Schooling for transnational solidarity? a comparison of differently Europeanising school curricula in Germany

ABSTRACT

To what extent are differently ‘Europeanising’ school forms programmatically geared towards building transnational solidarities, as their ethoses might suggest? This study draws on an analysis of discursive constructions of solidarity in the curricula for social studies and humanities at secondary level of two forms of schooling promoting a European ethos: the supranationally organised Schola Europaea and state-organised schools with a European profile in Germany (Europaschulen). I argue that solidarity is anchored in universalising ideals of humanitarianism, intercultural harmony, and political participation centred around the individual and her skills rather than a sense of a ‘thick’ pan-European community. The ‘transnational’ scale of solidarity manifests as interpersonal relationships beyond national affiliations, based on affective, religious, and ethical commitments to vulnerable others or on rational political action to ensure human and civil rights. Meanings and scales of solidarity are decoupled from the Europeanising ethos of the schools and from the different organisational logics in which they are embedded; instead, they reflect the disciplinary logics of the school subjects and curricular contexts where they are most often mobilised: religion, ethics, and politics. The paper ends with a discussion of these findings within broader debates on transnational solidarities and Europeanisation in education.

KEYWORDS:

• Transnational solidarity
• Europeanisation in/of education
• Germany
• European schools / Schola Europaea
• curriculum analysis

Introduction

Solidarity has become an increasingly ubiquitous trope in public and academic debate in recent years, notably in the context of the manifold crises affecting Europe and the world. Its discursive uses, however, vary depending on by whom, when, and where solidarity is mobilised, revealing the institutional and historical situatedness of the concept (Chouliaraki 2013; Siebold 2017; Brändle, Eisele, and Trenz 2019; Wallaschek 2020). Current research on the social mobilisation of European youth suggests that transnational forms of solidarity are emerging among individuals, groups, and non-governmental organisations through social activism and civic involvement across borders, even though readiness to help is unevenly distributed according to social class and level of education (Lahusen and Theiss 2019; García Agustín and Jørgensen 2020). European solidarity may not require ‘thick’ forms of European identity in a ‘categorical’ sense (Calhoun 2002; Soysal 2002) to be successfully mobilised by varied publics, but it may require increasing awareness of unequal relations of power and privilege.

Little is known, however, about the role of educational institutions in putting forward ideals of ‘European solidarity’, despite the key significance of schools in the everyday lives, discursive socialisation, and ‘civil enculturation’ of future citizens (Schiffauer et al. 2004; Golubeva and Austers 2010). As solidarity is a core, albeit contested, value of the European Social Model enshrined in the EU’s legal framework (Follesdal, Giorgi, and Heuberger 2007; Sangiovanni 2013), and the EU’s educational agenda is known for promoting neoliberal visions of individual competences that may contradict solidarity orientations (Grek and Lawn 2009; Nóvoa 2013; Joris, Simons, and Agirdag 2021), the question arises as to whether schools in the European(ising) educational space will promote solidarity as a European value, and if so, how.

This article addresses this question by focusing on educational institutions with a distinct Europeanising mission. I start from the expectation that schools officially adopting what I refer to as a ‘Europeanising ethos’ promote solidarity in their intended curriculum, but they may do so differently depending on their raison d’être, organisational logics, and student communities. Further, recent developments in organisational and institutional approaches in education indicate that organisations not only take up the ‘myths’ upon which they are built in various ways depending on the cultural environments they inhabit, but that these informal aspects (including rituals, norms and forms of socialisation) both reflect and shape global processes, leading to an almost symbiotic relationship between organisations and globalisation (Berkovich and Benoliel 2021, 2). Therefore, whether and how schools officially engage with solidarity could reflect their embeddedness in several, variously entangled, supranational, national, regional, and local structures and agencies that characterise current globalisation processes, not least in education (Meyer and Rowan 2006; Meyer 2001).

Building on these insights as well as my understanding of Europeanising trends in education as reflective of broader cultural globalisation (Szakács 2018), I inquire as to how meanings of solidarity mobilised in the formal curricula of schools with distinct Europeanising ethoses relate to the different notions of Europeanness they stand for. Two under-researched school forms reflective of Europeanisation in education in different ways have been chosen for closer scrutiny¹: (1) Schola Europaea – multilingual schools organised supranationally and intended primarily for the children of employees of EU institutions, and (2) Europaschulen – state schools in the decentralised German education system adopting an additional European profile in line with the national framework of implementing a ‘European dimension in education’ in Germany.

