CITIZENSHIP AND SOCIAL INEQUALITY Definition Citizenship

CITIZENSHIP AND SOCIAL INEQUALITY

Definition • Citizenship refers to the rights and duties of the members of a state. Who is a member of the state?

T. H. MARSHALL: • Citizenship is a status which is enjoyed by a person who is full member of a community.

HISTORICAL ROOTS OF MODERN CITIZENSHIP • Classical Greece. Citizenship was limited to free men, who had a right to participate in political debate because they contributed, often through military service, to the direct support of the city-state. • Medieval Europe. A citizen was any member of a city; that is, an urban collectivity immune from the demands of monarch or state.

EXPANSION OF CITIZENSHIP THROUGH DEMOCRATISATION • It includes a wider definition of the citizen regardless of sex, age, race, or ethnicity.

• ORIGINS OF CITIZENSHIP: through natural processes of evolution or class struggle? Is it the outcome of working class struggle or ruling-class strategy?

SOCIAL MOVEMENTS AS FACTORS IN THE GENESIS OF CITIZENSHIP 1. Class struggle. 2. Feminist movement. 3. Human right movement. 4. Ecological movement.

Antony Giddens: • “In my view it is more valid to say that class conflict has been a medium of the extension of citizenship rights than to say that the extension of citizenship rights has blunted class division”.

THE SIGNIFICANCE OF WARS TO THE DEVELOPMENT OF CITIZENSHIP 1. In Britain the extension of the franchise to women was justified with reference to their participation in the war effort during the First World War. 2. The imposition of democratic institutions, including citizenship, on defeated societies (as was the case in Germany, Italy, etc. after the Second World War).

T. H. MARSHALL ON THE STRUCTURE OF CITIZENSHIP • Components of citizenship civic political social

Political citizenship • It guarantees the right to participate in the exercise of political power in the community: 1. by voting; or 2. by holding political office.

K. Marx on the value of political citizenship: • Of what significance are these individual rights in class-divided societies in which individuals do not have the practical ability to exercise them?

CIVIC RIGHTS • Rights which are recognized as belonging to all individuals in a society, which can be upheld by appeal to the law, and are not subject to arbitrary denial either by individuals or by the state. They are usually defended in terms of the protection of the individual from the state, and subject to clear limits, themselves identified in relation to the rights of others or else the common good.

THE RIGHTS OF WORKERS TO ORGANIZE IN TRADE UNIONS: IS IT THE OUTCOME OF CLASS STRUGGLE OR THE STRATEGY OF THE RULING CLASS? •

DISCUSSIONS ON CLASS & CITIZENSHIP • 1 st position. The development of citizenship leads to the decline of class and class conflict (Bendix). • 2 nd Position. The basic conflict between social classes has not yet been resolved.

SOCIAL CITIZENSHIP • It is the right to participate in an appropriate standard of living; this right is embodied in the welfare and educational systems of modern societies. • “The incorporation of social rights into the status of citizenship creates a universal right to real income which is not proportional to the market value of the claimant”.

T. Marshall: There is a permanent contradiction between the principles of citizenship and the operating of the capitalist market. “In the twentieth century citizenship and the capitalist class system have been at war”. • Capitalism inevitably involves inequalities between social classes, while citizenship involves some redistribution of resources, because of rights which are shared equally by all.

A. Giddens: The essentially fragile and contested nature of modern citizenship • 1. The citizenship is contested by the ruling class. • 2. The crisis of the modern welfare state.