The Crisis of Citizenship. A Symptom of Societal Destructuration

A widespread socio-political diagnosis suggests that renewed reform processes are needed to address the social and environmental crises facing contemporary societies. To understand what this implies from the viewpoint of societal analysis, a retrospective look at the reform processes that characterised the substantial development of welfare after the World War II as well as its later crisis is necessary. The chapter reconstructs these processes with reference to the United Kingdom during the Clement Attlee’s Labour Government since 1945. It shows how the institutionalisation of civil, political and social citizenship rights influenced the building of a shared consensus about the fundamentals of civil coexistence. To understand its later crisis the guiding principles of the neo-liberal worldview as well as the modalities of their implementation since the 1980s are presented. The focus is here on the social fragmentation and the loss of social legitimacy that these processes induced. The main societal phenomenon that emerges from the analysis is that of a failing social structuration that comes to expression in the ‘intermittent normativity’ of contemporary societies. The question thus arises as to how a resumption of regulatory societal structuration in the sense of an ecologically aware twenty-first century welfare can develop. In this respect, the chapter analyses the reciprocal action between the high social plasticity of contemporary societies and the transformative potential of social action.