From Identity to Citizenship in the Global World: How Global Educational Institutions and Networks can Contribute to a Culture of 'Global Citizenship'

Theoretical assumption of close interaction between the concept of identity and the concept of citizenship is not accidental, as it is a result of development of ideas in modern theory of citizenship studies. (Hansen 1998; Painter 2003; Abowitz, Harnish 2006; Abell, Condor 2006). Those ideas got a "second wind" with different evidences of globalization, with creation of multiple supranational institutions and communities, that are structuring both individual and group identities across national borders. This leads to the fact that modern person can feel at the same time being a citizen of a particular country or region, work to restore the ecology of the rain forest in the other part of the world, be a member of the highly specialized professional community of global corporations and organize international actions in defense of prisoners of conscience as a "citizen of the world." Though great variety of different communities , to which a modern person can belong, is providing lots of new opportunities, it also brings lots of challenges, as those communities are often based on different ethics, that may be in sharp conflict with each other. What can modern education do to help a person to meet those challenges? Our assumption is, that to build a culture of global citizenship we need more diverse system of global educational institutions. This paper seeks to examine styles and formats of both formal and informal educational institutions, using cases of ERMA - European Master Program in Human Rights and Democratic Governance and NECE - Networking European Citizenship Education - and explore the possibility to combine of best practices of those formats by creating " joint learning spaces”