ABSTRACT
T S Eliot's view of culture led him to think of people as having multiple identities, even though he would not have used those particular words. People are members of localities but also of nation states. They are the inheritors of the traditions of a European civilisation. Eliot reflected over many decades on the nature of European identity. After the First World War he was attracted to the notion of a common European culture as one route to post-war reconciliation. Eliot's thoughts about education for citizenship and about world government continue to raise questions sixty years later about the extent to which schools should prepare young people to be both citizens of their own state and 'citizens of the world'. The stress on global citizenship, he also feels, undermines the sense that we need to develop in young people of the centrality of political power which is largely based in nation states even when they act together globally.
