Social Citizenship and the
Environment
JOAQUI´N VALDIVIELSO
Department of Philosophy, University of the Balearic Islands, Spain
ABSTRACT Social citizenship, an idea and practice that is currently undergoing substantial reconsideration, is often regarded as requiring high economic growth and the spread of the market economy and formal work. But this may have consequences for sustainability. To consider whether or not sustainability and social citizenship are compatible, the notion of social citizenship is here divided into three elements of social commitment: industrial, waged and contractual. The analysis attempts to reveal the extent to which the nature of social citizenship has been transformed, and examines its relationship with sustainability and the idea of ecological citizenship.
Introduction
The debate on citizenship has been central in moral and political theory and philosophy in the last decade. To a large degree, this academic revival has given priority to political and civil dimensions and largely overlooked others of great importance. This particularly affects social citizenship, which has been immersed in a substantial reconsideration of its own at the same time.
For example, in July 2004, benefits for the unemployed in Germany – the paradigm of broad social citizenship – suffered the deepest cuts in the last 50 years. The red–green alliance in the Federal Government has just started to implement the social democratic programme called Agenda 2010, a substitute for the old Godesberg Programme which ‘paved the way for freedom, justice and solidarity by providing the framework for social and economic reforms based on a social market economy’ (SDP 2003: 2). Like similar programmes, Agenda 2010 stresses the need for a ‘modernisation of the labour market’ and ‘ecological modernisation’ in addition to growth and employment, the classic means of achieving the old ideals. In any case, these new issues are secondary to the old requirements, which has led to extremely ambitious approaches. Thus, Swedish Premier Goran Perssons wondered recently, ‘How can we create growth, full employment, and a sound environment, as well as develop the European social model (. . .)?’ (Perssons, 2004: 1).
Correspondence Address: UIB. Edif. Ramon Llull Crta. Valldemossa, km. 7.5. 07122 Palma de Mallorca, Spain. Email: jvaldivielso@uib.es
Vol. 14, No. 2, 239 – 254, April 2005
The green movement has always suspected that achieving sustainability would be difficult if economic growth and formal employment were encouraged to achieve their highest possible rates. The purpose of this article is to consider whether or not sustainability and social citizenship are necessarily incompatible. Rather than examining the possible financial feasibility of a more environmen-tally benign social State, the notion of citizenship itself in terms of both social and environmental questions will be considered. To do so, social citizenship is analysed in a way that reveals the extent, if any, to which its nature has been transformed and its possible relationship with sustainability and even with the idea of ecological citizenship. To shed light on the complexities of a possible model which combines the requirements of ecological and social citizenship, the notion of social citizenship has been divided into three elements or dimensions of social commitment: industrial, waged and contractual.
The Tripartite Soul of the Old Social Citizenship
Social citizenship is frequently viewed in terms of socio-economic rights: rights to the socialisation of certain risks thanks to a relative redistribution of wealth through the welfare state. As with other dimensions of citizenship, the responsibility for reducing social citizenship to a bundle of rights is largely due to the influence of T. H. Marshall. According to Marshall’s (1992) seminal thesis, welfare rights represent a third ‘part’ or ‘element’ in the development of citizenship, after civil and political rights. This view conveys the impression that satisfying social rights depends on the prior realisation of civil and political rights. Although fruitful on one hand, three limitations to this perspective can be pointed out.
The first limitation is that the conceptual distinction between the civil, political and social arenas is itself deceptive. In fact, securing social rights sanctioned the rights to political organisation, representation and action in productive activity – political rights – as an inseparable part of the social package. Obviously, the relative ‘constitutionalisation’ or politicisation of the private economic sphere altered the very idea of civil rights and in particular, the liberal-Lockean vision of ownership of the means of production as an extension of the corporealmeum. It implied a right to another’s property – ‘jus in res aliena’ – in favour of workers (Dome´nech, 2004).
The second limitation is that interpreting the typology in evolutionary terms, as if the development of rights would lead in a linear fashion from one generation to another, to a ‘phase’ rather than a ‘part’, is not very convincing. As socialist criticism has pointed out, the real enlargement of some rights may coexist with severe restrictions in others; in fact, communist regimes in the mid-twentieth century were more intensive in social rights and less so in civil and political rights than many of their contemporaries in the West (Bottomore, 1992: 55, 62).
conceptions of citizenship around two basic poles, a rights-centred conception belonging to Marshall’s liberal tradition and a duties or obligations-centred conception belonging to the civic-republican tradition (Dobson, 2003: 38).
