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Redefining Responsibility: The Politics of Citizenship in the United Kingdom*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 November 2009

Katherine Fierlbeck
Katherine Fierlbeck
Affiliation:
Dalhousie University
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Abstract

The growing economic liberalization within, and interdependence between, modern states have limited the ability of state administrations effectively to pursue public policies without the “co-operation and self-restraint” of their citizens. The concept of citizenship will thus increasingly be a battlefield in the struggle for ideological hegemony between major political interests who attempt to define citizenship to enhance their respective political agendas. These debates over the nature of citizenship have been articulated most clearly in the United Kingdom, where the Speaker's Commission on Citizenship (report released in September 1990) has been a focal point in the discussion of what citizenship in a modern state entails.

Résumé

La libéralisation et la plus grande interdépendence des ´conomies font en sorte que les administrations publiques des États modernes peuvent de moins en moins se passer de la coopération et de l' autodiscipline de leurs citoyens. Dans ce contexte, le concept de citoyenneté devient de plus en plus un enjeu dans la lutte pour l'hégémonie idéologique entre les grandes forces politiques qui cherchent á imposer une définition de la citoyenneté qui sert leurs intérêts respectifs. C'est dans le Royaume-Uni que ce débat autour de la nature de la citoyenneté dans un État moderne s'est le plus clairement exprimé, surtout à l'occasion des travaux de la Commission sur la Citoyennet´ (rendus publics en septembre 1990) présidée par le Président des Communes.

Type
Research Article
Information
Canadian Journal of Political Science/Revue canadienne de science politique , Volume 24 , Issue 3 , September 1991 , pp. 575 - 593
Copyright
Copyright © Canadian Political Science Association (l'Association canadienne de science politique) and/et la Société québécoise de science politique 1991

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References

1 Cairns, Alan and Williams, Cynthia, eds. Constitutionalism, Citizenship and Society in Canada, Royal Commission Research Studies, Vol. 33 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press for Supply and Services Canada, 1985), 43.Google Scholar

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7 “The strategy [of the current Social Democratic government] is therefore to introduce a new set of citizen rights to collective capital (‘economic citizenship’) as a means of resolving the existing contradictions between social citizenship with full employment and economic growth” (Esping-Andersen, G. and Korpi, W., “Social Policy as Class Politics in Post-War Capitalism,” in Goldthorpe, John, ed., Order and Conflict in Contemporary Capitalism [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984], 190).Google Scholar

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9 A fascinating question for sociologists, no less than for political scientists, is why such demands are arising in so many places with such ferocity.

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17 “The success of the new orthodoxy lies in its ability to supply an account of a good society which is in line with the direction of socioeconomic change, and which justifies the characteristic morality and lifestyle of the newly prosperous middle classes: ‘suburban prejudice made flesh,’ as it has been aptly described” (Jordan, Bill, The Common Good [Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989], 15).Google Scholar

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26 The Times, November 19, 1987, 2.

27 The New Statesman and the New Society were merged into the New Statesman and Society (NSS) in January 1988.

28 NSS, April 15, 1988, 3.

29 Ibid, (emphasis in original).

30 The Times, September 19, 1988, 2.

31 The Sunday Times, October 23, 1988, B3. his.

32 The Sunday Times, October 9, 1988, Al.

33 The Times, October 14, 1988, 16.

34 NSS, January 8, 1988, 21–23.

35 The Times, November 22, 1988, 4.

36 Encouraging Citizenship, v.

37 First section draft report, Sect. II, ii.

38 See the Manchester Guardian, January 31, 1988,

39 Malcolm Wicks, “Community Care and Citizenship,” draft paper for the Commission on Citizenship, March 28, 1990, 5.

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46 NSS, April 29, 1988, 14.

47 A 1988 Labour policy review document argued that a Bill of Rights would be “by its very nature concerned with negative rather than positive freedom” (“as if,” remarked one critic, “the former were unimportant”); that the protection of basic rights would be “at the mercy” of the judiciary; and that the document would tie British law to the European Human Rights Convention: factually true, but not a potently negative criticism. See NSS, May 20, 1988, and December 2, 1988; and the Manchester Guardian, October 25, 1988, 5; December 2, 1988, 15.

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