Intercultural citizenship from an internationalist perspective

The main purpose of this article is to present the concept of intercultural citizenship and its relationship to internationalism. In the first part, internationalism is distinguished from internationalisation in education, and from the notion of cosmopolitanism. Where internationalisation is largely a question of new activities within existing concepts of education, internationalism in education would promote the “bonding” of groups across national and state frontiers, and cosmopolitanism in education would aspire to over-rule the role of education in creating a sense of national allegiance and replace it with the promotion of an identification with human society as a whole. In the second part, intercultural citizenship is presented as the basis for dialogue among groups of different languages and cultures within and across nation-state boundaries. Education for intercultural citizenship, it is argued, needs to combine the objectives of foreign language education and citizenship/political education, and a brief example is given of how this can be done, with reference to a more comprehensive account elsewhere. The attraction of intercultural citizenship includes the opportunity for young people to engage in internationalism through international dialogue and action, thus reducing the prejudice engendered by national perspectives.