It is more useful to argue that social rights in democratic societies have transformed the architecture of the very idea of citizenship itself and have structurally affected other rights, especially property rights. The result of concrete social struggles and class conflict, the modern ideals of freedom, justice and solidarity were taken one step further to transform the similarly modern ideals of individual, property and market. In other words, these ideals were not mere appendices to the basic, core rights of a liberal origin that took normative priority over other core rights of socialist origin. Instead, they were the contingent and concrete resolution of the tension between different elements in the modern notion of citizenship and especially in the notions of justice and equality.
At the same time it seems that social citizenship cannot be reduced to a mere bundle of rights. In fact, its own lexicon refers to ‘social contract’, ‘post-war social consensus’ and ‘industrial agreement’, expressions which bring to mind a weighing of rights and duties. In general, political economy has indicated two distinct levels of institutionalisation in the social pact, especially comprehensible within the context of the post-war economy and the prevalence of the Fordist model of production and consumption. At the micro level, the relative democratisation of the workplace was channelled through trade union representatives, yet it also involved the renunciation of the maximalist objectives of workers’ control and self-management so fervently supported by a part of the working class of the time. At the macro level, it meant participating in social pacts (frequently specified and arbitrated by the state) aimed at productivity and economic growth. The indexed growth in wages and the multiplier effect of the consumption it favoured also formed part of the agreement.
In other words, the social agreement also implied the involvement of great swaths of the population in the success of enterprises and the economy in general and in particular in a specific way of consuming and producing. Boltanski and Chiapello (1999) considered that this type of commitment configured the very notion of political community – ‘cite´’ – and of the general or common good and could therefore be denominated a ‘civic-industrial commitment’. Interestingly, in the 1950s, T. H. Marshall himself thought of citizens imbued with a certain fundamental morality of industrial origin; when differentiating citizenship from the regime of serfdom, he held that ‘citizenship requires a bond of a different kind, a direct sense of community membership based on loyalty to a civilisation which is a common possession’ (1992: 24). In his opinion, with the advent of social rights, ‘social integration spread from the sphere of sentiment and patriotism into that of material enjoyment’:
On this reading, the social element of citizenship provides access to ‘material civilisation’, ‘material enjoyment’, ‘the whole range from the right to a modicum of economic welfare and security to the right to share in the full social heritage and to live the life of acivilised being according to the standards prevailing in the society’ (1992: 8; italics added). Marshall could not be clearer, and he spoke of an ‘industrial citizenshipparallel with and supplementary to the system of political citizenship’ (1992: 26). Then, ‘social integration’, membership in and loyalty extended from (patriotic) morality to the common heritage of industrial civilisation and citizenship. Marshall even refers to the concrete way in which that commitment is carried out. When most of the population had a job, he wrote,
It is no easy matter to revive the sense of the personal obligation to work in a new form in which it is attached to the status of citizenship. It is not made any easier by the fact that the essential duty is not to have a job and hold it, since that is relatively simple in conditions of full employment, but to put one’s heart into one’s job and work hard (1992: 46–47).
Here it appears that ‘the personal obligation to work’ is ‘attached to the status of citizenship’ and that ‘the sense of obligation’ is put into practice by working ‘hard’, ‘with one’s heart in it’. Marshall is usually read (and there is textual evidence for this of course) as insisting on the idea that the sole concrete duty of the citizen is to pay taxes and that ‘[t]he other duties are vague, and are included in the general obligation to live the life of a good citizen, giving such service as one can to promote the welfare of the community’ (1992: 45). However, giving oneself up to work is not the type of duty that can be labelled ‘vague’, especially when Marshall seemed to lament the lack of a greater moral commitment by workers.
In short, these are not simply welfare rights. On the one hand, the right to equal citizenship is fulfilled by accessing material consumption in a more egalitarian manner in industrial civilisation, namely, as an ‘industrial citizen’. On the other hand, maintaining this civilisation depends on virtuous participation in the world of labour and the enterprise, that is, as a ‘worker citizen’. From this point of view, the duty of the ‘social citizen’ lies not only in contributing to maintaining the welfare state with his taxes, but also in morally committed actions with a particular idea of civilisation in mind when consuming and working, namely, as a ‘citizen’ and not just as a mere tax-payer. Distinguishing between the three distinct components of the idea of social citizenship – referred to here as industrial, waged and contractual components – may be of use in better understanding the possible intersection between social and environmental questions.