The study is located at the intersection of two separate areas of research: transnational solidarities and Europeanising education. While discussions of transnational solidarities cover youth from all walks of life but tend to omit formal education as a site of research, studies on solidarity in European education focus on the integration of migrant, refugee or minority groups (e.g., de Law and Swann 2011; Moskal and North 2017; Haene, Neumann, and Pataki 2018) and do not pay much attention to the transnationalising structures and discourses in which European schooling is embedded (Robertson and Dale 2008; see Dale and Derouet 2012). Moreover, youth that are not disadvantaged or not moving between countries are generally neglected by studies on solidarity and education. Solidarity is researched primarily in relation to disadvantaged groups in nationally bound forms of schooling, with a pronounced focus on how it may be produced or hindered via policies and everyday school experiences (e.g., Levinson 2001; Epstein and Oyler 2008; Quantz 2011) rather than how it is discursively constructed via educational contents. In contrast, transnational educational patterns – and the manifold ways in which they produce global, cosmopolitan, and international mindedness – appear as the purview of research on elite schooling, such as private or international schools, where a vocabulary of competitiveness and individualism prevails, as opposed to one of solidarity, cohesion, or integration (Maxwell et al. 2018; Oh 2018).² However, current research on transnational dynamics in education suggests that boundaries between the elite and non-elite, private and public, profit and non-profit, national, international and transnational are becoming blurred as a result of increased networking and cooperation practices and multiple flows of persons, artefacts, and symbols across borders (Hornberg 2014; Adick 2018). Boundaries are further undercut by re-spatialising and re-territorialising relations of power that need to be understood in terms of their interconnections and mutual interdependencies in both national and global arenas (Kenway 2016; Hinrichsen and Matute 2018; Peter 2018; Pfaff 2018; Parreira do Amaral, Steiner-Khamsi, and Thompson 2019). Schools are therefore becoming ‘nationally unbound’ in increasingly manifold ways that go beyond solidified binaries (Beech and Larsen 2014) and require more empirical attention from a transnational perspective.

In this study I address the mutual blind spots of these literatures by accounting for: (1) the complexifying nationally unbound constellations in which both advantaged/elite and disadvantaged/non-elite schooling takes place in the European context, and (2) the discursive construction of solidarity in formal educational settings. By using the term ‘nationally unbound’ to characterise the environment in which ‘education’ occurs, I draw on Basch, Schiller, and Blanc’s (2005) conceptualisation of transnational phenomena. In so doing, I recognise the multi-scale, multi-actor, and hence ambivalent and plurivocal character not only of educational organisation and governance (Dale and Robertson 2009) but also of curriculum and educational media production (Macgilchrist 2017; Nordin and Sundberg 2018).

I proceed as follows: first, I explain briefly why I consider Schola Europaea and Europaschulen as differently illustrative of Europeanisation in education and how their curriculum reflects supranational and ‘national’ logics respectively; second, I describe the material and methods used for the curriculum analysis; third, I examine the concepts of solidarity permeating the intended curricula of these schools and raise the question as to whether these differ according to the differently Europeanising ethoses of the schools. I end by discussing the implications of these findings for current discussions on transnational solidarities and Europeanisation in education.

Schola Europaea and Europaschulen in Germany: different paths to Europeanising education

The Schola Europaea (henceforth SE) reflect Europeanisation in education through their uniquely European raison d’être as well as their organisation as a system of education in its own right, located in a liminal space between national, international, and supranational determinations (Carlos 2012; Leaton Gray, Scott, and Mehisto 2018; Lewis 2020). Founded in the 1950s, they reflect the anti-nationalist ideals of the post-war generation (Pukallus 2019; van Lingen 2012). They promote Europeanisation in a ‘hard’ sense, that is, at structural, organisational, and ideational levels, through: (1) an explicit mission to create (a distinct class of) Europeans (Swan 1989; Savvides 2006; Shore and Baratieri 2006); (2) a supranational organisational logic steered centrally from Brussels by the Office of the Secretary-General of European Schools; (3) a supranationally agreed-upon European curriculum; (4) an internationally recognised, academically oriented European Baccalaureate qualification (Gray 2003); and (5) privileged, transnationally mobile addressees of their multilingual educational offer (Erler et al. 2012).

In contrast, the Europaschulen (henceforth ES), reflect Europeanisation in education in a more indirect, pragmatic, and nationally anchored fashion (Hornberg 2010). They promote the EU’s educational agenda as part of a federally organised system acting as a relay of Europeanisation. The origins of this profile are linked with Germany’s early adoption of the ‘European dimension in education’ recommendations by European institutions³ (Ryba 1992; Klapper 1993) in a resolution passed in 1978 by the Standing Conference of the Ministers of Education of the German States (Kultusministerkonferenz; henceforth KMK) and revised in 1990, 2008, and 2020, which provides a rationale, guidelines, and specific measures for the integration of a ‘European education’ in state-schools across Germany. The 2020 revision emphasises solidarity as both European value and competence for ‘living together’ in a community marked by heterogeneity (KMK 2020, 2), thus highlighting the need to examine notions of European solidarity in the ethos of state-schools in Germany more generally. As criteria for obtaining an ES profile differ by state but invariably emphasise the inclusion of curricular content about Europe and the EU (Hornberg 2010, 95–104), European solidarity becomes even more topical in these schools. While ‘regional’ in their organisation and basic curriculum (Engel and Ortloff 2009) and ‘local’ in their implementation of the European dimension, state-schools with a European profile stand, in contrast to the supranational SE, for a ‘nation-state’ logic of promoting Europe in education via decentralised contents and activities (Hornberg 2010). They do this through their: (1) mission of bringing Europe closer to its citizens by enhancing pupils’ knowledge about Europe and broadening their linguistic skills rather than seeking an additional supranational identity⁴; (2) federally decentralised organisational logic; (3) local curriculum consisting of a state-level basic syllabus and additional requirements for the European profile; (4) nationally, and in some cases, bilaterally recognised qualifications, e.g., Abi-Bac; and (5) multiculturally-imagined addressees, placed in the context of migration-related diversities characterising German society (Lubig-Fohsel 2001; Hornberg and Sonnenburg 2017; Möller et al. 2017; Sonnenburg 2020). Their focus on Europe as a pragmatic competence rather than an idealistic ‘new’ identity is reflective of the current EU agenda of individual-focused, competition-oriented twenty-first-century skills.

