Conceptualizing Citizenship. Eastern European Inputs to the Contemporary Debates. Insights from Hungary

Abstract

Active citizenship, critical citizenship, digital citizenship, global citizenship: just a few from the concepts that have shaped the debate about citizenship in the past decades. While these concepts have dominated both the academic and the public discourse and had implications for citizenship education in mature democracies, they often seem to be far away from the lived realities of many Eastern European new democracies. In these countries, debates about citizenship have been burdened with the legacies of the non-democratic past, and even citizenship education has been marginalized for a long time. This paper introduces the Hungarian case and aims to contribute to the theoretical debates about the concept of the good citizen by reflecting on the peculiarities of a post-socialist new democracy.