As context matters, a cross-national European study of the meanings of the concept of citizenship must, first of all, take the distinctive historical backgrounds into account. Understandings of citizenship have not only changed over the course of time, but its multifaceted, different meanings also reflect both varied political and social histories and legal traditions and cultures in the respective European countries. When, in this chapter, special attention is paid to legal traditions and cultures as characteristic of particular trajectories of development, this is not intended as a reduction to a legal discourse; on the contrary, it is an attempt to...

In this chapter, we describe and analyse the range of actors involved in contemporary citizenship debates. These actors include left-wing and right-wing politicians, feminist movements, trade unions and social movements more generally. They may adhere to more dominant and powerful discourses on citizenship or struggle with alternative formulations, attacking mainstream or defending former interpretations. For all these reasons, it is not clear a priori whether citizenship is a liberating or a disciplinary concept; in fact, as stated in the Introduction, it can be both, depending on who is using the concept, in what context, and with reference to which kinds...

Globalisation, European integration and migration pose new challenges for understanding citizenship from a transnational perspective. Since the 1990s the increase in migrants and refugees has sparked new political debates about multiculturalism and multicultural policies across Europe, debates which have, increasingly after 9/11, been coloured by Islamophobia.¹ These debates follow both similar and diverging paths in different European countries, all of which carry different legacies of colonialism, imperialism, and different histories of migration. In some, the debates about multiculturalism are new; in others, such as the UK, they revive and reshape debates of the 1960s following postwar immigration. Along with these...

Since the 1990s, Western Europe has experienced a remarkable shift in political thinking about childcare. A profound politicisation of the relationship between the state and the family has generated renegotiations of the boundaries between public and private responsibilities in the care of young children. Parenting norms, parental responsibilities and relations are changing rapidly in many regions, while families and households are no longer expected to take full responsibility for the care of their children under school age. Policies aimed at reconciling paid work and childcare are accelerating these processes. With a special interest in the transformation of childcare – from private...

The previous chapters have examined changes in the perception and application of citizenship rights in relation to childcare provision and to migration and asylum. This chapter looks at what Chapter Four called the ‘transnational redistribution of care work’ – the ways migration and childcare intersect in the case of the private employment of migrant women as domestic and childcare workers in European households. This phenomenon has been referred to as ‘the global care chain’ (Ehrenreich and Hochschild, 2003) where women from poorer regions of the world migrate to care for the children and households of employed women in the West in...