In sum, the school forms discussed here are embedded within different organisational logics and curriculum-making constellations (supranational and national); they cater to school communities that are differently located in the socio-economic opportunity structures of Europe, reflecting different future aspirations for their graduates and pathways to Europeanising education (see Table 1). In terms of formal ethos, both promote ideals of Europeanness that resonate differently with concepts of solidarity: SE’s mission emphasises a supraordinate form of identity which may project a ‘thick’ solidarity based on commonality of feeling and preservation of national identity, whereas ES centres on individual skills of intercultural understanding which may be conducive to a ‘thin’ solidarity based on competences of peaceful coexistence. These differences warrant a closer look at their curricula to ascertain whether and how their different missions (common identity vs. pragmatic skills), organisational logics (supranational vs. national) and imagined addressees (transnationally mobile vs. migration-related diverse communities) make a difference to the meanings of solidarity they promote.

Table 1. The Schola Europaea and the Europaschule profile in Germany compared in terms of mission, organisation, curriculum, qualifications, and imagined addressees (own composition; building on Hornberg 2010, 223–224).

	Schola Europaea schools	Europaschule profile in Germany
Mission	Supranational identity with preservation of national language in a multilingual context	National/Local identity with development of multilingual competencies for living in multicultural Germany
Organisation	Supranational & centralised: Coordination from EU-level	‘National’ & decentralised:Coordination from state-level
Curriculum	Supranationally agreed upon European curriculum	State-level curriculum + additional Europaschule requirements (in line with KMK decision and ‘European dimension in education’ recommendations)
Qualifications	Internationally recognised (academic) European Baccalaureate	Nationally (in some cases, binationally) recognised (academic or vocational) qualifications
Addressees	Transnationally mobile elites	Multicultural general population

Material and methods

I draw upon a qualitative analysis of publicly available documents regulating the functioning and learning outcomes of SE and ES: mission statements, policy documents, regulations, curricular guidelines, and syllabi approved for the lower and upper secondary levels. The disciplines in focus are history, geography, economics, politics, social studies or civics, religion, non-denominational ethics, philosophy, and SE-specific courses (e.g., ‘Human Sciences’). A comprehensive collection strategy was pursued in this study, whereby all available and relevant curricular documents applying to these school types for the same education levels, years, and disciplines were included. This resulted for SE in a total of 14 texts in English⁵ and for ES in 40 texts in German⁶ for all school types (Hauptschule, Realschule, Gymnasium and Integrierte Gesamtschule) of general education (allgemeinbildende Schulen) in Lower Saxony.⁷ To account for the specificity of ES among other schools following the same basic curriculum but not having adopted the profile, the ES set of documents (N=40) comprised of the basic syllabi (34 texts) as well as, additionally, federal- and state-level criteria regulating the awarding of ES and other guidelines applying only to this profile (6 texts).

The data was analysed qualitatively with the help of CAQDAS software based on a recursive-iterative approach considering the discursive situatedness of concepts (Clarke 2005; Breuer 2010). An initial search for explicit mentions of the word ‘solidarity’ and its derivates (e.g., ‘solidary’) was followed by a close reading of the material by two coders to identify implicit notions of solidarity and associated concepts (e.g., love, care, charity, humanitarianism, social engagement, social activism, resistance, social cohesion, social integration) as well as how these are discursively framed in different contexts within the texts.⁸ These occurrences were coded using a hybrid approach combining inductive and deductive elements (Fereday and Muir-Cochrane 2006; Hanish, Rank, and Seeber 2014).

Data-driven inductive coding allowed for new understandings of solidarity to emerge during the analysis and was complemented by coding based on categories adapted from literature on constructions of solidarity (Koos 2019; Wallaschek 2020): its meanings (e.g., political, cultural, social, economic), its scales (e.g., local, national, European, global), and its manifestations (e.g., affective/emotional bond, rational/calculative interest, behavioural/action). Inspired by Oxley and Morris’s (2013) mapping of concepts of global citizenship against different constitutive elements of the intended curriculum, I too considered the context within each document where solidarity was mentioned: e.g., statement of curricular aims, competences to be achieved, content-knowledge, methodological suggestions. This allowed me to uncover misalignments between different aspects discursively mobilised within the same text, thus enabling a complex mapping of notions of solidarity in the curriculum corpus.

