ABSTRACT
In sharp contrast to a history of exclusion, governments and international organisations for the first time started to see people with intellectual disabilities as entitled to equal rights. The ideas of deinstitutionalisation, self-determination, and participation emerged in the international arena during the same period as the gradual changes of national legislations and policies that brought people into the era of post-institutionalisation. The ideals of the global discourse on intellectual disability policy are deeply anchored in the tradition of the humanist subject. Hence, they express the idea that people with disability shall serve for their own needs, make decisions about their own lives, and be protected from external influences while doing so. A special area of integration, continuously stressed in the material, concerns the education of people with disabilities. Equality of political participation is fundamental to any contemporary conception of citizenship, and it seems contradictory to claim that individuals prohibited from voting have acquired this status.
