‘New Europeans’ for the ‘New European Economy”: Citizenship and the Lisbon Agenda

Abstract

This chapter analyses the European Union’s Lisbon Agenda and its relation to changing conceptions of citizenship in general, and social citizenship in particular. The guiding assumption made here is that citizenship, conceived in simple terms as the concept defining the rights and responsibilities of civil society to the state and vice versa, is not static but instead bound up with and dialectically related to broader struggles over socio-economic restructuring (see also Purcell, 2002). Although these processes have certain transformative effects on the rights and responsibilities of citizenship, at the same time rights and responsibilities entrenched in prior social struggles can have an impact on, and even limit the degree of such change. If, as Chantal Mouffe (1992: 225) suggests, ‘the way we define citizenship is intimately linked to the kind of society and political community we want’, and if in turn, as Bryan Turner (1993: 12) submits, ‘whatever forces push modernization forward also develop and expand citizenship’, then an examination of citizenship should us provide with a clearer indication of the underlying ‘social purpose’ of these processes.