Solidarity within and beyond (European) borders: between implicit Eurocentrism and explicit universalism

Against initial expectations, hardly any references to ‘European solidarity’ as defined in the scholarly literature were found in the corpus of curricula and additional guidelines for SE and ES. I present this absence in terms of two interrelated findings: (1) an implicit western Eurocentrism as the basis for a thinly woven European solidarity and (2) a universal value set as the basis for a transnational solidarity-in-action that may transcend national borders in a global setting without being specifically ‘European’.⁹

Thinly woven western-Eurocentric solidarity

What communities characterised by solidarity are referred to in the curricula of schools with European ethos and what forms of belonging and identification are implied? The analysis showed that: (1) the EU as a community of solidarity in an intergovernmental sense makes curiously scant apparitions in the curricula of both school forms; (2) Europe as an abstract cultural and geographical space, a default ‘scene’ where history happens, or a taken-for-granted set of normative values for intercultural living is more present across the whole corpus to the detriment of non-European spaces, ideas, and experiences. However, this Eurocentric gist is conspicuously skewed towards Western Europe. These projections, I argue, are weaving a thin meaning of European solidarity because neither implies a strong, bounded sense of community based on categorical identity and/or action. In what follows I illustrate the shapes these explicit and implicit meanings of European solidarity take in the syllabi.

European solidarity as enshrined in the regulatory framework of the EU is not explicitly mentioned in the SE curricula. However, an SE geography syllabus mentions EU policy cohesion funds in the context of regional inequalities in the Union (Schola Europaea 2013b, 17), which may provide opportunities for teachers to discuss EU-wide solidarity in economic or fiscal terms in the classroom. The EU as a community of solidarity (Solidargemeinschaft) appears, however, explicitly mentioned in a Lower Saxony politics syllabus (Realschule). Political solidarity within the EU in terms of international cooperation between states is presented here as the solution to the ‘challenge’ of extra-European migration, implying therefore a bounded and exclusive understanding of who belongs to Europe (Niedersächsisches Kultusministerium 2015a, 24). As this latter document also applies to schools that do not have Europaschule certification (i.e., it is not part of the additional criteria making up this profile), this occurrence is decoupled from the schools’ European profile as such: in other words, it is not the ES profile that determines whether this content is prescribed in the curriculum or not. The teaching of EU international relations as ‘solidarity relations’ in the syllabus for politics is part of the state-level organisational logic and is to be understood within the broader legislative framework of the ‘European dimension of education’ introduced by German authorities in 1978 (see KMK 2020 for the latest revision). However, the ES profile determines how this content could be taken up in class. The curricular themes where the syllabus mentions solidarity in a European context are likely to be strengthened in ES because while not allocating extra time, their profile specifically requires them to ‘integrate European themes in class (Europa-Curriculum)’ (Niedersächsisches Kultusministerium 2018, 403).¹⁰ In this sense, although such occurrences of European solidarity in the syllabus are not specific to ES, they reflect the European profile insofar as they are programmatically strengthened via the regulatory framework for these schools.

The European dimension in education also transpires in the Lower Saxony curricula through recourse to the ubiquitous, yet abstract, aim of intercultural ‘living together’ (Zusammenleben), which has increasingly permeated European curricula and textbooks since the 1990s (Schissler and Nuhoğlu Soysal 2005), and is equally likely to be more emphasised in ES in line with the profile’s criterion of ‘developing and strengthening of intercultural competences’ (Niedersächsisches Kultusministerium 2018, 403). In the Lower Saxony syllabi these references are, however, rarely linked directly to Europe or the EU and do not specifically invoke an active sense of solidarity. Instead, a passive avoidance of conflict is implied, for instance by mentioning solidarity together with human dignity, freedom, or equality as political ‘foundations of human coexistence’ (Niedersächsisches Kultusministerium 2015a, 2015b, 19), all of which can be interpreted as implying universalising forms of solidarity rather than a single, narrow European form.

Europe is invoked more readily in SE syllabi but, similarly, the attitudes implied do not go beyond mere mutual respect, tolerance or understanding of differences: ‘Awareness and experience of a shared European life should lead students to show greater respect for the traditions of each individual country and region in Europe, whilst developing and preserving their own national identities’ (Schola Europaea 2018, 2). That European life is shared (among whom?) is a given. Such aims may open opportunities to discuss solidarity in class, but in a disengaged form that may stop at ‘respect’ and ‘understanding’ given that any active engagement with the other is not required and who the other may be remains undefined.

