ABSTRACT
In both France and the United Kingdom, public and academic debate about the role and character of social provision has implicated questions of citizenship.1 In France, this debate reflects a long tradition of post-revolutionary public discussion about citizenship, and the language of citizenship is employed in a wide range of contexts.2 In the United Kingdom, public discussion of citizenship has been traditionally less pronounced, and it has only been in the last two decades that an active public debate about citizenship has developed.3 Recent British interest in citizenship partly reflects efforts, led by ‘Charter 88’, to lobby for an entrenched bill of rights (Stewart 1995), but also a desire by intellectuals and journalists on the political Left, marginalized in the 1980s, to find a bulwark with which they could resist the neoliberal reforming zeal of Margaret Thatcher’s governments. ‘Citizenship’ seemed to promise a means of defending the modern British welfare state against neoliberal threats to dismantle it. This chapter examines citizenship discourse, as it relates to social provision, through a focus on two notions that play a similar role: social citizenship, in the United Kingdom, and solidarité, in France. It highlights the concepts’ shortcomings, and sketches the outlines of an alternative foundation for defending social provision.
