Reforming the French welfare state: Solidarity,social exclusion and the three crises of citizenship

The article explores recent debates about citizenship and social provision in France. It examines the essential concepts comparable to ‘social citizenship’, as understood in British debates, and the role that they have played in the development of the French welfare state. Its conclusions are threefold. First, social provision in France is founded on the principle of solidarité, which holds that all citizens face a series of social risks (unemployment and illness) that make them dependent on one another. Second, as the traditional insurance principle (the core of the French welfare state) is founded on socio‐economic conditions (concerning the nature of social interdependence and social risk) that no longer exist, the emergence of these social ills has led to not one but three crises of citizenship: a crisis of coverage, of legitimacy and of participation. Third, while it is too early to draw definitive conclusions, recent policy reforms suggest that the difficulties faced by French welfare are encouraging moves towards the British model of tax‐based (rather than insurance‐based) financing of social provision.     

Not life but the world is at stake: Hannah Arendt on citizenship in the age of the social

This article evaluates Hannah Arendt's contribution to ‘thinking citizenship’ in light of her controversial account of the modern rise of ‘the social’. It argues that Arendt's writing on the social is best understood not primarily as analytical and normative but as an historical argument about the effect of capitalism and modern state administration on meaningful citizenship. This short piece analyses one important element of Arendt's story about the historical rise of the social: that it is a peculiar hybrid of polis and oikos, a scaled-up form of housekeeping, and its threat to the public, political world.     

Debating the ghost of Marshall: a critique of citizenship

Significant changes to societies and the jettisoning of social rights are limiting access to conventional citizenship and fueling a new criterion by which a substantive ‘citizenship’ may now be claimed. Specifically, fame, fortune and a kind of martyrdom are, de facto, the new ways in which an individualistic approach is used to access citizenship, initiating a two-tiered system of inclusion. This article uses a Canadian context to examine the relevance of Marshall's concept of citizenship. The argument will follow in four parts. First, I review Marshall's construct of social rights and take up some of the ‘internal’ critiques of its limits. Second, I examine the gendered limits of social citizenship claims. Third, I explore what amounts to an ‘external’ critique of Marshall, i.e. thinkers like Beck who argue that the debate has moved on from how to do ‘social rights’ to an attack on the very notion of (social) rights. Finally, I propose what a citizenship without social rights concretely amounts to in the modern world.     

‘I have so many successful stories’: framing social citizenship for refugees

The current US refugee resettlement system reflects the US government's agenda of having refugees acquire quick employment with low state welfare dependence and minimal fiscal and cultural disruption to the receiving communities. The non-governmental organizations (NGOs) assisting refugees hold broader goals for refugees, including feeling a sense of belonging in the USA. These goals represent a framing of social citizenship rights for refugees, and how NGOs frame social citizenship varies depending upon the NGOs contractual relationship with the US welfare state. Using data from 57 in-depth interviews, I describe how resettlement and assistance NGOs currently frame social citizenship for refugees in relation to market citizenship, and how their relationship with the federal government shapes this framing. Findings illustrate the role of NGOs in creating a discursive space for expanding the social citizenship rights of refugees and the ways such framing is highly constrained by the definitions of belonging that emerge from market citizenship.     

Meso‐discourses,state forms and the gendering of liberal‐democratic citizenship

This article builds upon Michel Foucault's fleeting observation that ‘the state consists in the codification of a whole number of power relations’ and that ‘a revolution is a different type of codification of these same relations’ (Held et al., 1983, pp. 312–3). Specifically, the article uses the case of Canada to argue that distinct state forms rest on particular meso‐discourses which inform a logic of governance, historical configurations of the public and private and gendered citizenships. The meso‐discourses of separate spheres, liberal progressivism and performativity (the logics of governance for the laissez‐faire state, the Keynesian welfare state and the neo‐liberal state, respectively) have coded and recoded gendered citizenships, thereby providing women and men with differential access to the public sphere and to citizenship claims. The neo‐liberal state's meso‐discourse of performativity is especially challenging for women and all equity‐seeking groups because it prescribes the ascendency of market relations over political negotiation or ethical considerations, as well as the attrition of social and political citizenship rights. Social citizenship is being eclipsed by market citizenship.     