In the absence of an explicit discursive construction of ‘European solidarity’, there is, however, an implicit articulation of a culturally bounded-sense of community in Europe in both SE and ES sets of documents. This is, in turn, deeply Eurocentric. Similarly, both the ‘national’ and the ‘supranational’ curricula feature contents suggesting the creation of Europeanness based on a sense of shared experiences in the imagined space of Europe. Such content, for example in history and geography, privileges the European space, events, and personalities, confirming the Eurocentric bias of curricular contents in European countries more generally (Pereyra and Luzón 2005; Lässig and Pohl 2009; Araújo and Maeso 2012; Philippou 2012). Key phenomena are introduced from a European civilisational perspective; the history timeline is articulated along what are conceived to be traditional cultural markers of ‘European society’ (Outhwaite 2008): Greek and Roman antiquity, the Mediterranean commercial space, Christianity, humanism, Renaissance, Industrial Revolution, Reformation, Fascism and Communism. This finding is more pronounced for the SE curriculum, where an unproblematised default view of the actors of history as ‘us, the Europeans’ (in contrast to ‘them, the rest of the world’) permeates formulations of topics such as colonialism and imperialism: ‘What happened when Europeans explored the wider world? […] How did the experience of exploration change Europe and Europeans? What impact did European exploration have on the wider world?’ (Schola Europaea 2016, 14).

However, this Eurocentric bias does not, in any of the curricula, extend to the whole of Europe to imply a sense of pan-European solidarity. While eastern integration is mentioned in the statement justifying the updating of history and human sciences syllabi for the SE¹¹, the inclusion of events, developments, personalities and so on from the eastern members of the EU and former Soviet-bloc countries remains minimal. Moreover, it singles out the ‘otherness’ of the region as distinct from the ‘core’ of Europe, rather than focusing on commonalities. Developments in these countries are almost exclusively mentioned in lessons on communism and its demise, such as the unit on ‘Eastern Europe, Western Europe 1949–1973’ (Schola Europaea 2013a, 17). This raises the question as to how feelings of belonging to, and solidarity with, Europe among the student population (regardless of their origins within or without EU borders) may be enabled, as well as to how a default understanding of ‘Europe’ as ‘Western’ may be challenged.

Findings from other studies indicate that this might be extremely difficult in practice, as the Balkan region and former communist Europe have long served as a discursive other to Europe in national curricula not only in Western but also in Eastern European schooling after 1989 (Challand 2009; Michaels and Doyle Stevick 2009; Banjac and Pušnik 2015; Szakács 2018). Furthermore, the symbolic geographies of ‘old Europe’ are maintained among the everyday interactions of pupils even in the most ‘European’ of settings, such as that of a Schola Europaea in Brussels (Drewski, Gerhards, and Hans 2018), and the ‘equality of esteem’ among EU languages taught in these schools remains declarative, with English, French and German remaining institutionally privileged (Leaton Gray, Scott, and Mehisto 2018, 52). The Eurocentric biases of curricula in both sub-national and supranational constellations therefore reflect the broader unequal geopolitical relations of power in Europe, showing the complexities of Europeanising discourses in the post-socialist constellation and revealing once again the stickiness of Cold-War divisions, not least at the conceptual level (Silova 2010).

Transnational solidarities between humanitarianism and disruption

In contrast to the idea of EU-wide solidarity based on thinly woven identification with Europe or an intergovernmental solidarity between states, transnational solidarity defined as a cross-border relationship of support between individuals or groups (Ciornei and Recchi 2017) is more easily discernible in both SE and ES curricula, albeit without any explicitly European claim to uniqueness. This form of solidarity appears either as a set of universalising cultural values strongly rooted in religious and moral principles, or as a political civic value rooted in principles of democratic citizenship education.

Two distinct manifestations of solidarity emerged from the analysis: (1) an affective bond of love, care and respect for the weaker other, requiring a form of social engagement modelled on that of the (Catholic and Protestant) Church which, in turn, rests on the unattainable model of divinity itself (e.g., God, Jesus); and (2) a secular, rational commitment to social justice as enshrined in social movements for basic rights (e.g., human rights, workers’ rights, women’s rights, indigenous rights) and requiring civic engagement as an act of democratic citizenship, but which often remains stuck in a depoliticised past.

The affective manifestation of solidarity is the more prominent of the two; it is universalist and inclusive in scope and more conservative in meaning. It is present primarily in religion syllabi across school forms and implies a vertical relationship in the form of philanthropy or charity from the ‘haves’ to the ‘have nots’, the stronger to the weaker. This manifestation does not, therefore, require mutual help (Stjernø 2005). Solidarity with the ‘weakest’ members of society, a sensitivity towards those in poverty or who are in some way disadvantaged (including ‘children in poor countries’ or ‘drug addicts’), and the social engagement of the Church are strongly invoked in the Catholic and Protestant religion syllabi, while those for Orthodox and Islamic religion rather emphasise spiritual feelings of compassion and neighbourly love. A feeling of global fraternity between individuals sharing the same faith is evoked in the curricular aims of a Protestant religion syllabus in Lower Saxony: ‘the social and global solidarity of people who can recognise each other as brothers and sisters across all borders in their shared belief in the biblical creation’ (Niedersächsisches Kultusministerium 2009, 7).

