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New Labour has paid considerable attention to citizenship. In this paper I explore the different ways in which citizens have been addressed and affected by New Labour policies, concentrating on four processes: activation, empowerment, responsibilization and abandonment. I argue that these different processes are not just the effect of looking at New Labour from different perspectives. Rather they need to be seen as linked in a political and governmental project that seeks to construct the unity of the nation and manage its internal diversity.

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This is an exciting time to be writing this book. Discussions of publicness and the public sphere have tended to be preoccupied with narratives of decline: public services being privatised, state funding squeezed, public culture debased, politics corrupted, and so on. Underpinning such narratives is a fundamental assumption that any wider sensibility of public connectedness and public action is in retreat in the face of the growing power of markets, individualism and consumerism. The fortunes of the state, the institutions of the public sector, and the public itself are thus deeply

This paper explores the changing fortunes of the public realm during the last two decades. It poses the problem of how we think about globalisation and neo-liberalism as forces driving these changes. It then examines how different aspects of the public realm -understood as public interest, as public services and as a collective identity -have been subjected to processes of dissolution. Different processes have combined in this dissolution -in particular, attempts to privatise and marketise public services have been interleaved with attempts to de-politicise the public realm. Tracing these processes reveals that they have not been wholly successfulencountering resistances, refusals and negotiations that mean the outcomes (so far) do not match the world imagined in neo-liberal fantasies.For many, the development of a robust and vigorous public realm was one of the defining features of Western capitalist democracies: a core element of 'welfare capitalism' in its many varieties (Esping-Andersen, 1990;Huber and Stephens, 2001). At the beginning of the twenty-first century, the public realm looks rather less robust. Here I examine the dissolution of the public realm -and how to think about the forces seeking to dissolve it. This focus on the public realm is rather wider than the question of 'welfare states', although they overlap in important ways. I will be using the term 'public' to refer to a number of intersecting social phenomena: the idea of a 'public interest' which may require forms of collectivised expression; the institutionalisation of 'public services' (as a means of meeting the public's needs); and the conception of a public -a collective (usually national) body that is capable of having interests and needs. In various ways, these aspects of a public realm have been challenged in the name of the 'private', bringing about what John Baldock has called the 'declining publicness of public services ' (2003: 68). I will argue that globalisation and neo-liberalism have been identified as two of the core forces in the process of dissolving the public. I will also be arguing that the dominant views of these forces tend to overstate their scope and effects, while ignoring their uneven and unfinished character.But first it is important to say a little more about these conceptions of the public realm. Our understandings of the public realm rest on a dichotomous 28 john clarke distinction between the public and the private. Much debated, this distinction tends to cohere around the poles of private-as-individual/familial/domestic, and public-as-market/state/politics/bureaucracy (see, for example, Landes, 1998;Ribbens McCarthy and Edwards, 2002;Slater, 1998). It will already be clear that these clusters are not the same as the distinction between state and market that has been prominent in social policy. Indeed, the market has a tendency to be categorised as both private and public in different ways of drawing the distinction between the public and private. So, in contrast to the private as familial/domestic, t...