Introduction

Ever since T.H. Marshall’s groundbreaking essay Citizenship and social class (1950), the goal of the welfare state – in Europe at least – has been formulated as a quest for the ideal of ‘full citizenship’. This is conceived as full participation for everybody (that is, as equal citizens) in all spheres of social and political life, and in the ways and standards of life that are predominant in society. This ideal currently faces a number of challenges. Prominent among them are the threats of increasing social inequality, marginalisation, and even social exclusion due to mass unemployment.

High and persistent unemployment, in turn, has typically been interpreted as an effect of globalisation and technological change on the labour markets. During the 1990s, it was frequently claimed that European welfare states had not only lost the ability to attain the goal of full citizenship, but that they had even become counter-productive. At worst, they were hit by a kind of ‘Eurosclerosis’ (Blanchard, 2000); at best, they faced a trade-off between equality and employment (Krugman, 1994), which at any rate involves a threat to the ideal of full citizenship. Such ideas strongly influenced policy recommendations to political decision makers, who acted accordingly.

In the mid-1990s, various lines of economic analyses converged into a ‘dominant paradigm’ or ‘standard interpretation’ of Europe’s unemployment problems. According to this interpretation, unemployment is structural in the sense that it is mainly rooted in mismatches and other labour market rigidities. Consequently, efforts to combat unemployment have little effect, allegedly, unless they embody structural reforms of labour markets and welfare systems. How serious are such challenges? What have been the policy responses? And what are the effects on social protection systems, in particular for their ability to maintain full citizenship?

From a citizenship perspective, these unemployment problems of course deserve attention as serious threats. But so do the suggested solutions, among which quite a few may themselves be considered threats to citizenship if they do not work as intended.

The main purpose of this book is to provide an updated overview of unemployment and unemployment policies in a number of European countries, and to give a detailed description of the structure of unemployment, as well as trends and paths of policy responses.