The rational manifestation appears mostly in the content knowledge of ethics, politics, and social studies syllabi (e.g., Gesellschaftslehre in ES) and takes on more progressive shapes. It can be conceptualised as horizontal or transversal - a manifestation that emphasises (potentially fleeting and calculated) relationships between equals (Lynch and Kalaitzake 2020) or individuals sharing similar struggles (Jørgensen and Schierup 2020). A preoccupation with issues of inequality, poverty, exclusion and oppression permeates these curricula (e.g., Niedersächsisches Kultusministerium 2020). The corresponding curricular aim for this type of content is often formulated in Lower Saxony curricula as ‘acting in solidarity’ (solidarisch handeln), but what this ‘acting’ may involve or how it is manifested remains largely undefined.

In the affective manifestation solidarity does not directly challenge current power relations; it implicitly preserves them because charity, as such, does not necessarily empower the weak. In the rational manifestation it may appear as a form of resistance and antagonism vis-à-vis a status quo, although often in a tamed form. In line with the tradition of the Reformed Protestant Church (Stjernø 2005, 76), a Protestant religion syllabus for SE exceptionally mobilises a disruptive (Marxist), rather than a preserving (Durkheimian) concept of solidarity, at once preoccupied with compassion for weaker others and with fighting for social justice in line with resonances between a Christian ethic and Freire’s progressive pedagogies (Kelly 1998). The example of a socially critical prophet from the 8th century (Amos) is supposed to result, however, in description, knowledge, and interrogation, rather than action: ‘Pupils […] are able to describe examples of injustice and ask about its origins and consequences; know the biblical instruction to stand up for justice and are able to relate it to their own feeling for justice’ (Schola Europaea 2012, 20, emphases added). Similarly, the 2020 social studies syllabus for Integrierte Gesamtschule in Lower Saxony has a unit on ‘Participation and protest’ centred on the question ‘Why do people take to the streets?’. The stated aim of the unit is to evoke historical milestones of social participation to enable students to ‘shape the future’. The emphasis in the corresponding knowledge content, however, remains on historical examples of protest serving the competence of ‘[recognising] the need to publicly stand up for democratic values and human rights’ (Niedersächsisches Kultusministerium 2020, 3) rather than on present-day challenges, engagement with which is, presumably, a task left to the teachers.

Although the specific term ‘solidarity’ is not used, examples of struggles for social justice widely permeate the history syllabi for both school forms (e.g., workers movements, women’s movements, human rights or colonial independence movements), as well as, in one case in ethics, a principled discussion of ‘the limits of obedience’ in a unit on ‘Authority’ (Schola Europaea 1998, 3). Political resistance, such as the Polish Solidariność, is also mentioned. These examples confirm findings from cross-national research showing that social movements are discussed mostly in a depoliticised, tamed, and unthreatening past (hence, in history rather than social studies or civics), disconnected from the present and future of students (Skinner and Bromley 2019). This raises questions as to how (transnational forms of) solidarity action represented in these curricula may enable or disable future disruptive action, resistance, and protest among youth disillusioned with current political order.

Geography courses provide a partial response to this dilemma. Although the least likely to mention the word ‘solidarity’ (let alone its various meanings, scales, or manifestations), the geography syllabi for both school forms provided more extensive opportunities to engage critically with social justice in a transnational context, both in the curricular aims and suggested contents. These were more attuned to questions of inequality from a global perspective than most other syllabi.¹² A problematisation of scales and spaces in the curricular aims, an inclusion of transnational issues into the contents of teaching, and a sensitivity to global north / global south inequalities transpired from these texts, which, even though did not aim to overthrow current systems of domination, were the most nationally unbound and critical of all. For example, in a unit on ‘Feeding the world’ pupils are meant to engage with ‘Production and Farming’ and ‘Conflicts’ from ‘a variety of locations and development levels’ by choosing a case study from ‘a globalized crop or food transnational corporation […] fair trade in globalized agricultural production […] multinational and governmental land grabs’. The competences served by this content go beyond description, as pupils are meant to not only ‘[l]ocate areas of food inequality and explain the reasons for the inequalities’, but also ‘[e]xplore the globalisation of agriculture through a case study; [s]uggest solutions for a more sustainable form of agriculture; [d]ebate the issues of quality versus quantity in relation to food production’ (Schola Europaea 2015, 11, emphases added). Another syllabus for geography at the higher grades lists among learning objectives a critical stance in the global context. Pupils are to

develop a sense of location at different scale; […]; grasp the complexity and diversity of the world around him/her to develop a critical awareness and in this way become an informed citizen; evaluate the impact on countries/regions of various economic, social and political systems; analyse global links and interaction. (Schola Europaea 2013b, 5)

The Lower Saxony syllabus for Geography at upper secondary level also lists among the key curricular aims ‘[empowering] pupils to contribute responsibly to shaping their own future, to the future of the world, and to more global justice’ (Niedersächsisches Kultusministerium 2017, 8). In a unit on ‘Population – Internal and External Migration’, students of SE are expected to ‘critically analyse the aims & measures of EU immigration policies’, with keywords such as ‘Push and Pull factors, Schengen, Frontex, Blue Card’ (Schola Europaea 2013b, 13).

