ABSTRACT
In considering the area of thought set for the symposium, the linking of the analysis of poverty to that of citizenship means examining the poor’s need of recognition from a specific point of view. This chapter suggests that the concept of social exclusion should be treated less as an analyser than as the symptom of a more general process of the desocialisation of poverty, which tends to reduce it to the personal life courses leading to marginalisation, against which anti-exclusion policies set equally personal integration courses. It focuses on these integration measures, which are the main feature of the policies against social exclusion promoted by the Community amongst the member countries. The chapter looks at their coherence with the so-called ‘European Social Model’ (ESM) and explores how they operate and examines the elements which, in the integration measures of the ESM, arouse fears of a regressive transformation of citizenship systems.