Contesting belonging and social citizenship: the case of refugee housing in Armenia

Using the example of the right to housing, this article addresses the ways in which the practice of social citizenship, including popular claims and expectations and actual state provisions, has changed in post-Soviet Armenia. It examines the claims of Armenian refugees from Azerbaijan to state-provided permanent housing, which they consider the key condition for becoming ‘citizens’ and ‘locals’ in Armenia, and the Armenian state's solutions to the housing issue following the collapse of the Soviet Union. It demonstrates how the Soviet-era housing policy has left its mark on current notions and practices of social citizenship in Armenia. Even though social rights in general have decreased, notions of social citizenship are still present not only in the expectations and claims of needy refugees and citizens without housing but also in the state's acknowledgement of responsibility for its citizens' welfare (though currently providing only for those in extreme need), and in the equalising effect, the state housing programme has had for the majority of refugees who participated in it.     

Citizenship,justice and indigenous group‐specific rights—citizenship and indigenous Australia

Indigenous Australians and those supporting the cause of Aboriginal justice have used the language of citizenship rights to demand redress for indigenous peoples’ relative disadvantage. In doing so they make an appeal to rights of full participatory citizenship which have their roots in T.H. Marshall's writings. Liberal political theory, however, has resisted conceptions of citizenship which entail rights of assistance from the state: rights to welfare are more readily conceived of as charitable acts towards those members of a society unable to care for themselves. Unless the assumptions implicit in liberal conceptions of citizenship are challenged, demands for positive citizenship rights may re‐enforce stereotypes of Aboriginal inferiority. Drawing on Will Kymlicka's recent work, this article critically examines liberal conceptions of citizenship, welfare and demands for indigenous group‐specific rights as they may apply to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander citizenship.     

‘Men are not born fit for citizenship,but must be made so’: Spinoza and citizenship

The modern conception of citizenship contains often unacknowledged key background assumptions – about the role of rights in citizenship, about the citizen modelled on a liberal autonomous and rational individual, and about the equality of citizens within a democratic state. Spinoza's political works give us a useful perspective on the historicity of these assumptions. Whereas the modern conception is abstract, universalist, and depoliticised, Spinoza's sense of the citizen's belonging is adamantly specific, particularist, and political, and offers a way forward for rethinking citizenship. The key concepts of freedom and republicanism are analysed, and a political reading is developed of Spinoza's view of citizenship in terms of a way of conducting politics.     

Migrant Heroes: Nationalism,Citizenship and the Politics of Filipino Migrant Labor

The Philippine state has popularized the idea of Filipino migrants as the country's 'new national heroes', critically transforming notions of Filipino citizenship and citizenship struggles. As 'new national heroes', migrant workers are extended particular kinds of economic and welfare rights while they are abroad even as they are obligated to perform particular kinds of duties to their home state. The author suggests that this transnationalized citizenship, and the obligations attached to it, becomes a mode by which the Philippine state ultimately disciplines Filipino migrant labor as flexible labor. However, as citizenship is extended to Filipinos beyond the borders of the Philippines, the globalization of citizenship rights has enabled migrants to make various kinds of claims on the Philippine state. Indeed, these new transnational political struggles have given rise not only to migrants' demands for rights, but to alternative nationalisms and novel notions of citizenship that challenge the Philippine state's role in the export and commodification of migrant workers.     

Is the state social or the computer inhuman? Claims for state support and citizenship in post-socialist Georgia

In the discussions of citizenship in post-socialist Georgia, the topic of social entitlements predominates. Soviet social citizenship, which granted the full range of social rights, significantly shaped the people's current expectations of social rights in Georgia. In order to address the external and internal pressure for poverty alleviation, the Georgian government started reforming the social support system of the country. The cornerstone of Georgia's current social policy is a new social assistance programme, the main principle of which is to provide social benefits to the poorest families as identified by an evaluation system. This paper explores the enactment of the ‘targeted social assistance’ (TSA) programme in a village in north-western Georgia. By participating in the TSA programme, Georgian citizens exercise social citizenship as a practice of bargaining for universal social rights that at present are not achievable for all as the state provides social security only to extremely needy families. The category of social citizenship described by T.H. Marshall helps us to understand the claims of Georgian citizens for state support. The discrepancy between social security and social citizenship causes people to misunderstand the goals of the TSA programme and this ultimately leads to dissatisfaction among Georgia's citizenry.     