These examples suggest that the intended geography curriculum resonates well with (1) current debates in the solidarity literature that problematise scales and spaces and offer alternative views to neoliberal globalisation, as well as (2) key topics mobilising youth today (e.g., ‘refugee crisis’, environment crisis) in Europe and globally (García Agustín and Jørgensen 2020; Ataç, Rygiel, and Stierl 2021). While these findings cannot give insights into how teachers approach these topics in class, they do support arguments about the potential role of future-oriented topics in geography in enabling youth engagement even in the absence of direct awareness of ‘solidarity’ as a concept (Torbjornsson and Molin 2015). Further, they point to the potential role of geography (as opposed to the more traditional civics, politics, or history) in promoting new forms of political socialisation that uncouple citizen action from the exclusive space of national political action and instead connect individuals directly to the global arena through de-territorialised citizenship practices (Soysal 2000; Sassen 2005).

Discussion and conclusion

In none of the curricula of the two school forms was a distinctly European sense of solidarity made explicit or relevant. The solidarity promoted in Schola Europaea and Europaschule syllabi instead finds resonance in universalising and individualised meanings. While an underlying Eurocentrism can be detected in the inventory of spaces, locations, events, and personalities chosen to exemplify the history, geography, or politics syllabi, this is notably located within the western European space at the expense of eastern experiences.

Beyond this thinly woven identity dimension – which is hardly surprising given the non-conventional and ambivalent nature of the European construction (Soysal 2002) – the action dimension of solidarity in the curricula analysed appears primarily under the guise of civic or intercultural competences or skills. This suggests a transnational form of solidarity connecting individuals within a de-territorialised, global space that eludes the European construction altogether. It does so in line with the expectation derived from the Europeanising ethos of the Europaschulen profile, which places a premium on interculturality as a twenty-first-century skill, rather than that of Schola Europaea which, enduring since the 1950s, makes it its mission to create a community of like-minded ‘Europeans’.

The focus on solidarity as a competence to act (in German: solidarisch handeln) is in turn, in both school forms, firmly anchored in the individual person and echoes the competence-based approaches that have become institutionalised in curricula worldwide (McEneaney and Meyer 2000; Nordin and Sundberg 2018). Confirming the neoliberal gist of European curricula at all levels of education, this pattern at the same time reflects processes of Europeanisation in education as institutionalisation of wider world trends rather than of distinctly ‘European’ ones (Szakács 2015).

Variations in understandings of solidarity in this study were reflective of different disciplinary perspectives rather than organisational logics: religion curricula put forward an affective, humanitarian, and deeply universalising form of solidarity centred on the identity of the individual believer, while politics revealed a rational and active form of democracy around the norms and values of ‘living together’. Finally, history put forward a depoliticised form of solidarity built on social movements and the progressive acquisition of rights in various contexts of the past, while geography promoted a more transnationally oriented and critical form of individual activism, focused on sustainability, human mobility, and global inequalities.

While resonating with findings from other research on human rights and social movements in educational contents worldwide (e.g., Skinner and Bromley 2019) these conclusions also have a broader relevance for: (1) recent literature on transnational solidarities in Europe, and (2) current discussions of Europeanisation in education. In the first case, these findings bring a novel understanding of the institutionalised ways in which youth in Europe may become socialised into solidarity across borders in the absence of identification with a thickly understood ‘European’ community or identity. Existing research into European solidarities has indicated that it is not exclusively ‘European’ identities but abstract civic values such as active citizenship, belief in a pluralistic, open polity, and positive attitudes towards multicultural and social citizenship that are linked to individuals’ engagement across borders in acts of solidarity with fellow Europeans (Lahusen and Theiss 2019). But this strand of work has had little to say on the emergence in educational institutional contexts of nationally unbound civic attitudes and values among European youth and the success of their cross-border mobilisations across socio-economic strata. This study adds to this literature by highlighting how transnationally oriented solidarity values and competences are programmatically embedded in the curriculum of educational establishments endorsed by national and European organisations and attending to both elite and non-elite school publics – and how this may reflect broader socialisation dynamics that may not be uniquely ‘European’.

To the Europeanisation in, and of, education literature the study brings three key contributions. First, empirically, it uniquely brings together two forms of schooling that claim an ethos of Europeanness which has until now been seen either as a curiosity of international schooling (the Schola Europaea) or as a school profile relevant only within a national (German) setting (the Europaschulen). The study has shown that the two forms of schooling are indeed reflective of the variegated Europeanising dynamics in the formal schooling sector, thus revealing the necessity to delve empirically deeper into their workings, including the informal levels of school interaction.

Second, methodologically, the study short-circuits, through its comparative design above, below and beyond the national structure, the ‘nation-state’ / ‘education’ nexus and further complicates our understanding of spaces, scales, and their interrelationships in line with methodologically ‘transnationalist’ approaches in educational research (Dale and Robertson 2009). The novelty is that it engages not with policy spaces, governance mechanisms, datafication and infrastructures as the most dynamic areas of research currently responding to this call in the Europeanisation literature do (Grek and Lawn 2009; Lange and Alexiadou 2010; Hartong 2018); rather, it examines the contents of education at various scales within the European space. In most other studies this focus remains anchored in national comparisons of curricula and textbooks.

