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This chapter elaborates a theoretical framework for the comparative analysis of social exclusion, with particular reference to migrants and ethnic minorities. It attempts to forge a synthesis of theoretical propositions within US research on ethnicity, race, gender, and class with insights from European comparative sociological studies on welfare regimes. It compares ‘racialized exclusion’ in the United States with the segregated urban spaces in which immigrants and new ethnic minorities tend to be concentrated in European societies. It also discusses the highly different development in different parts of the European Union (concentrating on the 15 states which made up the EU until 2004). The discussion reveals a complex interplay between path-dependent institutional strategies and multiple tendencies of convergence in the direction of a neo-American strategy of globalization and its characteristic forms of ‘advanced marginality’. Yet individual societies continue to cope with forces of globalization as well as processes of racialized exclusion in different ways and with different results. These differences are linked to their particular welfare regimes, institutionalized economic and political frameworks, and particular modes of organization of civil society.

Germany has had the largest immigration of any European country: a mixture of ‘return’ of ethnic Germans and systematic recruitment of ‘temporary guestworkers’. The migrants stayed on and formed new ethnic minorities after recruitment was stopped in 1973. Yet the official line until the 1990s was that Germany was ‘not a country of immigration’. The resulting processes of ethnic segmentation and social exclusion coincided with a crisis of Germany’s strong ‘social state’, based on a regulated labour market, comprehensive social insurance, collective wage bargaining, and full employment. Exposure to global competition caused chronic unemployment, undermining the financial basis for the welfare state. The result has been a simultaneous crisis of national identity and the welfare state, with the pluralistic federal system apparently incapable of making the reforms needed to restart the economy and prevent the growth of inequality.

Drawing upon a variety of analyses, this chapter constructs a taxonomy of competing approaches to inequality, social cohesion, and citizenship and proceeds to locate the Third Way as a hybrid approach. While the Third Way strongly embraces elements of market liberalism, it also exhibits a mixture of social democratic, communitarian, and moral authoritarian features. The Third Way approach to policies for social inclusion is traced through a discussion of the European Union’s Social Inclusion Strategy, the development of ‘workfare’ type policies, and in the specific context of new labour policies in Britain. The ambiguous consequences of such policies are examined in relation to measures of inequality, poverty, and social exclusion. The chapter concludes that the Third Way maybe more than a pragmatic compromize, but whether it maybe capable of ameliorating the dislocating social effects of a market driven economic agenda remains uncertain.

New social risks are at the forefront of the EU's social policy agenda. In part, this is because a new social risk approach fits with open market policies, which stress constraints on state interventions and the importance of adapting social provision to meet economic goals; in part because old social risk areas are so heavily occupied by existing national government policies that it is difficult to find support for innovations. During the 1980s and 1990s, a number of attempts to develop international policy harmonization were pursued. These failed due to the difficulty of achieving cross‐national consensus. There are a number of relevant directives, chiefly in the areas of equality of opportunity for men and women and other labour market issues. The most important current developments, however, are in the area of ‘soft law’ through the Open Method of Co‐ordination and the National Action Plans in relation to employment, social exclusion, pensions, health and social care. The European Employment Strategy, with its stress on ‘flexicurity’, is the most advanced of these. It is at present unclear to what extent this process will achieve substantial changes in comparison with the importance of the economic pressures from the Single European Market.

This essay argues that economists have ignored a crucial dimension of poverty: its intrinsically dynamic characteristic of being locked into a low-level trap of asset (or capability) deprivation, resulting in exclusion from social and economic life on a par with the rest of society. Long-term poverty is fundamentally self-perpetuating. Hence, poverty alleviation in the long run must address incentives for the poor to acquire capabilities and assets that will enable them (or their children) to escape poverty in the future. In the Mirrlees model, for instance, the income-earning capability of every household is exogenously given, hence the root causes of current poverty are not addressed. A dynamic extension of this framework would be needed to include investment decisions by households, which would affect the evolution of their future abilities. Such a framework more directly addresses some of the general public concerns concerning the tendency of comprehensive welfare systems to breed long-term dependence. At the same time, the argument for superiority of cash over in-kind transfers ceases to be valid, even within the conventional utilitarian framework where consumer “rationality” is not questioned.