The Industrial Citizen
more advanced, industrialised societies. But, what does ‘industrial civilisation’ mean from the environmental point of view? The ecological economist, J. M. Naredo (2001), thinks that it is the fact that humans no longer produce and reproduce their lives like other species that defines ‘industrial civilisation’. The notion of industrial civilisation is related to the industrial human-nature metabolism: based for the first time in history on the transformation and movement of materials and fossil fuels and not on photosynthetic products.
Under current conditions this involves great material inequalities at different levels. According to Naredo’s calculations, at the intra-generational level in 1995, the total material requirement was 18 tonnes per capita, with rich countries averaging 75 tonnes and poorer societies coming in at just 7. Based on data from Wackernagel’s and Rees’ work on the ecological footprint, approximately 20% of the worldwide population consumes 70–80% of its natural resources (cited in Sachs, 2002: 19). At the inter-generational level, Wackernagel would add that humanity is currently exceeding the biosphere’s biological capacity by over 20%, which means that the common heritage of future generations is being depleted (Wackernagel et al., 1999: 385). Other methodologies and categories, such as the ‘environmental space’ used by Friends of the Earth or the ‘ecological rucksack’ of the Friedrich Schmidt-Bleek from the Wuppertal Institute (see Naredo, 2001), have added to these conclusions and show the extent to which industrial civilisation provides opportunities for material consumption. All these methodologies stress the fact that the material basis of industrial civilisation is finite and non-renewable, which is why the relationship between differences in consumption is causal; the consumption of some members impedes the improvement of others.
Globalisation boosts this process. On one hand, the dominance of the financial world over the productive economy implies extra pressure on natural planetary resources: purchasing power increases while the available stock of natural wealth decreases. On the other hand, the growing asymmetry between the monetary costs of extraction and the much higher costs of the final phases of administration and marketing make increasing international specialisation stress the divide ‘between poles of capitals and products accumulation and those of mining and dumping’ (Naredo, 2001: 59).
‘when G. Bush Sr. asserts that the American way of life is not up for negotiation, he asserts [not just] that its vital space cannot be reduced’ (Flipo, 2002: 62), but that others’ vital space cannot be enlarged and secured. There is a causal link between the over and under-use of natural space. Thus, over-consumers possess a kind of de facto ‘jus industrialis’, a privilege of entitlement restricted and guaranteed by their power to purchase environmental space. Andrew Dobson makes much of this kind of thinking in his appropriation of the idea of ecological space as the ‘space of citizenship’ in his theory of ecological citizenship (Dobson, 2003).
Nevertheless, the question must be asked whether this is a licit use of the term citizenship. From the viewpoint of the tradition of citizenship, there is one important deficit: the lack of a global political structure which guarantees the rights of ecological citizenship. Despite this, the idea is present in certain discourses employed by environmental non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and networks in global civil society, such as the example of the Jo’burg Memo. These agents denounce the relationships of power of the national and international institutions that generate and promote them: global trade and financial organisations, corporations, states, etc. When developing this ideafromcitizenship itself, Dobson stresses the challenging nature of this non-territorial idea, based on ‘thick’ material obligations, such as ‘ensuring that ecological footprints have a sustainable impact’ (2003: 119), and applying that, wherever pertinent, to the private-domestic sphere as well.
One of the problems with this conceptionfromecological citizenship has to do with membership. This article has previously highlighted the importance that access to material enjoyment as a means to inclusion has in Marshall’s view. In this regard, although it would be difficult to identify the ecological citizen in relation to a political structure, some criteria are required to distinguish between ecological and non-ecological citizens. Along the lines of this argument, one response would be to identify ecological citizenship by the sustainable consumption of environmental space. Nevertheless, and although the use of a universalisable footprint would allow under-consumers access to material civilisation, many ecological activists often do not have the opportunity to maintain sustainable consumption. Especially for those in wealthy societies, the needs of mobility, food, work, housing, training or leisure frequently cannot be met in accordance with criteria of sustainable consump-tion; the least impact possible is often still much higher than the desired impact in universal terms. Therefore, the notion of ecological citizenship must include the aspiration to being able to live sustainably, namely, the will to carry out the ‘thick’ obligation that Dobson indicates and social action aimed at sanctioning rights that protect it and make it feasible. This might be considered the possible boundary of the community of ecological citizens – their sphere of member-ship.
