Citizenship, social rights and social cohesion: A priori, the concept of social cohesion evokes the idea of a body of values, norms, behaviours and expectations that, because they are shared, give meaning to “living together”. This is why, at a time of globalization, neo-liberalism, and economic growth at all costs, implementing strategies designed to promote social cohesion is often presented as the antidote to the ills of society and the prerequisite to development. In the literature and political discourse, the concept of social exclusion is used to describe the reality of many social groups today who feel deprived of security and identity and are convinced that they have lost something they once possessed. The question, then, is one of knowing what the obstacle to social cohesion is. Research efforts, as well as international institutions, have abundant recourse to this logic in order to identify and remedy some of the obstacles they perceive as being the causes of social exclusion. For example, in this respect, inclusion and participation in the labour market is the object of sustained attention; the same applies to the war against poverty. Meanwhile, everything points to social exclusion and its opposite, social cohesion, being phenomena that cannot, for the purpose of analysis, be reduced to questions of material dysfunction in a given society. By the same token, social cohesion cannot be reduced to a matter of integration or a fight to leave the margins of society. This is only part of what we learn from the work of Jane Jenson and Mateo Alalouf, whose earlier efforts have inspired several contributions that follow.

This article presents first, a summary of the findings of the first phase of the human dignity and social exclusion initiative (HDSE) of the Council of Europe and second, an analysis of the implications for social policy of the four themes identified in the report's conclusions. These four themes are: i) trends in risk, ii) the changing role of the state in relation to risk, iii) convergence in social policy approaches in Europe and iv) the challenge confronting social NGOs in defending the least advantaged in risk society. Thus, the article uses the framework of risk, social exclusion and social rights to explore the implications of social policy trends for the lives of the least advantaged people and to comment on effective strategies for combating poverty and exclusion in the changing environment identified by the HDSE report.

The Chilean model of privatized pension schemes has expanded in Latin America in the last ten years and has generated much interest at the international level. This raises important questions in relation to the individualization of social risks and the erosion of the human rights underpinnings of social security. This article looks at the characteristics of Latin American privatized pension schemes and explores some of the motivating factors behind the trend toward privatization. The approaches to pension scheme reform advocated by the World Bank and the International Labour Organization are also compared. The legal standards and principles having generally guided the design of pension schemes until now provide insight for an examination of some of the issues surrounding the implementation of privatized pension schemes. Among these issues are the changing role of the State with respect to social protection and the ability of more vulnerable groups to exercise their right to social security.

This paper addresses some of the tensions for social cohesion presented by Canada's medicare system. This system, which constitutes the country's best-loved social program, is broadly governed by the five principles of the Canada Health Act. Independently and together, these principles promote social cohesion. Medicare is however also under threat from various elites, who favour elements of its privatization, and whose principal strategy is here termed privatization by stealth. The argument that privatization is disruptive of social cohesion is advanced in general terms and with specific reference to the case of Ontario's Community Care Access Centres, which broker public funds to non-profit and for-profit home care agencies across the province.

Since the beginning of the crisis and the rise of unemployment, the “social economy” has been given a strategic role in the defence of those abandoned by the capitalist economy. The social economy is regarded as an economy that produces social services and is also a tool for the integration of the unemployed. This role is all the more important because the social economy is historically carrier of democratic and social values and forms part of a social tradition dear to the workers' movement: a citizens' initiative, an alternative to the market economy with its injustice and social violence. It seems to us, from our experience in Belgium, that the social economy sector has also served as a Trojan horse for the deregulation of employment, constrained by the mode of subsidy and with the approval of its protagonists. We wonder if the call for the social economy development does not favor the weakening of the public service and the State's gradual withdrawal from public service? Is it an ambition or an adverse effect of the instrumentalisation to which this sector is subject?

Women's citizenship in the Southern Cone is based on a republican conception aimed at the participation to the community and a public responsability reaching from the local to the supranational level, from the public to the political space. Such a process implies a dynamic of individuation, but is also ambiguous because it reproduces the sexual division of labour.

This research note on the use of the Canadian and Quebec Charters of Rights in social matters shows that judicial proceedings have limited success. Even reinforced by the Charters, the concept of social cohesion is powerless when faced with legislative changes that have undermined social law. The paper traces broadly some recent modifications to social programs in Quebec and on the Canadian federal level in order to determine their impact on social law. To do so, we focus on the fiscal treatment of such programs.

In multinational polities, different orders of government are involved in determining the norms of social protection. In this context, this article addresses the question of who does what, how and why. The first section deals with the distribution of normative power concerning social protection in federal states and in the European Union. The second section examines a variety of devices enabling the articulation of shared power. Finally, a third section concentrates on the different functions of normative power in the social domain. The first one is obviously redistributive. Secondly, the exercise of normative power legitimises public institutions of all government levels involved. The third function, which is of particular interest in the context of multinational States (or political spaces such as Europe) consists in the consolidation of citizenship. The solidarity inherent in norms of social protection reflects the sense of belonging to a particular social group, and in this context, the nation. It can also serve to strengthen the sense of belonging to the larger political space, the multinational federation. In complex political structures, the power to establish norms of social protection contributes to the phenomenon of multiple loyalties and overlapping citizenship. Cementing citizenship in such a political context cannot succeed through homogenisation, but must respect the cultural dimension of social protection and the right to be different.

This paper analyses the public discourse regarding consent and sexual violence that emerged in response to the Ewanchuk (“bonnet and crinolines”) case. Analyzing the debate that ensued in the editorial pages of the National Post, I suggest that the strong response to Ewanchuk stems from the way in which participants in the debate interpreted the case through the lens of their own personal - and gendered -experience. The reaction is also the result of a clash between the dominant cultural-sexual script of heterosexual interaction, on the one hand, - a script which celebrates masculine sexual aggression, and the consensual script encoded in Canada's “No Means No” legislation, on the other. Finally, to a public already skeptical of feminism, Ewanchuk symbolized the feminist “take-over” of the Supreme Court. I argue, as well, that the interpretation of consent embraced in the dominant cultural-sexual script represents a considerable departure from the liberal ideal of free and voluntary consent in its reliance on a notion of “inferred” consent and its Hobbesian obfuscation of coercion and consent. Ultimately, Ewanchuk reflects the persistence of so-called common sense attitudes about sexual violence in spite of legal reforms, and it raises questions about whether consent can be defined in terms that would be meaningful and emancipatory for women.