Parallel to these efforts, the Council for Cultural Co-operation of the Council of Europe issued Recommendation No. R (82) 18 regarding modern foreign languages with the aim of achieving “greater unity among its member states […] by the adoption of common action in the cultural field” (Council of Europe, 1982). Their three basic principles included (1) the preservation of “the rich heritage of diverse languages and cultures in Europe” through an educational effort to “convert that diversity from a barrier to communication into a source of mutual enrichment and understanding”; (2) a “better knowledge” of European languages in order to “facilitate communication and interaction among Europeans” of different native languages, to promote mobility, understanding, and cooperation, and to “overcome prejudice and discrimination”; and (3) a “greater convergence at the European level” concerning national policies in the field of language learning (Council of Europe, 1982, p. 1). In line with these principles, the member states were called upon to ensure that their populations have access to learning foreign languages, to “deal with the business of everyday life in another country” (p. 2), to communicate with people from other countries and to “achieve a wider and deeper understanding of the way of life and forms of thought of other peoples and of their cultural heritage” (Council of Europe, 1982, p. 2). The political objectives of learning foreign languages in Europe were reinforced in Recommendation No. R (98) 6 (Council of Europe, 1998). Its preamble, among others, contained the aims of promoting “mutual understanding and tolerance, respect for identities and cultural diversity through more effective international communication” and of being “aware of the dangers that might result from the marginalisation of those lacking the skills necessary to communicate in an interactive Europe” (Council of Europe, 1998, p. 1). Based on these principles, democratic citizenship became a “priority educational objective” and from this point on, a particular urgency was attached to promoting “methods of modern language teaching which will strengthen independence of thought, judgement and action, combined with social skills and responsibility” (Council of Europe, 2001, p. 4), which are akin to the principles of Global Education.

Europeans renewed interest in GE in the second half of the 1990s, when in 1997, the North-South Centre of the Council of Europe published the Global Education Charter, which presented the rationale for incorporating the global perspective into education in Europe, together with some guidelines for successful implementation. The Charter was followed up by the foundation of the Global Education Network Europe (GENE) and by the Maastricht Global Education Declaration (2002), which was a European strategy framework in effect until 2015, defining GE as education that “opens people’s eyes and minds to the realities of the globalised world and awakens them to bringing about a world of greater justice, equality and human rights for all” (p. 1). It was established in the Declaration that GE is an umbrella term that encompasses “development education, human rights education, education for sustainability, education for peace and conflict prevention and intercultural education; being the global dimensions of education for citizenship” (p. 1). According to the Global Education Charter, GE differs from the above-mentioned fields as it “gives a broader perspective to what has been traditionally referred to by these special education areas and stresses the strong interdependencies and links between the economic, technological, socio-political, demographic and cultural aspects of social life” (p. 4). If we compare the components of the competencies these special educational fields develop, it becomes apparent that they work with interdependent and interrelated issues (Brander et al, 2015), but differ in focus and scope. Nevertheless, throughout the years, and based on the aspirations of the different European regions, different aspects of GE were prioritized, thus, different educational approaches appeared in national core curricula representing the global dimension of education (e.g., Democracy and Human Rights Education in Bosnia and Hercegovina, Global Development Education in Czechia, Sustainable Development Education in France) (Global Education Network Europe, 2019).

The promotion of Global Education stepped into a new phase in 2012, when the United Nations launched its Global Education First Initiative, making the nurturing of global citizens one of its priorities (UNESCO, 2014) all around the world. As a part of this new agenda, UNESCO (2014) developed a complex educational framework, called Global Citizenship Education (GCED), which “aims to empower learners to engage and assume active roles, both locally and globally, to face and resolve global challenges and ultimately to become proactive contributors to a more just, peaceful, tolerant, inclusive, secure and sustainable world” (p. 15). GCED is intended to play a pivotal role in equipping learners with the competencies they need to face the challenges of life in the 21st century. Even though the idea of putting citizenship at the heart of the agenda received a lot of criticism and is still a debated concept (more about this debate in Section 2.1.2.2.2), GCED received a lot of attention, and it has widely influenced education systems all around the world. This is apparent since the global component is already explicitly present in the core curricula of several countries (e.g., Australia, Colombia, Finland, Norway, the Republic of Korea, the United Kingdom, etc.) (Global Education Network Europe, 2020; UNESCO, 2015).

Global education took on a new urgency in the second part of the 2010s owing to two distinctive events. First, the diffusion of GCED was supported by the Incheon Declaration on Education 2030 (UNESCO, 2016), which stated that to have quality education in the 21st century, GCED should be placed at the heart of all educational endeavours. As a result, quality education became Goal 4 of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals, prioritizing Global Citizenship Education and Education for Sustainable Development. Second, the significance of GCED was further emphasised when in 2018, OECD PISA started to assess students’ Global Competence (GC), which is, by their definition,