Till Örebro universitet

The article is concerned with issues of national identity in a multicultural society (Sweden) and the role of citizenship education in creating a national identity. After having witnessed the terrorist attack and the traumas from Oslo and Utøya (22 July 2011), and the suicide bombing in Stockholm 11 December 2010, certain words, such as national identity and patriotism, make the project of writing on national identity from a Scandinavian perspective not just urgent but somewhat problematic. What I term national identity and democratic patriotism in the article is intended to combat all forms of chauvinistic ethno-nationality, on the one hand, and, on the other, fundamental ethno-religious identity. I argue for a particular way of understanding national identity that transcends ethnicity but also acknowledges it, by elaborating on the conception of ‘democratic patriotism’. In this respect my discussion is framed by the discussion of social integration and its importance to citizenship education, where my intention is to discriminate between the kind of national identity that refers either to aspects of political domination or a cultural hegemony, or both, and democratic and critical understanding of national identity in relation to pluralism and contingency, i.e. claims on respect for difference and otherness. The purpose of this article is to provide theoretical and empirical arguments for a didactical professional attitude and practice for reciprocal communication in this sense where meanings of national identity are discussed, tested and challenged in class. In light of the ongoing debate the article is a revisiting of concepts and a debate over concepts of national identity and belonging: how national identity can be identified, and what might be done to affirm a constructive, democratic national identity beyond both nationalism and multiculturalism. 

Agonistic recognition in education has three interlinked modes of aesthetic experience and self-presentation where one is related to actions in the public realm; one is related to plurality in the way in which it comes into existence in confrontation with others; and one is related to the subject-self, disclosed by 'thinking. Arendt's conception of 'thinking' is a way of getting to grips with aesthetic self-presentation in education. By action, i.e., by disclosing oneself and by taking initiatives, students and teachers constitute their being. The way Arendt theorizes action (vita activa) makes it essentially unpredictable and destabilizing, which does not seem to fit into what should be expected from education. In the article I will argue that it should have a place by virtue of the debate, challenge and contest it offers. But education should also be defined from a specific kind of contemplation called 'thinking' to become the cultivation of a faculty of judgment in education-thinking (vita contemplativa) as a common virtue in education. Arendt's demarcation between truth and meaning does from the point of view of agonistic recognition in education call for 'thinking' as a qualification of political and moral meaning-the 'taste' to be established in the individual, by individual judgements but always judged in relation to members of a community.