Responding to the 2015 Paris attacks: Educating for diversity and the scalar project of intercultural Europe

• In Event: Inclusion, Identity, and belonging

Proposal

The January 2015 massacre at the Paris offices of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo and subsequent days of terror represented for many the challenges of building a more diverse and inclusive European Union. The “event of Charlie Hebdo” (as it has been called) raised questions about radicalization of migrant populations that EU countries had failed to make welcome in their societies.

A response from the European Parliament’s Culture and Education (CULT) Committee delved into questions of how intercultural dialogue could be promoted more robustly and integrated more effectively into different levels of schooling and sites of public education. What lessons does the work of CULT during that period offer for coaxing or cajoling member states on how they educate to combat xenophobia and racism? What benefits do such projects above the state level offer, and what are their limitations or costs? This paper traces the life of this report on intercultural dialogue that was drafted by the Committee on Culture and Education (or CULT) in 2015 and approved by the full Parliament as a resolution in January 2016. It outlines the intertextual policy field in which CULT conducted its work, the report that this committee generated, and the response from the European Commission. I argue that the impact of CULT’s report lies significantly in how it engaged with the deep and broad intertextual scalar project of European integration, one that has steadily looked for a role in education (see e.g. Lawn and Grek 2012), a policy area otherwise understood to be the competence of member states.

This paper speaks to issues embedded within those described in the call for proposals addressing the theme of “Envisioning Educa􀆟on in a Digital Society.” Underlying these issues are growing tensions regarding governance and the appropriate scale of policy responses. As noted in the call, digital tools for use in education and shaping social conditions around it stretch students’ worlds and classroom spaces in new ways. They stretch them beyond the communities and nation-states that have traditionally vied for control. Some of this stretch is, as the call for proposals, activists demands for actions to address problems such as data justice that transcend the nation-state. In my paper’s exploration of how a supranational institution such as the EU used a political development to make a discursive case for the scale of action that it offered, it calls attention to a type of actor that is part of the historical moment described by the call but warranting more attention.

The research for this paper draws from a publicly available draft of the report/resolution by the CULT Committee of the European Parliament (from September 2015), set of amendments proposed in committee (from fall 2015), the amended report tabled for the plenary discussion (December 2015), transcript of the plenary discussion (January 2016), and the April 2016 response from the European Commission. Other policy documents that inform the analysis include significant reference points in EU discussions about education at that time, such as the‘ET2020’ Strategic Framework for education and training. I have contextualized these texts through an existing ethnographically informed secondary literature on the EU (Abélès 1993 and 2000; Abélès, Bellier and McDonald 1993; Busby 2013; Firat 2019; Novoa 2016; Ringe 2022; Shore 2000; and Wodak 2011, as well as Muntigl, Weiss and Wodak 2000), as well as over a dozen formal and informal interviews I have conducted with former and current MEPs and their assistants on the development of parliamentary reports. Among my interviewees is the former MEP who served as rapporteur (or parliamentary lead) for this report.

The paper has been developed from an ethnographic and anthropological approach to following the development of a policy discourse and the “policy world” (Shore, Wright, and Però 2011) with which it is in dialogue. The texts and documents that form the data have been analyzed using frameworks from linguistic anthropology on intertextuality (Silverstein and Urban 1996) and scale (Carr and Lempert 2016). The paper points to the relevance of ethnographically informed discourse analysis of supranational institutions such as the EU, and the ways in which they complicate traditional debates of educational policy scale that have certainly involved transnational actors such as the World Bank or corporations, but that have otherwise often focused on the local and the national as the locus of a struggle.

Author

• Jonathan Larson, Grinnell College