Secondly, in modern times citizenship
has often been an important component of
social movements to expand social rights.
The development of social rights through
the women’s movement, the peace movement
and the Civil Rights movement in the
United States are classic examples. Citizenship,
rather than a strategy exclusive to the
‘ruling class’ as Michael Mann (1987)
argued, has in contemporary politics emerged
as fundamental to rights discourse and to
oppositional movements. Recent debates
about environmental citizenship and sexual
citizenship have served to reinforce the assumption that citizenship is a collection of
rights. The notion that citizenship might
entail obligations has strategically been
appropriated by right-wing governments who
wish to use citizen charters as techniques for
regulating public utilities. Thus in Britain
various conservative governments became
interested in the idea of citizenship both as
obligations to the state and community, and
as rights to adequate service from public utilities
such as the railways. There is of course a
much more radical notion of citizenship
obligation associated with the idea of virtue.