This paper explores how the image of the citizen emerges in current used textbooks of social sciences for Swedish students in upper secondary school. From the schools’ governing documents, it appears that the Swedish school system has the responsibility to prepare students for democratic citizenship. Policy documents presents a picture of "the abstract learner" who through the “right” knowledge and skills shall be prepared for a future democratic citizenship as adults. Hereby, citizenship appears as a state to be achieved in which the student is abstracted from their contexts of ethnicity, gender and social class. In the light of recent years' socio-economic and political changes in Sweden, earlier research has shown that such social ties do have a significant impact on the extent to which students succeed in school. Given this inconsistency between directives of the school's governing documents and the increasing importance of students' social context, it is interesting to examine how the image of citizen from the perspective of ethnicity, gender and class emerges in the school textbooks of social studies. Despite the growing importance of new technologies and alternative teaching methods, the textbook retains a central role for the content of teaching in Swedish schools. The issues of democracy and citizenship are today also prominent in a European context. To draw attention to the relationship between national and European notions of citizenship is an additional objective of the study to present a contribution to compare the image of the Swedish citizen with the image of the English citizen and of the Spanish citizen.