La crisis de la ciudadanía social y el malestar de la democracia en Europa

Abstract

Social citizenship has begun to break down in Europe, precisely at a time when technology has rendered the productive model more flexible and the world economy has become predominantly financialised, giving rise to differentiated career paths, structural labour surpluses (generated by the new mode of regulation and embedding of labour in the productive process), and highly fragmented life-styles. The social question (viewed from a national, distributive, labour-oriented and egalitarian standpoint), which had lain at the heart of the idea of Europe since World War II, has been losing its institutional defences as the economic framework has morphed into a multinational technological and financial network that is dispersed, volatile and delocalised. The result has been like a breakdown of the traditional labour-based society and the set of civic (and legal) conventions underpinning it, and the onset of an institutionally organised, progressive dualisation and fragmentation of labour relations; all this has meant a serial weakening of the framework of protection, security and rights enshrined in the classic European notion of labour citizenship that ultimately affects the very notion of democracy. Since the 1990s the European Union has been acting more as an agency of monetary discipline than a defender of the collective guarantees of wage-earners, and in the European context of today, social citizenship has shrunk to a new kind of liberal citizenship which remits solely to individual political freedoms.

Keywords

• austerity
• citizenship
• labour society
• public policies
• social fragmentation
• Welfare State