The ‘europeanisation’ of othering: children using ‘Europe’ to construct ‘others’ in Cyprus

Abstract

The accession of the Republic of Cyprus to the European Union in 2004 was anticipated to be a ‘catalytic’ factor in developments towards a solution of the Cyprus problem at the political level. Within education, it was also seen as an opportunity for addressing diversity in a historically ethnocentric educational system through the introduction of a European dimension. Against this background, this article explores Greek-Cypriot children’s discourses about national others by drawing upon two sets of data collected in two studies of roughly seven years apart. Despite the different theoretical and methodological approaches of the two studies, and despite the temporal distance between them (almost three and a half years before and after Cyprus’s EU accession respectively), the concept of ‘Europe’ was mobilised by children in highly similar ways to distinguish, evaluate and hierarchise various others and to re-produce ethnic, racial, and Eurocentric stereotypes against national outgroups and their immigrant classmates from diverse ethnic and cultural backgrounds

Keywords:

• children
• Europe and education
• Cyprus
• othering
• europeanisation

Acknowledgements

During fieldwork for Study A, the first author was funded by the SMUTS Memorial Fund Award for Fieldwork Expenses, University of Cambridge. During data analysis for Study B the second author was funded by grants from the University of Virginia.

Notes

1. Greek-Cypriot public schools are all mixed-sex schools and largely homogeneous (albeit less so in the school of Study B) in terms of the religion (Christian Orthodox) and ethnicity (Greek-Cypriot) of the children. All schools in both studies fell under the authority of the Ministry of Education and Culture (MoEC) which provides schools with textbooks of the national curriculum, funding, resources, and teaching personnel.

2. Barefoot (ξυπόλυτoς) as expressed by Dalia holds a negative connotation of peasantry and poverty.

3. A phrase in the Cypriot dialect to denote that something is in a very far, not easily accessible place.

4. It is interesting that national outgroups were grouped by children, without differentiation in their responses for the two items, even though the second item asked whether they would consider sharing a desk with a peer and thus provided some ‘space’ for children to consider variability within each national outgroup.

5. The mobilisation of ‘Europe’ as a medium for development was a finding which emerged only from Study A, even though the bipolar construct of Turks and Greeks was a common finding in both studies. Unlike Study A, the research problem and questions explored in Study B did not allow for further exploration of the association between Europe and Turkey.