(Sachs, 2002) as social relations between under- and over-consumers: ‘more affluent groups’, ‘consumer classes around the world’ and ‘urban-based middle classes’ deprive ‘the poor’, ‘the marginalised majority’. From this perspective, equity should involve reducing over-consumers’ consumption. The ecological footprints within a society are enormously disparate and, significantly for the purposes at hand, the greatest over-consumers are probably not the main beneficiaries of social citizenship (see Stymme & Jackson, 2000), although this does not exempt them from their corresponding share of responsibility. As mentioned above, the growing purchasing power of the well-to-do is the root of environmental injustice; therefore, ecological citizenship must aspire not only to guaranteeing the right to live sustainably, but also to bringing those who do not do so closer to sustainable ways of life. This article proposes that this is predictable in terms of membership in the global community of sustainable consumers, although undoubtedly not in the classic terms of the right to national citizenship based onjus solisorsanguinisand in clear contrast to what here has been calledjus industrialis.
The Worker Citizen
In recent decades, fulfilling ‘the essential duty to have a job’ has not been as simple as it was in Marshall’s time. This has to do with the change in the nature of formal work. After the experiences of the 1970s and 1980s, being employed is no longer the normal state of affairs: ‘the gap between the imagined normality of employment and a steady job and the experienced reality of unemployment, under-employment and precarious or irregular employment is widening’, indicated Offe and Heinze (1992: 2). In spite of the increasing number of gainfully employed people, structural changes in advanced economies have meant that standard well-paid employment is disappearing. ‘We have ended welfare as we know it’, in Bill Clinton’s words, much as we have ended employment as we knew it, replaced by a myriad of temporary and sub-standard flexible forms of employment: telework, self-employment, free-lancing, on-call work contracts, job-sharing, and so forth, or simply undeclared work (EIRO, 2004: 59–67). As Sennett aptly indicated (1998), it is increasingly harder to build a biographical narrative from a professional career. Two consequences of importance for the ecological question deserve attention.
other concerns to the primary goal of profit-maximisation’ and ‘increasing inequality and commodification of ‘nature’ as ‘natural resources’ (Paterson, 2001: 46–48), ‘workers’ as the ‘labour force’, ‘creative beings’ as ‘human capital’ (Gorz, 2003: 1) and ‘citizens’ as ‘consumers’ (Bauman, 1998: ch.2).
The second is that industrial-labour integration also has a moral dimension. The work ethic and vigour that Marshall yearned for referred not only to its productive dimension, but also to its civic and civilising ones as well. Work well done was viewed not only as part of a labour contract, but also as a contribution to the common good – ‘public service’ – and even to the Promethean project of harnessing nature. This idea of civilisation brought different traditions together, including socialist and liberal ones, which were at odds for other reasons (Lipietz, 1993: ch.3) and led to the enthusiastic championing of work as a universal unifier on more than one occasion. Nowadays, two types of pressure pulling in opposite directions are affecting the work ethic.
First, the reformulation of capitalism in the 1980s gave birth to a newethos
that Boltanski and Chiapello call a ‘new spirit’ (1999). Nowadays, businesses attempt to value all the skills that make employees more flexible, including relational, communicative and emotional skills (as mentioned previously, this ‘knowledge economy’ is not an immaterial economy, at least not from the viewpoint of its relationship with the natural environment). The old social contract, by contrast, signified a change in the regime of servitude in the sense that it was a ‘contract’: workers did not alienate their person, only their labour (Gorz, 2003: 16). At any rate, this ‘total mobilisation’ of the flexible worker (Gorz, 2003: 22) has important repercussions on citizenship, as it promotes group adhesion, corporate patriotism and hypercompetitive attitudes in general – as can be seen in management narratives that invokecoach, leader, hero and so forth. Thus, in an environment of extreme uncertainty, labour socialisation under globalised capitalism, in Sennett’s words, ‘corrupts character’, hinders the establishment of stable commitments and dissolves the presumed universality of the old work ethic. This new morality questions the very idea of the worker citizen itself.