T.H. Marshall and his critics: reappraising ‘social citizenship’ in the twenty-first century

T.H. Marshall's concept of ‘social citizenship’, developed in the 1949 lecture ‘Citizenship and Social Policy’, remains a vital study of welfare in developed nations. However, Marshall's social citizenship has come under attack as undermining civil liberties, or falling short of offering real equality to marginalised groups. This article returns to Marshall's lecture to show that he was in fact aware of such problems, but nonetheless held the provision of social rights to be a valuable normative project. Furthermore, this article argues that a new social citizenship, incorporating collective rights claims, could present a strong challenge to neoliberalism in contemporary welfare debates.     

Social Citizenship of Young People in Europe: A Comparative Institutional Analysis*

This article explains the diversity of young people’s access to social welfare by distinguishing between two models of social citizenship in a comparative analysis of 15 Western European countries. On the one hand, social citizenship can be familialized, when young people are considered as children and therefore do not receive state benefits in their own name. This form of citizenship is found in Bismarckian welfare states, based on the principle of subsidiarity. On the other hand, it can be individualized, in which case young people can be entitled to benefits in their own right, insofar as they are considered as adults. This form of social citizenship is found more in Beveridgean welfare states.     

Designing safe citizens

Modern liberal citizenship is a failing design, and this is nowhere more apparent than in the contemporary US. Currently there is a frenzy around US citizenship – who has it but shouldn't have it, who should have it but doesn't have it, who had it but renounced it. The sheer volume of ideas, images, and events and their mass circulation makes it almost impossible not to notice how unsettled and unsettling contemporary US citizenship has become. If, as designer Bruce Mau suggests, the success of a design is its invisibility, then it seems that the design of contemporary US citizenship is anything but a success. Taking seriously the claim that modern liberal citizenship is a failing design, this article focuses on how citizenship is designed and redesigned through history. Its central research question is: what are the design principles of modern liberal citizenship, and how are they experienced in the contemporary US? Noting that modern liberal citizenship emerged from state security debates and that security concerns preoccupy those in the contemporary US, this article investigates not only how citizenship is designed but how safe citizenship is designed. As such, it is less concerned with the legal definition of citizenship than with the practical packaging of citizenship as part of a design for safe living.     

Fundamentalism's encounters with citizenship: the Haredim in Israel

This paper centers on the challenge that fundamentalist groups – such as the Israeli ultra-Orthodox community (the Haredim) – pose for citizenship. It focuses on two issues: challenges centering on contribution to and sacrifice for the Israeli nation-state; and alternatives that fundamentalism poses to definitions of citizenship. Empirically, it is based on research in three arenas: service in the Israeli military; a voluntary organization aiding state agencies after terror attacks (ZAKA), and a charitable association offering help in health and social welfare (Yad Sarah). Two trends – challenges to concepts of security and the state, and the weakening of the state in the economic sphere and social services – have opened up spaces for fundamentalist groups to operate in civil society and complement the state. The Haredi community has gradually developed a new concept of inclusion that both fits the state-centred view of citizenship and their own fundamentalist perspective.     

The cost of belonging: exploring class and citizenship in Soweto's water war

More than a decade since the dawn of democracy, South Africa remains one of the most unequal societies in the world. Civil and political citizenship may have – rhetorically at least – reduced the stark racial inequality in the relationship between citizen and state evident under apartheid. Some authors suggest a positive correlation between social citizenship and social equality. However, in post-apartheid South Africa, deep socio-economic inequalities continue to mar the democratic content of society. Although rights to welfare and social services are nominally in place and are enshrined in the constitution, scores of poor, black South Africans are unable to claim social citizenship, precisely as a result of their class position. Using, as a lens, community struggles in Soweto against the commodification of water, this article seeks to explore the relationship between citizenship and class. It does this by addressing the relationship between the state and its citizens within the context of service delivery, paying particular attention to the impact of prepaid water meters and to the strategies that were employed by community movements in Soweto's ‘water war’. The key argument is that under the system of capitalism, class inequality will persist regardless of the extent of citizenship.     

The Sacred,Social Creativity and the State

Abstract

This paper explores the specific contribution of a strand of contemporary French social theory founded by Cornelius Castoriadis and Claude Lefort to the under standing of human power. It formulates a conception of power that transcends its definitions in terms of physical coercion or institutionalised violence to reveal the way power is creative and institutes the social. Its reflection on the cultural nature of political power and it role in society is shown to extend the pioneering reflection of Durkheim's sociology, especially as regards the homology that exists between religion and politics. The social role performed by the state explored by Durkheim prefigures Gauchet's theory of the state, which builds on Lefort's work. Gauchet's theory can be said to elaborate a critical synthesis of the two stands of Durkheim's work: the sociology of religion and the sociology of the modern state. This synthesis raises questions on the role played by the European state in the development of individualism, in both its political and economic manifestations.     

