Policy Approaches to Quality of Citizenship Education by European Intergovernmental Organisations

For at least two generations, the education systems of industrialised states have become a target of international policy-making. The field of citizenship education will be taken as an example to show how the Council of Europe and the European Union try to influence their member states and which policy tools they apply. For that purpose, we systematically describe and compare two exemplary approaches to quality assurance of citizenship education in view of the resources both intergovernmental organisations (IGOs) have at hand. The chapter concludes with a critical discussion of the strengths and weaknesses of both approaches.