Whither the social dimension? : Citizenship, multiculturalism and the enigma of social exclution

The European Community took, in the late 1980s and early 1990s, a principled stand stressing the urgency to defend and further develop the welfare state and its historically established rights of citizenship on the supranational level. This was, among other, explicitly expressed in the programmes on poverty and social exclusion (European_Commission 1991, Room 1992). The analytical and normative-political framework for reform and renewal, which was here set up, was explicitly informed by the British sociologist T. H. Marshall’s now classical theory of citizenship, most well-known from the widely red and commented essay, Citizenship and Social Class from 1950 (Marshall, 1992 (1950)). Here Marshall laid out a threefold analytical and theoretical framework for depicting the development of rights of citizenship, implicating a complex interplay between, what he called, civil, political and social rights of citizenship. Alongside the work of John Maynard Keynes in political economy Marshall’s concept of citizenship belongs to the basic theoretical foundations of post-Second World War welfare state policies in Europe. While Keynes laid out the framework for those new strategies of state led intervention into western market economies that harvested great successes until the mid-1970s, Marshall’s conception of modern citizenship represent an integrated analytical and moral-political framework for the theoretical understanding of the relationship between market, welfare and democratic polities (Strobel 1996)...