Third, conceptually, the study reveals the manifold ways in which Europeanising dynamics (reflected here in the formal contents of education and the organisational set-up of schools promoting Europe) can be explained beyond their inter-/supranational vs. national dichotomic logics. Instead, the two school forms, and their Europeanising ethoses, are part of more complex, historically situated and discursively entangled nationally unbound constellations that paradoxically de-centre Europe as either source or hindrance of all educational change. These constellations reflect the circumstances of these schools’ origins as well as their contemporary predicaments, linking them to ideologies of neoliberal self-actualisation through ‘educational’ means. They entangle, in other words, organisational logics with discursive frames in unexpected, misaligned ways: a ‘nation-like’, community-making discursive mission is put forward via a supranational organisational structure (Schola Europaea), whereas a universalising, individualised mission is constructed via a nationally organised system (Europaschule). Their curricula, in turn, do not construct a single European solidarity in a ‘thick’ sense uniting identity claims to Europeanness with social justice engagements, nor do they match the organisational logics revealed by their differently Europeanising ethos. Rather, they follow more disciplinary conventions and solidify already institutionalised, dominant and western Eurocentric projections that preserve rather than disrupt the status quo. This confirms the complex discursive formations articulating educational ideologies in various contexts and adds to our understanding of the much discussed global/local nexus in education (Meyer and Ramirez 2000; Schriewer 2012). It does so, however, with a specific, under-researched, ‘European’ twist, which emerges however as curiously inconsequential.

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank Sabine Hornberg, Felicitas Macgilchrist, Barbara Christophe, Ulrike Deppe, Annett Graefe-Geusch, Nicole Pfaff, Nadine Wagener-Böck, Birte Schroeder, Helen Lehne, Wendy Anne Kopisch and all the members of the Research Network ‘Transnationalisation and Education’ at the University of Göttingen as well as the anonymous reviewers for insightful comments at various stages of this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the German Research Foundation (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft) under grant number 396205389.

Notes

1 Further comparison of these school types on other dimensions beyond the formal curriculum (e.g. informal ethos, school practices, extra-curricular project work) is part of the wider project the paper draws upon (see Szakács-Behling 2021) but beyond the scope of this paper.

2 A recent exception is ‘International Mindedness’ examined empirically in a traditional international school in East Asia as a possible catalyst for the emergence of a class-based ‘global’ solidarity among Transnational Capitalist Class and Global Middle Class students (Bunnell et al. 2020).

3 These recommendations advise national states to promote Europe in their national curricula by including more content on Europe and the EU, extending the teaching of European languages, and enhancing school exchanges among different European countries.

4 This is achieved, for instance, via an emphasis on curricular content on Europe, intercultural learning objectives, school exchanges and/or bilingual educational opportunities.

5 SE syllabi are translations of the same document corresponding to different language sections (French, German, and English). Translation effects were accounted for (for e.g. if the word used in English for ’solidarisch’/’solidaire’ was ‘supportive’ instead of ‘solidary’).

6 The author’s German language proficiency is at a sufficiently high level to ensure that no translations were necessary. The second coder is a bilingual German-English speaker.

7 This is the state with the second largest number of ES in Germany (184 in 2020/2021, amounting to about 6% of state schools in Lower Saxony) and offering one of the most extensive set of criteria for obtaining the European profile. These criteria consist of 8 main categories and 25 sub-categories: ‘Anchoring in the school profile and in the school program’; ‘Integration of European themes in class ("Europa-curriculum")’; ‘Promotion of multilingualism and the foreign language profile’; ‘Development and strengthening of intercultural competences’; ‘Participation in European projects, actions, competitions, youth forums, etc.’; ‘Networking’; ‘Staff development and qualification’; ‘Quality assurance’ (Niedersächsisches Kultusministerium 2018, 403–404).

8 Solidarity as a value often remains implicit in the curriculum. When mentioned explicitly, solidarity is hardly ever defined, explained, or exemplified. It is therefore more the discursive context in which it appears and the associated concepts that surround it that provide insights into the meanings, scale and manifestation of solidarity implied in the text.

9 I support these findings with examples from all instances found in the corpus across school forms, disciplines, and education levels where the word ‘solidarity’ was mentioned explicitly or made relevant implicitly. Examples were chosen if: (a) they were the only case where solidarity appeared in a text pertaining to a particular school type/discipline/level combination or, (b) (in the case of more mentions) they were among most illustrative for the identified pattern.

10 All translations from German to English are my own. The original texts are available from the author upon request.

11 The syllabi were updated in 2013, 2016 and 2017 to reflect the ‘[growing diversity] in geographical and national backgrounds of European school students’ (Schola Europaea 2013a, 2, 2017, 2).

12 With the exception of social studies syllabi (e.g. Gesellschaftslehre) that are cross-curricular and combine elements of geography, civics and history.