The European Union and Its Member States

Abstract

This chapter is necessarily rather different from the chapters that deal with individual countries. The EU consists of 28 states, each of which has considerable elements of sovereignty but is also a member of a political, economic and social union. Citizens of each member country are also citizens of the EU: this is additional to their country citizenship (and a consequence of it), and EU citizenship confers further — supranational — rights that can be enforced at the European level, which clearly compromises elements of state sovereignty. (Still more rights are given by the European Convention on Human Rights, established by the Council of Europe — which is a much larger body than the EU.) The EU is a mixture of being an intergovernmental institution, in which state governments meet, negotiate and compromise, and a ‘supranational’ institution, where pan-EU bodies can make policy and legislation that bind the individual countries. This makes a description and analysis of the educational policies and practices of ‘educating for the nation’ problematic. To analyse 28 state curricula and the various professional practices that are employed — and the EU’s own supranational perspectives — would be either unduly long (and perhaps tedious) or meaninglessly concise. This chapter is thus rather more synoptic than some of its companions.