This book provides a general essay on the relationship between particular constructions of social citizenship and particular forms of the welfare state, and the ways both have changed and evolved over time. The central argument is that the welfare state is an integral part of the capitalist state and, consequently, any structural changes in the latter will have a major impact on the texture and content of the former. This will be explored through a study of transformations in the concepts of social citizenship and the welfare state from the postwar period to the present.
In developing this thought it will be argued that, over time, these two concepts are moving towards a process of parallel transformations, with changes determined by the nature of the dominant political ideology and the structure of the economy and productive relations. By examining these parallel transformations we can distinguish various key parameters for understanding this relationship, such as the boundaries and conditions which shape these different historical forms of the social state. In this context, the transformations to citizenship lay the groundwork for the emergence of the rules that legitimize each individual historical form of the welfare state.
These reflections will be elaborated on by positing two different formulations of citizenship and the welfare state (with the latter being manifested in two differentiated grades of intensity). The first formulation is that of social citizenship and the postwar (or Keynesian) welfare state, while the second is that of the neoliberal welfare state. The first manifestation was that of active citizenship and the active welfare state. Subsequently, with the Great Recession of 2008, the formulation of the responsible citizen and the residualized welfare state (that is, a form that is geared towards a residual model of social policy) emerged. This phase, in the wake of the global financial crisis of 2008, legitimizes all the targets that had been systematically cultivated in a milder way in the first phase of the neoliberal welfare state. It aims at the liberalization of processes for the privatization of social policy and the shift towards a residual welfare state.
It is of particular importance that each of these periods is defined by the situation that succeeds it. The framework of the Keynesian welfare state becomes delineated shortly after its end, when the consequences of its delegitimization can be seen. Accordingly, the boundaries of the first phase of the neoliberal state can be discerned immediately after the start of the second (Great Recession of 2008). Each of these periods incorporates boundaries, rules of legitimacy, different forms and objects of intervention, and, of course, different interpretations and explanations. By way of example, Keynesian consensus was the legal basis for the development of the welfare state and social policy in the early postwar decades. Its purpose was to assist the stateās macroeconomic intervention by pursuing a Keynesian economic policy and establishing a framework to support institutions for redistribution of income and rights.
For a variety of reasons this consensus can be derived from and shaped as a symptom of the general will. These different types of consensus are common, while the prevailing form of consensus over a given period of time is complex and dynamic (Gravaris 1997). Consensus evolves with continuities or discontinuities, with consent or conflict. Reasonably speaking then, the change in the measure of equilibrium to the sovereign will is a structural variable in the transformations of social citizenship and the welfare state.
Changes in such social formations and types of social intervention originate precisely from changes to these limits. In this sense, the Keynesian consensus was agreed between industrial capital and organized labor unions at a time when this could be justified. This outcome was not, however, static. On the contrary, this consensus coincided, according to Kalecki (1943), with a political-economic cycle that led to the redistribution of income and rights.
At the end of this cycle, the industrial class sought to recover whatever it had momentarily been forced to give up. This was accomplished through policies to reclaim the socialized processes of capital accumulation. In this second cycle (in this case, the neoliberal welfare state) there was a drastic restriction of income and rights redistribution processes and institutions (Gravaris 2018: 88ā9). In this historical form, there was a reduction in the methods used by the state for the extraction of forms of social assistance that, until the advent of modernity, had been left to society (charity, mutual help, the social role of the church).
In the international scholarly literature there are several analyses of the relationship between citizenship and the welfare state for each of these historical periods separately (e.g. Marshall 1950; OāConnor 1973; Titmuss 1974; Pinker 1980; Pierson 1991, 2001; Turner 1997; Spicker 2000; Dean 2004, 2014; Clarke et al. 2007; Taylor-Gooby 2008; Hoxsey 2011; Dwyer and Wright 2014; Edmiston 2017). However, work that has attempted a macroscopic, parallel, and combined examination of these conceptual transformations is limited and does not always aim to fulfil such a purpose. In simple terms, the importance of the welfare state for transformations in citizenship has been little studied (Taylor-Gooby 2008: 7), although it is central.
A range of contributions to the international literature has attempted to study important aspects of this relationship. Christopher Pierson (1991) offers a key text on the emergence and development of welfare states and an introduction to their contemporary challenges. The classic study by George and Wilding (1994) deals with the main ideologies of welfare. OāBrien and Penna (1998) set out different theoretical approaches, which seek to interpret historical and contemporary changes to the welfare state. Fitzpatrickās (2001) book aspires to provide a comprehensive analysis of the theory of well-being. In particular, its Chap. 4 approaches citizenship as a complex set of obligations and rights, which is a crucial component of the theory of welfare. Deaconās (2002) study seeks to provide a detailed elaboration of ways of reshaping citizenship and social well-being in Britain and America. Dwyerās (2004) monograph is perhaps the most comprehensive reading of citizenship in the light of social policy, as it sets out a variety of different perceptions and versions of it.
Taylorās (2007) book attempts to codify the diversity of ideological approaches to the issue of well-being and to elaborate on the ways in which they are reflected in a range of social policies. The collective volume by Alcock et al. (2008) refers, in part, to the historical background and contemporary context of well-being and citizenship in Britain. Taylor-Gooby (2008) deals with the remodeling of the content of citizenship in light of the contemporary challenges facing welfare states.
Dwyer and Wright (2014) find that personalized conditions and obligations for the enjoyment of social benefits are now at the heart of the concept of citizenship in the twenty-first century. Edmiston (2017) points out that modern cuts in the British welfare state are undermining the effectiveness and universality of citizenship.
It is clear from this brief overview that, despite the existence of a significant number of studies that seek to relate the concepts of citizenship and the welfare state to a particular historical period, this is not applicable to a comparative assessment of the transformations to them between different historical phases. Efforts in the latter case appear to be extremely limited and it is worth mentioning two of them, which show evidence of convergence with the effort undertaken in this book.
The first is that of Ruth Lister (2011). Lister, in her attempt to highlight the context of the transition to what she calls the āera of responsibility,ā discusses the mild reforms undertaken by the Labour government in the United Kingdom before the Great Recession of 2008 and subsequently by the Cameron Conservative government. To do so, she examines the ways in which social policy measures have been used to create a treaty for social control and the promotion of citizensā responsibilities and obligations. Lister argues that this logic of āresponsibilityā was applied to the most vulnerable. As a matter of fact, increased obligations for access to social benefits have been introduced, as well as eligibility filters for fulfilling citizenship. In an environment like this, the state has created conditions of hostility to citizensā rights that, unlike increased responsibilities and obligations, are almost absent from the public agenda.
A second and more macroscopic effort is that of Moreno (2016), whose work contains the most relevant dimensions of the argument that will be developed in the following pages. Moreno argues that three different phases of the welfare state can be distinguished. The first is the golden age, corresponding to its postwar development. The second is the silver age, which was formed and evolved from the 1970s to the Great Recession of 2008. The third is the bronze age, which is unfolding in the current period of crisis. Through an analysis of each of the different periods that Moreno distinguishes, he concludes that the bronze age may well be the prelude to a return to a āprehistoricā social Europe.
Having focused on some of the central concerns of the relevant studies, this study then moves on to its central discussion. The originality of this work is that it attempts to examine the two concepts in their parallel evolutionary path. That is, after each theoretical analysis of the transformations of citizenship, this transformation is correlated with the form of the welfare state that has been legiti...