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ONE
Introduction: social activism, belonging and citizenship in a period of crisis
Shana Cohen and Jan-Jonathan Bock
The repeated political and economic crises in Europe over the past few years - whether related to years of austerity imposed by national governments, the inflow of refugees, or the UK vote on membership of the European Union (EU) - have arguably intensified existing disaffection with political elites and confusion over the political and social meaning of citizenship. Is citizenship related to place of birth, to individual political behaviour, to shared values and personal or collective contributions to social solidarity, or a combination of all of these? How should public institutions and political rhetoric cultivate notions and practices of citizenship? More practically, how can politicians and policymakers promote a concept of citizenship and a related set of actions, such as civic engagement or political participation, when they are perceived as so distant from the majority of the population?
This volume brings together academics and practitioners in the UK and Germany who associate citizenship with the structural organisation and experience of social solidarity and likewise, going beyond distinctions often made in policy between individual behaviour and collective action. They are responding in their work to trends that have developed over past decades, namely the decline of trust in public institutions, rising economic insecurity and diminishing state intervention, to alleviate the effects of this insecurity. The most noticeable and negative consequences of the latter have been dramatic changes in welfare policies that limit eligibility and force more self-reliance, even among vulnerable populations facing complex and difficult circumstances, often involving health problems (Connor, 2010 Bonoli and Natali, 2012 Wiggan, 2012). The aim of the volume is to demonstrate how, in this era of economic and social pressure, academics analysing the potential transformation of society and individual identity, and social activists engaged directly with the destructive impact of welfare policy, are evoking a constructive alternative to more public expressions of disenchantment and disaffection. The choice of Germany and the UK is to illustrate the effects of the timing of austerity measures, or earlier in Germany, differences in welfare policies and political systems - namely regionalism in Germany and centralisation in the UK, and the role of civic and faith-based charities in addressing the demand and need generated by the decline in public benefits.
Citizenship and the gap between political elites and the public have been the subject of increasing academic interest and concern, not only due to declining voter participation rates but also to the rise of populist movements, whether on the political left or (mostly) right. In many cases, this left-right distinction is increasingly difficult to make. A survey conducted for the UK-based Hansard Society on trust in politicians found that respondents considered the accountability they faced in their work to be very different from 'the unaccountability of elected representatives'. Respondents perceived a 'basic lack of performance delivery mechanisms available to citizens to hold them [politicians] in check' (Hansard Society, 2010, p 11). Similarly, a report from the British Regulatory Policy Institute entitled Trust in the System argued that '[p] arties must become more responsive to the public as a whole and less self-absorbed' (2009, p 5). Commenting on the British referendum on European Union membership, the American philosopher Michael Sandel explained the frustration generated by the gap between political elites and the public:
There is a widespread frustration with politics, with politicians and with established political parties. This is for a couple of reasons one of them is that citizens are rightly frustrated with the empty terms of public discourse in most democracies. Politics for the most part fails to address the big questions that matter most and that citizens care about: what makes for a just society, questions about the common good, questions about the role of markets, and about what it means to be a citizen. A second source of the frustration is the sense that people feel less and less in control of the forces that govern their lives. And the project of democratic self-government seems to be slipping from our grasp. (Cited in Cowley, 2016)
In the atmosphere of frustration described by Sandel, whether in the UK, Germany or elsewhere in Europe, performing the job of representation becomes commendable, and the conveyed sense of duty a sentiment to be respected and noted rather than expected. After the murder of the British MP Jo Cox in June 2016, days before the referendum on membership of the EU, one of her constituents remarked that'for the first time in many, many years, we actually had an MP that was interested in Birstall [her constituency], and interested in us, and interested in the people and the businesses here' (cited in Hume and Sterling, 2016). However, the failures of contemporary representative politics have not precluded instances of striving for a common good by individual citizens, particularly at a grassroots level. In other words, engagement with the 'big questions' posed by Sandel still exists, even if not to the needed depth in political debate. The purpose of this volume is to offer examples of this engagement. The book also provides a platform for discussing how grassroots activism can edify abstract notions of a'just society', the meaning of citizenship, and abstract questions relevant to the sustainability and, if necessary, transformation of democratic political systems.
Austerity, political crisis and social activism in the UK and Germany
One of a series of critical self-reflective statements from international agencies, the article 'Neoliberalism oversold?' (Ostry et al, 2016), written by economists from the International Monetary Fund, questions the social costs of pursuing this particular economic ideology. Stating that 'the evidence of the economic damage from inequality suggests that policymakers should be more open to redistribution than they are' (2016, p 41), the authors suggest that 'fiscal consolidation strategiesâwhen they are neededâcould be designed to minimize the adverse impact on low-income groups' (2016, p 41). Significantly, they conclude that '[a]usterity policies not only generate substantial welfare costs due to supply-side channels, they also hurt demandâand thus worsen employment and unemployment' (2016, p 41).
