69 Fragmentation and Subjectification 1 citizenship is pursued and measured in the EU. It is too focused on socialising its citizens so that they may support the needs of the existing socio-political order. He warned that this approach of individualisation and the domestication of citizenship ‘runs the risk of undermining rather than promoting citizenship and civic action’ (Biesta, 2009, p. 154). Although this may seem an indiscriminate accusation, it is supported by the fragmentation thesis. Fragmentation simultaneously occurs on the macro-level of the world, the meso-level of society and the micro-level of the individual person, and it cannot speak of citizenship solely in terms of the individual person (leading to individualisation) or of the existing socio-political order (domestication). The socio-political order may have its rationality, however that is not the only possible rationality of the world (6). Biesta (2009) pleaded for a citizenship conception that is ‘more driven by political and collective than strictly individualistic concerns’ and ‘more aware of the fact that different interpretations and articulations of the democratic values of liberty and equality point at real alternatives’ (p. 152). His conclusion presented a choice and showed a direction for education: There is, therefore, a real choice for European higher education. It can either become one more socializing agent for the (re)production of the competent active citizen, or it can seek to support modes of political action and civic learning that embody a commitment to a more critical and more political form of European citizenship. (Biesta, 2009, p. 154) The need for global citizenship is one more argument for thinking of citizenship education as a subjectifying force that invites the student to be a self in the world, to respond to others and to collaborate with people from very different 6 The way Biesta (2009) phrased this references MacIntyre’s (1988) critical question: Whose justice? Which rationality?
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