Page 154 - Contemporary Political Sociology Globalization Politics and Power

140 Citizenship

therefore, be supplemented with rights to cultural difference (Pakulski,
1
1997 ; Rosaldo, 1999 ; Stevenson, 2001, 2003 ).
Finally, Marshall seems to have understood citizenship as evolving
towards the end point at which he analyzed it in Britain in the mid -
nineteenth century. He neglected to consider how closely it was linked in
this respect to the expansionary post - war economy, apparently assuming
that Keynesian corporatism would lead to unending economic growth.
Marshall saw a fundamental tension between citizenship, which reduces
inequalities, and capitalism, which produces them. He was optimistic that
the tension would be resolved in favor of citizenship. In the light of boom
and bust economics since the 1970s, and neo - liberal restructuring of
relationships between states and markets, the social rights Marshall appar-
ently assumed were the end point of the evolution of citizenship have
come much more seriously into question.

4.2 Citizenship, Wealth, and Poverty

From a descriptive analysis of the evolution of citizenship in the twenty -
first century, Marshall ’ s model has now become something more like an

ideal. Marshall saw social rights as ameliorating the worst inequalities
produced by capitalism, which inevitably affect some more than others.
Social rights include what is commonly thought of as “ welfare ” in the
US, and increasingly elsewhere: help from the government to those
who are not engaged in paid labor to meet basic needs. For Marshall,
however, social rights were much more than “ welfare. ” He saw citizen-
ship rights as producing a system parallel to capitalism, a sphere of life
in which market logics of competition and profit would become irrelevant.

In Europe, the greater part of the welfare state was made up of “ univer-
sal ” services, available to everyone, of which free education and health-
care were the most important in the post - war context. Citizens would
spend most of their lives in this parallel sphere, to the point where
inequalities produced by the capitalist labor market would become largely
irrelevant. For Marshall, social citizenship introduced a fundamental
tension into capitalist societies. Capitalism does not just produce inequal-
ity between citizens; the market requires that citizens are unequal: that
they have incentives to sell their labor to earn money and compete to
consume what is produced. In retrospect, Marshall ’ s view of the com-
promise between citizenship and capitalism looks extremely optimistic
(Turner, 1986 ).