ABSTRACT
The debate over citizenship, which was one of the foundational points of reference for the formation of the welfare state, has recently reemerged in reaction to the changing social policies of governments throughout the world and the growing resonance of socialist, feminist and anti-racist critiques of the rights and obligations that citizenship was thought to embody.1 The crises of the Fordist-Keynesian welfare state and the failure of government policies to deal with those crises have led to a re-evaluation of the meaning of citizenship, particularly with regard to social rights. For the post-industrial Left, the new citizenship debate provides an opportunity to move beyond traditional views of political, civil and social rights and attempt to introduce new economic rights which might breed greater independence. Moreover, the debate also generates the possibility of clarifying what obligations should be reciprocally attached to the rights of citizenship and how concrete these obligations should be. Thus the resurgence of discourses on citizenship enables post-industrial socialists to outline the implications that the end of ‘work-based society’ could have for the future shape of state welfare and, consequently, the potential developments on the horizon for a new socialist citizenship.
