The deconstruction of employment and the crisis of citizenship in Europe

Abstract

The social question raised nationally and linked to a distributive, labour-led and egalitarian perspective, which had been key in developing the idea of Europe since the Second World War, has ended up without institutional advocates; meanwhile the dominant economic framework has been structured as a new multinational, dispersed, volatile and reallocated technological and financial network. As a result, there has been a kind of disintegration of the traditional form of labour society, as well as a decline in the set of civil and legal conventions on which European citizenship was constructed. Since the 1990s, the European Union has been acting more as a disciplinary monetary body than as a set of institutions that defend the collective guarantees of a wage-earning society, and in the current European framework social citizenship appears to have retreated in favour of a new kind of liberal citizenship, where the narrative is linked to individual political liberties.