State-Led Civic Education: Responding to New Challenges or Stuck in the Past? An Analysis of the Hungarian Case

State-led civic education is a political construction, which serves the purposes of nation-states, and has a value-laden and context-dependent character. As the new realities of global citizenship are challenging the nationalistic ideals of state-led civic education, an interesting question is, how countries are responding to this change. This study focuses on Hungary, where the post-socialist past adds a further layer to this challenge: education regimes should have sought an answer to the questions related to global citizenship while they have not even had a mature answer to how to educate democratic citizens. This paper examines how the school curriculum as a means to secure the state’s civic ideals has been used in Hungary since the regime change. The purpose of the thematic analysis is to identify a typology of citizenship concepts as reflected in education policy documents and to contrast the results with the new realities of global citizenship. Education acts, national curricula and framework curricula between 1990 and January 2020, when a new national core curriculum was introduced, will be analyzed with a content-focused approach, using Boyatzis’s thematic analysis. The underlying coding scheme utilizes Ichilov’s multidimensional model of citizenship.