Citizenship in an Enlarging Europe Towards Gender Equity?

Abstract

In choosing to focus this book on the concept of citizenship, it has been important to bear in mind that the very concept is a construct of liberal democratic theory and hence problematic. Many feminist political theorists have pointed out that the liberal democratic theory of citizenship, while ostensibly based on universal principles and hence gender-neutral, has always been in practice mediated by gender, class and ‘race’, with women of all groups historically and currently excluded from full political agency (Lister, 1993: 3; Vogel, 1991). Anne Phillips notes that the end of state socialism proved to be not ‘the end of history’, but ‘only a preamble to renewed discussion of the forms and principles of democracy’ (Phillips, 1999: 4).