ABSTRACT
Current debates on the reorganization of the welfare state as well as new divisions of tasks between public and private actors within welfare societies are frequently associated with issues of citizenship. These debates are often put forward by left-wing critics who emphasize the dangerous consequences of increased restrictions on individual agency within a free society. Particular concerns arise from the tendency which Ralf Dahrendorf describes as the ‘Two-Third Society’, where the excluded will systematically be placed in the minority within the political process by a majority that controls welfare and enjoys a stable social status.2 At the same time, conservative critics (Murray 1984; Mead 1986) worry about the effects of social entitlements for the ‘privileged class’ of welfare recipients who are not interested in leaving a situation in which their material needs are provided for.3 This view criticizes welfare programmes for creating social dependency on the care of the welfare state, and for breeding ‘demotivation’. Recent developments in unemployment regulation policies indicate that the universal approach to the treatment of social welfare recipients is increasingly being replaced with selective programmes characterized, first, by lower subsidies compared to those of the 1970s and 1980s and, second, by the introduction of workfare schemes in social welfare.4 These schemes require people who benefit from social welfare to perform some kind of work in return. In this chapter, we criticize these demands as constraints that contradict understandings of modern citizenship. In particular they do not respect individual choice in seeking employment and confuse a right to assistance with duties pertaining to membership of a concrete nation-based society.
