Introduction

This chapter marries an overview of current developments in the theorisation of citizenship with a discussion of a number of trends in European welfare states, which have implications for gendered citizenship. These trends are reviewed in relation to four main issues:

• • the pressures for residualisation of social rights

• • the relationship between social rights and obligations and the ‘recommodification’ of labour through which the ability to uphold a socially acceptable standard of living is tied more closely, once again, to labour market participation.

• • the implications of this recommodification for the recognition of care as an expression of citizenship responsibility

• • supra-national citizenship, in particular with reference to the European Union (EU) and social rights and the treatment of ‘outsiders’.

Although the chapter does not directly address labour market trends, current developments in citizenship need to be understood in the context of those trends, in particular the intensification of marginalisation, discussed elsewhere in this book. In turn, a clearer understanding of both the concept of citizenship and of the changing nature of social citizenship in different welfare states helps us to make sense of current responses to changing labour market conditions and to new patterns of marginalisation.

Meaning(s) of citizenship

Citizenship is one of those slippery terms that means different things to different people and is the subject of disparate understandings according to the national context. At one level it simply represents a legal status, symbolised in the possession of a passport. However, it also has a deeper, more substantive, sociological and political meaning, which describes the relationship between individuals and the state and the relationship between individuals within a national community.

As such, it is also a highly contested concept at every level, from its meaning to its political application. This is, in part, because of what it means for the type of society to which we aspire, but it also reflects citizenship's roots in two different, and at times antagonistic, political traditions: liberalism and civic republicanism. The former casts citizenship as a status involving primarily rights accorded to individuals; the latter casts it as a practice involving responsibilities to the wider society (Oldfield, 1990).

T.H. Marshall's famous essay on Citizenship and social class (1950), which provides the starting point for most subsequent discussions of citizenship, defined it primarily as a status. As is well known, he conceptualised citizenship rights as civil, political and social.