreover, strategies of this kind were present even in those states that remained the most politically decentralized and culturally diverse, and thus in some respects the most likely potential organizational models for the EU. On the 'state-building' process in Switzerland, for instance, see Altermatt et al. 1998.
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