New routes to social cohesion? Citizenship and the social investment state

The notion of social cohesion appears when policy communities are engaged in discussing and redesigning citizenship regimes. One aspect of the citizenship regime with which reformers are concerned is the welfare architecture, and in particular the kind of state needed in the new knowledge economy. The main proposition of this paper is that a redesigned welfare structure, undertaken by policy communities concerned about social cohesion, is often one that envisages a social investment state. To explore this hypothesis, the paper proceeds in three steps. First, it briefly documents the emergence in a number of settings of the discourse of "social investment." Second, it maps the differences between two citizenship regimes, the post-war one anchored in social rights and the one under construction now. The paper then turns to examine the consequences of this new regime for the design of social policy in the first decades of the 21(st) century.