This chapter presents a theoretical framework for the EU’s passive leverage, defined as the traction that the EU has on the domestic politics of credible candidate states merely by virtue of its existence and its usual conduct. Passive leverage includes the political and economic benefits of EU membership, the costs of exclusion, and the way that the EU treats non-member states. The force of the EU’s passive leverage explains why the governments of virtually all credible future EU member states declare EU membership as their foremost foreign policy goal.

The question this study set out to answer was: if reputation is the interest to be protected by defamation law then what should be the test(s) for what is defamatory? The stated aim was to fill a gap in the common law by providing a principled, theoretically coherent statement of law regarding what is defamatory. This chapter proposes a new legal framework that aims to meet that goal. Only the principal test for what is defamatory should be retained because it is the only one that meaningfully protects reputation. However, the common law should dispose of the traditional, exclusive presumptions that form the content of ‘the right-thinking person’ and instead use inclusive presumptions that are premised upon an acceptance of equal moral worth. Any displacement of these presumptions should be controversial. A departure from the commitment to equal moral worth should be made only with great care and caution.

The Restoration cult of Hooker reached its climax under Charles I. It was challenged during the exclusion crisis, notably by Richard Baxter who claimed Hooker as a Reformed sympathizer and by Algernon Sidney who used the Polity to vest authority in the people, but the ultimate success of the royal party ensured they were swiftly marginalized. Instead, Hooker’s ecclesiastical image continued unchanged and works such as Pariarcha by Sir Robert Filmer ensured that Hooker’s royalist credentials were also bolstered.

The experience of environmentalism in the US, UK, Germany, and Norway is introduced in detail, with special reference to the relationship between the state and the movement. The history of each country in the modern environmental era is sketched. The movement took a very different form in each country. The oppositional public sphere confronting the state in Germany looks very different from the well‐behaved set of interest groups in the US or the Norwegian organizations that are tightly integrated into government. The shape and fortunes of environmentalism are heavily influenced by the state's orientation to societal interests, which can feature inclusion or exclusion, and be passive or active.

Social movements contribute to democracy and democratization. This chapter broadens the focus to democracy within society as a whole, civil society, and the public sphere as well as the state, and the contributions that movements can make to it. The counterintuitive conclusions are that inclusive states can actually be bad for democracy in the society as a whole (even if they look positive when it comes to democracy within the state), while passive exclusion in states such as Germany can promote democracy. States with a prescriptive orientation to civil society, be it on behalf of inclusion or exclusion, stifle movement diversity.

The main issues addressed in the book are introduced, starting with discussion of the great diversity in the environmental movement, and making the point that the major groups of the movement in the United States, in taking on the role of interest groups in the liberal pluralist model, have excluded and marginalized many positions. The study to be made is described as focusing on two key concerns: how to acknowledge and recognize, rather than deny, diversity in environmentalism; and how to organize that diversity politically in a manner more inclusive than the liberal, or mainstream, environmental model. Different sections of the chapter discuss: the problems with conventional (liberal) pluralism; the democratic potential of the recognition by grassroots environmentalism of different experiences of the same event; the notion of justice embodied in the environmental justice movement – distributional equity (which can be achieved through procedural equity), recognition of the diversity of participants and experiences, and political participation (the demand for more public participation in the development, implementation, and oversight of environmental policy); and pluralism in theory and practice. The final section of the chapter provides a preview and plan of the book.

Attention to the environmental movement does not guarantee a sense of respect for its diversity, so this chapter is dedicated to a study of the limitations inherent in various approaches to the study of environmentalism(s) in the United States. The argument here is that many examiners are more interested in building explanatory models than in understanding the diversity of environmentalism; hence, many models are built on a foundation of exclusion. The chapter first takes a brief look at the limits of standard histories of the environmental movement. It goes on to critically examine the current state of the literature on the environmental movement by investigating methods of classification of variety, the attempt to forge an environmental vanguard (hegemonic progressivism), and the myriad claims to unlocking the motivations of environmental actors. All of these approaches are described as having a tendency to exclude evidence, examples, or categories that do not fit the proposed model.