Strategies of Minority Struggle for Equality in Ethnic States: Arab Politics in Israel

This paper challenges existing theories of radicalization and secession that are presented as “natural” tendencies of minority nationalism. It demonstrates the affinity between the strategies of national minorities and those of social movements, claiming that excluded minorities seek to reframe and expand the meaning of their citizenship, as do social movements, by utilizing the structures of opportunities available to them through citizenship and by mobilizing whatever resources possible to improve their status. Minorities utilize the opportunities embedded in their citizenship, despite its shortcomings, before ever moving to alternative strategies that may jeopardize the valued incentives that were achieved so far as citizens. The paper demonstrates its theoretical hypothesis by examining the changes taking place in the strategy adopted by the Arab minority in Israel. This minority has chosen to abandon accommodative politics and is adopting a more active and challenging strategy vis-à-vis the state. In contrast with common claims that conceive Arab politics as a tendency towards strategies of radicalization and confrontation with the state, this paper demonstrates that recent changes in Arab politics seek to expand the meaning of citizenship beyond liberal limits and adapt it to new conditions in order to meet the minority's expectations of full and equal citizenship.     

Parsons on citizenship

In Parsons's analysis of citizenship, his general theory, liberal views, and assessment of American society intersect. Drawing from these distinctive sources, Parsons addresses questions still central to the study of citizenship. While Parsons presents a strong case for inclusion by means of liberal citizenship as an integrative force in modern societies, his treatment of inclusion is also limited in several respects. For example, Parsons elaborates one model of citizenship without attending to historical origins and variations; he stresses education as a type of cultural right but does not demonstrate the specific integrative role of higher education. As global controversy continues to swirl around liberal models of citizenship, Parsons's work can help in framing theoretically grounded responses to challenges to those models, such as communitarianism and fundamentalism, though it does not capture all possible forms of social integration.     

The national dimension of citizenship in T.H. Marshall

In the revival of the political theory of citizenship, T.H. Marshall is a seminal influence. A major attraction is clearly his apparent reversal of the usual relation between membership and rights. Whereas rights are commonly regarded as deriving from membership, Marshall raises the possibility that appropriate combinations of rights may be constitutive of membership in the form of citizenship, a form not determined by any prior identity. This is of immediate relevance for analysis of possible postnational reformulations of citizenship. Yet theoretical discussion must take seriously the derivation of membership from rights, which requires attention to the concrete sociological process by which rights become endowed with meaning. Although it has received comparatively little comment, this theme is central to Marshall's discussion, which provides some suggestive pointers to the main theoretical issues. In particular, Marshall reproduces the standard British ambivalence about the ‘national’, which is variously and sometimes confusingly distinguished from the ‘local’, the ‘private’ and the ‘foreign’. The ‘civilisation’ of which Marshall suggests that it should be a ‘common heritage’ is historically situated—in fact it is precisely because it is in one sense already common that social pressure gradually causes it to be recognized as such. In other words, it is possible to show that Marshall's analysis specifically addresses the issues of citizenship within the nation‐state. Its potential relevance beyond the nation‐state requires, therefore, explicit discussion of the social basis of belonging that Marshall, for his own purposes, was able to take for granted.     

Urban citizenship of rural migrants in reform-era China

One paradoxical reality of today's China is that urban citizenship does not necessarily go to those who have already moved to the city. Rural migrants are now allowed to work in cities but are deprived of a wide range of entitlements. Taking Shanghai, the most populous city in the world's most populous country, as a case study, this article establishes significant empirical content to elucidate how the notion of urban citizenship is interpreted in China, what criteria are applied for granting the urban citizenship, to what extent the entitlements of migrants in cities are comparable to those of the bona fide urban residents, and whether the lack of urban citizenship influences migrants' integration into host cities. Empirical investigation shows that granting of the urban hukou (household registration) is based largely on migrants' contribution to, rather than simply on their presence in, the host city. In the context of reform-era China, urban citizenship is used by city government not only to exclude some members of society from accessing urban welfare but also to make the urban economy more competitive by grabbing capital and human resources possessed by migrants.