Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Europeanization in the ‘other’ Europe: writing the nation into ‘Europe’ education in Slovakia and Estonia

2009; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 41; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/00220270802515919

1366-5839

Deborah L. Michaels, E. Doyle Stevick,

Historical Geopolitical and Social Dynamics

Abstract How is the tension between renewed nationalist and European narratives of belonging being unfolded in the curricula, discourse, and practice of civic education in Slovakia and Estonia. As two post‐socialist territories that were 'reborn' as independent nation‐states in the 1990s, Slovakia and Estonia were confronted with pressure to 'Europeanize'. 'Europeanization' is intended to challenge doctrines of ethno‐cultural citizenship, and is expected to play a significant role within civic education. One might expect nationalists in these contexts to reject Europeanization and those with a more tolerant or cosmopolitan bent to embrace it. These different case studies show, however, that educators, curriculum developers, and textbook authors at the national level do not simply dismiss conceptions of Europe. Rather, two trends emerge: First, Europe is redefined geographically, allowing Estonia and Slovakia to assert that they are inherently European (as the borderland and the centre, respectively). Second, the meaning of Europe is contested through counter‐narratives about what constitutes Europeanness, and the concept of Europe is sometimes appropriated not to advance civic citizenship, but rather for exclusionary and nationalist ends. Keywords: citizenship educationcivicsdemocracyEstoniaEuropeanizationnationalismSlovakia Notes 1. For an overview of the Council of Europe's activities in democratic civic education see the Introduction to this issue (Keating et al. 2009 Keating, A., Ortloff, D. H. and Philippou, S. 2009. Introduction: Citizenship education curricula: the changes and challenges presented by global and European integration. Journal of Curriculum Studies, 41(2): 145–158. [Taylor & Francis Online] , [Google Scholar]). 2. Slovakia and Estonia are not unusual in this regard. Renan, in his renowned 1882 Sorbonne lecture 'What is a nation?' (see Renan 1990), noted the tendency of nations to re‐write history to serve their own ends. Similarly, Loewen (1994 Loewen, J. W. 1994. Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong, New York: New Press. [Google Scholar]) evidences the manipulation of historical narratives in US textbooks. 3. We are drawing here on Anderson's (1991 Anderson, B. 1991. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism , revised edn, London: Verso. [Google Scholar]) now famous characterization of the nation as an 'imagined community'. 4. Excerpts from Slovak textbooks were originally in Slovak and translated by Michaels into English. 5. This democratic interpretation of the 1848 nationalist revolutions in the Habsburg Empire has credence in the sense that the German‐speaking population was disproportionately represented in the Viennese parliament to the disadvantage of the empire's many minorities (Johnson 1985 Johnson, O. V. 1985. Slovakia, 1918–1938: Education and the Making of a Nation East European Monographs, No. 180, Boulder, CO: East European Monographs. [Google Scholar], Leff 1988 Leff, C. S. 1988. National Conflict in Czechoslovakia: The Making and Remaking of the State, 1918–1987, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. [Crossref] , [Google Scholar]). However, recent scholarship has emphasized the democratic successes and relatively high degree of tolerance that existed in the Austrian half of the multiethnic Habsburg Empire (Brubaker 1996 Brubaker, R. 1996. Nationalism Reframed: Nationhood and the National Question in the New Europe, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. [Crossref] , [Google Scholar], King 2005 King, J. 2005. Budweisers into Czechs and Germans: A Local History of Bohemian Politics, 1848–1948, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. [Google Scholar]). 6. A notable exception to this trend is the textbook by Kusý and Stredlová (2003 Kusý, M. and Stredlová, T. 2003. Tolerancia: príručka o výchove k tolerancii [Tolerance: A workbook about education for tolerance], Dunajská Streda, Slovakia: Vydavatel'stvo Lilium Aurum. [Google Scholar]).