Yet, the consequences of austerity have gone beyond short- or even medium-term material impact. They have revealed the long-term incapacity of the state to confront urgent problems, such as the influx of refugees into Germany, deter the rise of mass anxiety over diminishing life opportunities, and, inversely, inspire optimism through leadership. This incapacity can be attributed to the decline of representative politics, which reflect in turn the widening gap between political and economic elites on the one hand, and the majority of the population on the other. The result of the gap has been what scholars such as Peter Mair (2006) and Wendy Brown (2015) have called democracy without a demos, without popular participation, and even without interest in politics, though perhaps still in democracy as a political system (Crouch, 2004 Cook et al, 2016). Mair also writes that despite 'quite consistent evidence of popular indifference to conventional politics and, more arguably, to democracy', there has been 'a distinct renewal of interest in democracy (if not necessarily in politics as such)' (2006, p 28). He then asks how these contrasting trends can be reconciled.
This book reflects an interest in democracy and, more pointedly, in how to express and practice citizenship, particularly in relation to helping others and generating a physical and social space for individual belonging. The contributions to the volume were written five to six years after the imposition of austerity policies in the UK, and more than a decade after their implementation in Germany. The German chapters were written during a period of political unease because of the Eurozone crisis, the influx of refugees and questions about integration into German society. A few of the British chapters were written after the EU referendum. The referendum in the UK revealed the political potency of economic disenfranchisement, anxiety about immigration and its impact on quality of life, alienation from elites, and the absence of any significant or substantial policy framework to promote social solidarity. Feelings simmering for years, even decades, now had a moment of expression. As a taxi driver in Manchester told Shana Cohen in 2010, or before austerity and long before the referendum: "My wife, who has been sick, has struggled for years to get benefits. If she had a dot on her forehead [if she was of Asian origin], it would have been easier." The imposition of austerity measures could only exacerbate the perception of competition for scarce resources, whether among different ethnic groups or otherwise, and of political disinterest in the wellbeing of much of the population.
According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the term austerity refers to 'difficult economic conditions created by government measures to reduce public expenditure' (The Oxford English Dictionary, 2016). Jamie Peck (2012) explains how austerity, and specifically cuts to public benefits, has become a tenet of neoliberalism: 'according to the neoliberal script, public austerity is a necessary response to market conditions, and the state has responded by inaugurating new rounds of fiscal retrenchment, often targeted on city governments and on the most vulnerable, both socially and spatially' (2012, p 626). In Germany, this retrenchment started in 2003 under the then Chancellor Gerhard Schröder, who announced a set of labour market and welfare reforms through a general strategy called Agenda 2010, intended to reduce unemployment and induce economic growth. At that point, Germany had high unemployment and relatively high levels of public debt, repercussions from the country's reunification in 1990 and a lack of adjustment during the 16-year reign of Schröder's predecessor, Helmut Kohl.
Described by some as 'the sick man of Europe' at the turn of the century, Germany's government pursued the same 'Third Way' model (Giddens, 1998) of the then British Prime Minister, Tony Blair: give more power to the market and reduce the scope of the state, purportedly to boost innovation, employment and self-reliance. To achieve this, labour rules were rendered more flexible, subcontracting with few obligations towards employees became easier, social security was cut back, and those on unemployment benefits had to accept job offers or face sanctions. Schröder presented the Agenda 2010 strategy as an attempt to free the creative forces of the market, on the one hand, and to encourage citizens and involve them in addressing the circumstances that lead to unemployment and inactivity, on the other. Just as Blair, Schröder - nominally a social democrat from the SPD party - faced resistance in his own party and from his coalition partner, the Greens, as well as from academics and trade union members.1 Schröder, however, pressed ahead.2
The overall goal was to decrease non-wage labour costs and make German companies more competitive globally, at the cost of increasing insecurity among workers. The key slogan of the new strategy was fördern und fordern - or to support those who were keen to help themselves, while simultaneously demanding self-activation and commitment. The reforms encouraged the growth of flexible, temporary and part-time work, while also limiting the job security of part-time employees, who could now be fired more easily. It also introduced a kind of part-time mini-job paying 450 euros a month tax-free. The reform package reduced unemployment assistance to basic existence levels after 12 months of joblessness, replacing a policy that had sought to reflect individual living standards by pegging state assistance to previous salaries and contributions. The Left party, which came into existence in response to the reform, denounced Schröder for creating 'poverty by law' (Kipping, 2006).