As can be seen, a contract of this type would seem to benefit from a certain cultural change. On the one hand, the morality generated by this new capitalism has lost the universalist aspiration of the old work ethic, while relaxing the identification between work well done and the industrialist dream. Two questions arise from the standpoint of sustainability: Must one stop being a worker citizen in order to become an ecological citizen? In other words, does entry into the labour force necessarily lead to ‘industrial integration’? If not, then how is it possible to be an ecological citizen while being a waged worker? And if so, how would social citizenship be possible without any type of labour commitment?
Reflecting on the different forms of membership in terms of social citizenship may be useful in addressing the first question. Even before the crisis in the full employment society, social critique had denounced the existence of a ‘fourth world’ of social exclusion in a broader sense, which it denominated ‘social exclusion’ (Klanfer, 1965). In those days, the term had a broader character and emphasized the structural generation of different forms of social pathologies and deprivation. It was not until the 1990s, under the looming shadow of massive unemployment, that it was restricted to the lack of integration into the legal, remunerated, productive environment, and structural analysis was replaced by individualist explanatory models. Those who wished to maintain the structural perspective have not left off denouncing what they have metaphorically christened ‘dualisation’, ‘South-Africanisation’ or ‘Braziliani-sation’ and predicting that a third and even half of the population will be permanently excluded (for example, Gorz, 1989: 88). These predictions have not come true, at least in wealthy countries, although stratification between different forms and degrees of vulnerability or exclusion has become the prevailing note (Bauman, 1998). In other words, there are different degrees of membership in social citizenship.
The volume and forms of exclusion also depend on the way each society redistributes social provision. Welfare theorists, with some differences, usually agree on at least three ideas in this regard. Firstly, they agree that economic security and provisioning should be promoted not only by the state, but also by other institutions, such as the market and families. Secondly, they agree that the models that promote access to the most egalitarian standards of living are the least conditional models, with the paradigmatic example of the Scandinavian countries. The least universalist, such as the North American model, leave access to welfare in the hands of the market, although they usually include some type of palliative assistance for the most vulnerable groups. Thirdly, welfare theorists agree that the current trend in welfare regimes is to lose the centripetal, inclusive and unconditional State-centred dialectics in favour of a greater commodification of provisioning (see Esping-Andersen, 1990; Handler, 2002).
which Marshall or Handler take for granted and which does not prevent entire pockets of the population, particularly immigrants, from being excluded. However, the greater levels of labour freedom they promote have made some of these societies exemplary models for those who strive for equality. Yet beyond that, this greater freedom made these societies laboratories for all kinds of social experiments and more sustainable consumption and production methods that are less dependent on capitalist imperatives: co-operative social economy, non-lucrative mutuals, do-it-yourself activities, moneyless exchange and self-supply networks, barter clubs, and so forth. This third sector has been not only an activator of moral stock but also an authentic source of basic sustenance when it lacks the backing of a strong state, as the recent crisis in Argentina has demonstrated (Castro, 2003). In general, this has made critics of the labour society invest a great deal of their post-productivist hopes into developing a ‘third sector’ of a ‘convivial’ or ‘reciprocal’ economy (Lipietz, 2000; Gorz, 1997: 161–175; Graham Smith and Gill Seyfang, this volume). In short, a productive sphere is proposed in which living sustainably, the first requirement of ecological citizenship, can be promoted, in which the ecological citizen escapes waged labour.
However, total liberation from industrialism is not easily achieved; the dependability of monetary income flows to finance modern finance systems involves a limit to the volume of coverage that can be de-commodified, as indicated by Offe and Heinze, defenders of the development of this third sector (1992: 4). Even when alternative ways of life, work and consumption reduce certain social expenditures at the same time, it does not seem likely that services such as health or pensions can be made totally independent from the formal economy.
This tension between gainful and meaningful work has led theorists of the post-productivist social contract to propose the maximum freedom of movement between different productive activities and particularly to favour the sphere of freely defined needs and sustainable self-production guided by concrete reciprocity and solidarity. A post-Keynesian social contract would thus promote a ‘multi-activity society’, thanks to social reforms based on the shortening and sharing of working hours and life, some form of basic income and public policies which promote a reduced-scale sustainable economy. Although the term originated with Andre´ Gorz (1997), different combinations of such reforms have been proposed by authors such as C. Offe and A. Lipietz, as well as U. Beck, J. Habermas and J. Rifkin, among many other important social theorists. The third sector would become an additional pillar of a welfare regime that would sanction the right ‘not to work to destroy the world’, thus debilitating the association between industrial/wage and social aspects of labour.
public space’ (Gorz, 1997: 65). In short, this perspective continues to conceive of social provision as a counterpart to some type of public service – in this case, productive but not necessarily within the labour market. Thus, one comes to the question of whether it is possible to conceive of social citizenship without any labour obligation at all, waged or not.
