**3. Historical background**

Historically, the claim for multicultural education can be traced back to the civil rights movement of the 1960s in the USA [8]. For almost 90 years after the abolition of the forced enslavement of Africans and African Americans, school authorities in the USA continued to embrace state-sanctioned segregation and cultural hegemony in public education. Segregated schools remained lawfully in existence until 1954, when the Supreme Court finally proclaimed that every individual, regardless of race, is entitled to equal protection under the law [9]. During the 1960s and early 1970s, the civil rights movement worked actively against discrimination in the public, demanding that the educational system should respond to a wider range of needs, cultures, and histories [5].

In the European context, the growing awareness of multicultural education has emerged in parallel with the different phases of migration in post-war Europe, as well as, with the major shift in policy following the 9/11 attacks in New York [10]. Migration within and into Europe contributed to changing the composition of students in many classrooms, which led to a greater awareness of the mutual rights and responsibilities of migrants and societies, not least related to language policy. With the terror of 9/11, the beginning of the new millennium brought with it a major shift in policy, making security concerns related to migration a priority. In recent decades, the focus of multicultural education has therefore been on what holds societies together rather than on how diversity and differences divide communities within European countries. Although all EU countries have considerable autonomy in the field of education, EU institutions and the Council of Europe have played a role as major supranational actors in the educational field, providing unifying calls for acknowledging the intercultural dimension in schools and education. An example is an Open Method of Coordination (OMC), which is an intra-European initiative aimed at identifying common multicultural challenges in schools, spreading best practices, and encouraging countries to review their existing national policies.
