ABSTRACT
The notion of citizenship is becoming more and more a hotly debated topic in partisan politics in general and for social-democratic parties in particular. Two developments seem to have influenced the resurgence of citizenship. First, economic competitiveness in a globalised world (economic efficiency) is increasingly considered as a constraint to maintaining a high level of social protection (social justice) being at the heart of the notion of ‘social citizenship’. This discussion is pertinent because one of the major concepts of the ‘old way’ of Social Democracy, social citizenship, mainly introduced by T.H. Marshall (1950), seems to be contested in the discussions of the Third Way. Social citizenship is a concept narrowly related to the welfare state of Social Democratic origin and social policy in general. In Marshall’s view, a full democratic participation of citizens not only depends on civic and political integration but also on social integration. Social citizenship must thus be understood as a basic condition of the modern inclusive democracy. In the words of one of the most insightful analysis of Marshall’s work, ‘social rights not only provide citizens with a sense of material security . . . social security encourages a sense of belonging and commitment to the kind of society, the welfare state, within which citizens live’ (Hemerijck, 2001: 138). The right to real income is then not ‘proportionate to the market value of claimant’ and there should be a ‘subordination of the market to social justice’ (Hemerijck, ibid.). Second, another tendency, in part related to processes of globalisation and directly pertinent for the construction of citizenship, is the trend towards the individualisation of society (Beck and Sopp 1997). Individualisation can have disconcerting repercussions on social and political integration.
