Multicultural Citizenship and Intercultural Education

Conditions for a Multicultural Citizenship

In the 1950s, the idea of citizenship was enhanced within the framework of cultural coherence in allegedly ordered societies in Western countries. Citizenship indicated the inclusion of individuals in a culturally homogeneous society. Against this background, citizenship had to guarantee individuals' rights of inclusion and participation in all social contexts that were considered of primary importance (e.g., economy, politics, religion, education, family, health care). Citizenship indicated the acknowledgment of individual rights, such as civil rights (sphere of individual freedom), political rights (sphere of democracy), and social rights (sphere of welfare and health).

Beginning in the 1980s, the growing awareness of the multicultural character of Western societies and the high level of interdependence in the world has shifted scholars' and politicians' attention to the new meanings of global citizenship. In this evolving context, the rights to social inclusion and participation have been changing, adapting to new forms of multicultural sociality. Citizenship rights [Page 1524]are anchored to the universalistic vision of Western societies, which implies the primary value of inclusion and participation of individuals. Against this backdrop, global citizenship should be based on allegedly global rights and should be seen as a universally valid transcultural project for the world society. In other words, this project should be universally acknowledged, but in this respect an emerging problem seems to be whether and in which ways global citizenship can be multicultural citizenship.

In the last decades of the 20th century in Western multicultural societies, the idea of citizenship was faced with the coexistence of individual rights and cultural diversity. Multiculturalism was an attempt at designing a new form of multicultural citizenship through the recognition of the collective rights of national minorities and/or ethnic groups, in a social and cultural context in which individual rights were considered fundamental and inescapable. Multiculturalism tried to integrate two types of rights, by implying that (1) each minority or group had to adapt to the primacy of individual rights within society, and (2) society had to recognize the rights of these minorities or groups. The concept of multicultural citizenship resulted from the combination of these two types of rights that, however, were placed in a hierarchical relationship structure, where collective rights could be accepted only if they were not in contrast with fundamental and inescapable individual rights. A major problem for multiculturalism is the recognition that the primacy of individual rights is one cultural perspective among others; multiculturalism has failed to promote a stable multicultural citizenship based on the legitimization and practice of the coexistence of individual and collective rights.

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