This study analyzed the relationship between social citizenship (particularly welfare rights) and its corresponding republican responsibilities in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Korea. It, in particular, focused on such a relationship u ...
This study analyzed the relationship between social citizenship (particularly welfare rights) and its corresponding republican responsibilities in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Korea. It, in particular, focused on such a relationship unfolded in the market, society, and the state. For this purpose, this study scrutinized 1) the national curriculum, 2) its related textbooks on history, social studies, morality and ethics as well as citizenship, and 3) interviews with citizenship activists, professors, teachers of the three countries. The tools utilized for the study are not only the ideologies of liberalism, republicanism, and social democracy, but also the notions of selective and universal social citizenships.
The Unites States virtually had a social welfare system corresponding to the selective social citizenship, even though it did not recognize the concept of social citizenship. American citizens who were expected to be independent and self-reliant received minimal social welfare not as a right but as a ‘gift.’ In the textbooks concerned citizens’ duties and responsibilities as well as their rights were explained in detail. These phenomena derived from voluntarism and individualism deeply rooted in American history as well as America’s relatively high levels of standard living, social equality, and socio-economic and geographic mobility.
In the United Kingdom, the citizenship textbooks based on 2008 national curriculum under the Labour government, drawing on historic documents on human rights declared by the UN and the EU, favored the notion of universal social citizenship which was equally applied to everyone. The 2008 curriculum did this because it wanted to strengthen the unity of the multi-cultural British community. However, the citizenship textbooks of the 2014 national curriculum under the Conservative government, pointing out the EU’s encroachment of the British parliamentary sovereignty and side effects of multi-culturalism, explained that social citizenship was established by the influences of liberalism or social democracy in the historical development of various rights derived from the Magna Carta of 1215. In addition, the textbooks defended selective social citizenship by emphasizing the values of individual freedom and self-reliance through economic and financial knowledge. However, both national curriculums and its related textbooks did not specify particular obligations and responsibilities (including tax obligations) that corresponded directly to social citizenship. Also both of them did not define republican duty to the community which put public interests above private ones.
In the Korean 2015 national curriculum and its related textbooks, social citizenship, the legitimacy of which appeared to be guaranteed as a ‘social right’ by the Constitution, had both the two notions of selective and universal social citizenships in terms of not only its ideology (social democracy) but also its forms of social welfare system. However, the emphasis on the merits of ‘workfare’ or ‘productive welfare’ indicated that the textbooks were favorable to the concept of selective social citizenship, while the discussion of the possibility of ‘(universal) basic income’ suggested their friendliness towards that of universal one. Furthermore, the textbooks on economics were neutral between the two concepts of citizenship, but those on finance were pro-selective welfare, while those on multi-culturalism showed a general preference for universal welfare.
However, only two of the whole textbooks analyzed here mentioned—very shortly—civic responsibilities and obligations vis-a-vis civil rights in general. Furthermore, the explanation of these ‘basic obligations’ was not an explanation of the obligations that corresponded to social citizenship, social rights, and social welfare rights. In this regard, the concept of universal social citizenship was stronger than that of selective one in terms of social citizenship as a right rather than a duty.
Korea’s notion and system of social citizenship and republican duties and responsibilities resembled those of the UK rather than the United States, considering both the ideologies and the forms of the social welfare system and the imbalance between the social rights and duties.