Abstract
The paper focuses on the European Union (EU)'s education policy, examining the question how the concept of active citizenship has evolved over the past two decades in EU's main policy documents on adult education and learning, in the broader context of lifelong education and learning policy. It confronts those concepts with some characteristics of the active citizenship debate in contemporary social theory.
In the paper, I work with EU's main education policy documents after the year 2000 as well as with selected contributions of social theory (especially political philosophy and political sociology) on issues of (desirable) changes of democracy so that the forms of democracy in place are better compatible with society's current forms, orientation and problems and with people's needs. Based on measuring keyword frequencies and contexts, the document analysis found no association between the evolution of the citizenship debate in social science and in the policy documents of interest.
It also found no patterns in the evolution of the notion of citizenship in the documents.