Citizenship education is pivotal to the creation of the nation. The nation-state is shaped by policies which promote a common national language, national history, national myths, literature, media, military, education and even a national religion (Kymlicka , 2003). By contrast, international bodies, such as the Council of Europe, promote a broader understanding of citizenship and belonging, based on human rights. This paper explores the concept of “education for cosmopolitan citizenship” (Osler and Starkey, 2005) examining complex questions that ‘super-diversity’ (Vertovec, 2007) and migration raise. It considers challenges to democracy which education can address. It argues that education for cosmopolitan citizenship is not necessarily in tension with education for national citizenship. Instead it requires us to re-imagine the nation-state as cosmopolitan. The task is not to enable the newcomer to be more like “us”, but build to extend all students’ range of identities, within a nation-state which enacts cosmopolitan values.