Welfare recipients were pressured to take low-paid and precarious jobs despite the insecurity and, as has happened in the UK, became trapped in a pattern of moving in and out of benefits, including the periods of limbo after a job has ended and before benefits have started again. Again, as in the UK, the consequence of deregulation has been a dramatic rise in job insecurity and low-paid positions, with some workers holding multiple jobs. In 2010, over 23% of employment situations in Germany were low-paid (Bosch, 2012, p 8). However, it should be noted that Germany's federalist and subsidiarity traditions have provided some counterweight to welfare reform, unlike the dramatic impact cuts in benefits have had on the UK's centralised system (Leisering, 2005, p 1).
The reforms under the British coalition government, elected in 2010, and the subsequent Conservative government, elected in 2015, have gone further than those in Germany, using austerity in effect to reshape the social role of the state. Cameron's widely criticised notion of a 'Big Society' (Cabinet Office, 2010) reflected the shared party consensus between at least New Labour and the Conservatives that voluntary sector and grassroots actors should assume more responsibility for local social problems, and that individuals should assume more responsibility for their own behaviour if they wished to access public benefits. In both countries, the state can facilitate action at a local and individual level, whether through grants or punitive measures, but not increase its own intervention. As Mayer (2013) writes of welfare reform in Germany, 'the state is supposed to promote and enable the activities of its citizens rather than merely hand out benefits and thereby enforce the "passivity of citizens"' (Mayer, 2013).
Indeed, national and local organisations in the two countries have responded to economic pressure, particularly the rise of poverty and corresponding trends of unemployment, insecure employment and increasingly punitive welfare systems. The Trussell Trust and Tafel national networks of foodbanks discussed in this volume are examples of such organisations. Though Germany possesses one of the strongest economies in Europe, according to the ParitÀtische Gesamtverband's widely discussed report, as of 2016, approximately 12.5 million people, out of a total population of over 80 million, were classified as poor, that is, as earning less than 60% of the median household income (ParitÀtische Gesamtverband, 2016). This figure was the highest since German reunification in 1990. As in the UK, the working poor constituted a growing percentage of this trend, or over three million, due at least in part to the erosion of labour protections (Somaskanda, 2015).
In the UK, the rise in poverty, particularly among families where one or more parents work, since the beginning of austerity measures in 2008 has been striking. As of 2013, there were more individuals in working families living in poverty, 6.7 million, than in workless and retired families combined, or 6.3 million (Morris, 2013). A 2016 Joseph Rowntree Foundation study found that 1.25 million people, including 312,000 children, were destitute 'at some point in 2015' (Case, 2016). A third of this population possesses a complex need, and the causes of destitution included illness, unemployment and sanctions, or withdrawal of benefits, due to, for instance, having missed Jobcentre appointments (Rickman and McKernan, 2016).
Among others, faith-based organisations have tried to compensate for the diminished safety net and public sector support. For instance, the Church of England's organisation to combat poverty, the Church Urban Fund, provides small levels of funding through the Together Grants (Church Urban Fund, 2016b) and Near Neighbours (Church Urban Fund, 2016a) (funded in turn by the Department for Communities and Local Government). Increasingly, grant recipients reflect soaring social need at a local level.3 The Archbishop of Canterbury has lent vocal support to credit unions, which he considers an important ethical alternative to the private banking sector (see Chapter Six) local churches in the working-class London Borough of Peckham founded a service to help people seeking employment, including those who have served prison sentences (Chapter Seven) the Christian faith has inspired The Trussell Trust's foodbank network, as its leader, Sarah Greenwood, explains (Chapter Nine) and even Cambridge's Money Advice Centre is inspired by the Christian idea of charity (Chapter Five). The mobilisation of a Christian ethics of care and sacrifice is a central feature in most practitioners' accounts. At the same time, other faith groups have either established or expanded initiatives, for instance, the local Muslim foodbank Sufra NW in London, and national volunteering initiatives, such as Mitzvah Day (Jewish), Sewa Day (Hindu) and Sadaqa Day (Muslim).
In addition to investing in social services, the Church of England and the Catholic Church have issued highly critical political statements concerning welfare reform. The bishops in the House of Lords have acted to block welfare reforms deemed unfair to the poor. The Cardinal (then Archbishop) Vincent Nichols, leader of the Catholic Church in England and Wales, decried in 2014 the demise of the safety net and the punitive behaviour of public agencies, like Job Centres, which can withdraw unemployment benefits. He described the 'basic safety net' as no longer exi...