Citizen or Taxpayer?
The crux of the so-called guaranteed basic income (GBI) is precisely its rupture with any kind of conditionality in the social contract, whether commercial or moral. This is not a post-wage contract, but rather goes beyond the idea of contract through ‘an income paid by a political community to all its members on an individual basis, without test or work requirement’ (Van Parijs, 2004: 7). Its unconditionality and universality are what separate it from earlier proposals. It should be recalled, for example, that active employment policies are not always conditional. For example, the French RMI (revenu minimum d’insertion), a guaranteed minimum income established in 1988, is almost unconditional compared toworkfare, as it does not demand proof of the will to (re)enter the labour market. Nevertheless, it is limited to the most vulnerable or excluded groups, while GBI is not.
Evidently, the political and economic feasibility of this proposal is extremely problematic, especially if the failure of similar, much more modest proposals is taken into account, such as the 35-hour working week, in clear regression wherever it has been implemented, such as in France and Germany. Despite that, it is justifiable in terms of citizenship and comparable to the universal right to vote, in terms of the unconditional distribution of a minimum of power to co-determine the destinies of the community itself (Dome´nech, 2004: 7–8). Through it, ecological citizens could access waged and non-waged forms of attractive activities which would be less vulnerable to the imperatives of capital, against which they would be endowed with a greater bargaining force. Although it would not prescribe public services – as would be prescribed for the classic republican citizen – it would sanction the right to be able to act responsibly in the productive sphere without splitting society into two types of citizens: first-class ones and the rest, excluded from material civilisation. GBI is also thus justified in ecological terms and its champions remind us that it allows the link between productivity and welfare to be overcome (Van Parijs, 2004: 18). This is the key to its possible compatibility with ecological citizenship. Nevertheless, is pure unconditional citizenship feasible? Delving into the normative background of social citizenship may shed some light here.
‘freedom, justice and solidarity’, to cite Germany’s Social Democratic Party (SDP). That is the essence of the welfare state: the distribution of market income through full employment and regulated labour markets, the redistribution of market income among households through the tax/transfer system and the relative emancipation of market income through entitlements to health care, education, training, housing, recreation, culture and a wide range of social services such as childcare and care for the elderly. Non-market indirect wages have tended to protect the most disadvantaged groups, such as the elderly or the disabled, in a wide variety of more solidaristic or charitable ways, but always by redistributing material goods. This vision of the nature of protection is precisely the distinguishing feature between the classic outlook and the moderniser.
Returning to the example of Germany’s SDP, the main difference between its current Agenda 2010 and the old Godesberg programme resides in ‘the modernisation of the labour market’ by means of a ‘carrot and stick principle’. ‘[T]hose who do not try hard enough to find a job or who turn down a
reasonable job will be forced to accept a reduction or termination of their benefit’ (SDP, 2003: 15;italics added). On this reading, and in Marshall’s own words, unemployed people could be accused of being bad citizens. This idea squares with current (new) conservative or ‘Third Way’ discourses, with current Chancellor Gerhard Schro¨der’s assertion that ‘no one has the right to be lazy’, part of the critique of the ‘dependency culture’. Thus, Anglo-Saxon
workfare, Agenda 2010, socialist flexisecurity in France and the European Union’s ‘new social contract’ accentuate social citizenship’s conditionality on a waged labour contract.
Joel Handler, following in Marshall’s steps, insists that this new regime produces the displacement of citizenship from ‘status’ to ‘contract’. Previously, ‘social benefits [were] rights that were attached by virtue of status – the status of citizenship’. According to Handler, ‘as with all citizenship rights, [the core of social citizenship] is fundamentally moral. Redistribution is an act of solidarity, of inclusion’ (2002: 5). His thesis is that inclusion through workfare obligations is ‘contradictory’ (2004), and results in the exclusion of those who cannot comply with the rules, especially immigrants, women, lone parents, long-term unemployed and even workers in a weak position from which to bargain with entrepreneurs.