Starts by discussing the perennial welfare state crisis, making the point that the contemporary crisis differs notably from its forebears. Rigidity is an endogenous symptom of the crisis, and the various symptoms include demographic ageing, and the growing risks of poverty and social exclusion (which spring from the malfunctioning of the labour market and the family). The aim of the book is to come to terms with the new political economy—the post‐industrial economy—that is emerging. To do this it pursues a set of interlinked arguments: the so‐called welfare state crisis, in which debate has been too focused on the state, when it should be on the interaction between the component parts of contemporary welfare regimes such as labour markets, the family, and the welfare state itself; the fact that the real crisis of contemporary welfare regimes lies in the disjuncture between the existing institutional construction and exogenous change; and the fact that the emerging risks of post‐industrial society come primarily from the revolution that is unfolding in both labour markets and households. Four phenomena form the unifying theme of the book: equality, risks, jobs, and the new political economy. Risks and jobs are dealt with in separate chapters; the introduction discusses equality and the new political economy.

Differentiated integration, e.g. arising out of the flexibility provisions of the Amsterdam Treaty, is a special instance of functional asymmetry within compound political systems such as federal states or the EU. Functional asymmetry exists when central decision‐making applies unevenly across the system; the system is asymmetrical in that some of the participants (provinces, member states) exercise greater powers than others. This chapter explores when and why such an arrangement may be acceptable to participants or may even be imposed (as with admission rules for EMU). It argues that states’ attitudes towards asymmetry may be shaped (1) by economic calculation (cost/benefit), (2) by possible tendency to link economic issues with non‐economic ones (democracy, human rights), or (3) by institutional design, which may permit matching of functional asymmetries with political ones (uneven participation in central decision‐making). In all three respects, the question arises, what is fair, or reasonable? Judgements on such matters are inherently subjective, but still may be the focus of reasoned discussion identifying two possible abuses of asymmetry: privilege and exclusion.

During the post‐war period, Irish labour unions have been characterized by fragmentation at the local level (with multiple unions competing for members, industrial unrest at the local level, and tensions between unions), but centralization at the national level. Labour unions have been clustered into large umbrella organizations, and the country has had a strong history of corporatism in industrial relations. The three stages of “globalization” in Ireland—the decision to embrace an open economic policy in the 1950s, Ireland's 1973 entry into the EEC, and the deepening of European integration in the 1980s and 1990s—have generated continuous pressures on Ireland to embrace new strategies to accommodate the pressures of market forces. Ireland's response to ‘globalization’ has not involved a disintegration of corporatist bargains or the weakening of unions, but rather a renewed focus on social partnership and consensus policy making in which unions have played a distinct role. The result of this social partnership has been impressive growth rates since 1987, but a lingering problem of structural unemployment. To address this issue, Dublin has committed itself to the continuation and strengthening of corporatist bargaining, but with an increased emphasis on addressing the problem of social exclusion. It remains to be seen whether social partnership mechanisms can effectively address the problems associated with long‐term unemployment and social exclusion, or whether Ireland is evolving toward a bifurcated economy, characterized by expanding jobs for skilled workers, but declining prospects for less‐educated workers.

Democratic inclusion used to be regarded as mainly a matter of expanding the franchise: if democracy was viewed as a merely mechanical process of taking a vote, aggregating votes, and declaring a winner, all that had to be done was to bring everyone in, give them a vote and let them look after themselves in the ensuing electoral fray. However, as concerns with social exclusion have broadened, faith in that simplistic model of democratic inclusion has waned. Mere inclusion, as per the mechanistic model of aggregative democracy, is not enough to meet all the new concerns—some affected interests will always be left out through those sorts of processes. The author argues that ‘democratic deliberation within’ offers the best way—and with the necessarily mute interests discussed in the next chapter, the only way—to address those new democratic concerns. The different sections of the chapter are: The Importance of Inclusion; Underlying Intuitions; The Hidden Costs of Inclusion Talk; The Political Functions of Inclusion Talk; Toward a Non‐Exclusive Concept of Political Authority; and ‘Democratic Deliberation Within’ as a Concomitant, and a Substitute.