– theraison d’eˆtreof the shift lies in the fiscal pressure to which welfare states are subject nowadays and equally in what he considers the disappearance of the ‘moral mechanism’ that founded post-war social citizenship (Rosanvallon, 1995: ch.7). Today, in his opinion, there is no social cement for a type of shared ethnicity in favour of unconditional solidarity. People find themselves in a ‘post-Rawlsian age’: the veil of ignorance from the war has been torn off and the wealthy are aware of their status and do not acknowledge any debt to the poor. Nevertheless, then, even for him, social citizenship was the result of the reinforcement of civic ties forged during the struggle against fascism. At any rate, and in the words of Rousseau’sSocial Contract, Rosanvallon states, ‘La Patriehas a debt towards its citizens because they are ready to die for her if necessary’ and the welfare state ‘is no more than an ordinary and restrained version of this ideal’ (1995: 49).
Given such as a shift, given that this ideal has been lost, does the new contract preserve the original core of citizenship? Rosanvallon himself returns to the idea that the foundation of the acquis social does not respond to a pragmatic quid pro quo agreement between those who finance and use the welfare state – basically, the middle class. This article has stated that it was not so much the willingness to die – as Rosanvallon does – as to adhere to the national material civilisation and tame class conflict which developed the contract, but the main point is that it seems inevitable to acknowledge the idea that the real moral grounds for citizenship is that everyone, not just taxpayers, deserves to be a citizen in similar conditions. In any event, it refers to some type of moral covenant, an inter-subjective commitment to equity and justice, that GBI tries to maintain. However, in the case of social citizenship the commitment has to do with the production and distribution of material goods. Here, a pure unconditional GBI can be fruit from the poisoned tree.
beneficiaries is attractive, but unconditional monetary flows do not exist; they are always generated at the expense of some type of consumption and production.
Conclusion
Social citizenship fundamentally refers to a moral and civic commitment to equality and justice. Therefore, it rests on the assumption of a notion of the common good and the commitment to ensure the rights to exercise the concomitant duty of participating in its definition and its fruits. The old social contract was the result of the historical processes of social struggles that materialised in institutions, values, images and concrete beliefs in its industrial and waged dimensions. Without a doubt, globalisation challenges a good part of the institutional framework, both micro and macro, which sustains it, but also unmasks its limitations: its restricted national scope, the productivist aura of the work and consumption ethic, in short its lack of civilising content.
The moral cement of social commitment is being redefined day by day, from the most commodified and compassionate to the most universalist and unconditional viewpoints. Ecological citizenship has a role to play in this space for social construction. From the viewpoint of sustainability, a new social contract should encourage forms of sustainable work and production patterns which do not destroy resources. From the viewpoint of social citizenship, it would aspire to similar material conditions and a dignified way of life for all. This is the framework that defines what a ‘reasonable’ work and welfare could be, the civic and civilising criteria which the old work ethic yearned for. If an ecological and social contract were to be implemented, the conditionality of social coverage should be focused in that direction rather than on integration into the workplace at all costs. In this case, wage citizens should have the possibility to develop their activities as free as possible from the imperatives of growth and capitalism’s new morality. The bio-transformative aspect of work should not be overlooked, nor should the fact that the private-productive sphere, whether market or not, can be alocusfrom which the ecological citizen can struggle to live sustainably. Escaping the wage requirement does not seem to be a fully generalisable option and therefore overcoming the industrial trap must also include regulating the formal economy with ecological criteria – those activities that nurture social provision as well as those which make them necessary, especially if they are, like the consumption of fossil resources, unsustainable. Unfortunately, social provision sustained by the last type of activity does not satisfy civilising criteria.
sliding down the slippery slope of consumerism and productivism; perhaps the constrictions of globalisation are unsalvageable. Nevertheless, the idea of citizenship should no longer serve as an alibi for industrial civilisation.
Acknowledgements
This research was developed within the Justice, Social Change and the Limits of Welfare State research programme funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Education (BSO2000-1116-C04-01). The author is indebted to the research group on Politics, Labour and Sustainability from the University of the Balearic Islands (UIB) for its support and comments, and to the participants in the ‘Citizenship and the Environment’ workshop at the ECPR Joint Sessions (Uppsala, Sweden, 13–18 April 2004).
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