Introduction

Abstract

In recent years, the concepts of citizenship and social and political engagement, especially the involvement of individuals in what have come to be termed the new social movements, have become major issues for academics from a wide variety of perspectives. The reason why citizenship has returned to centre stage probably rests, as Kymlicka and Norman (1994: 352) have written, upon the notion that the ‘stability of a modern democracy depends, not only on the justice of its basic structure but also on the qualities and attitudes of its citizens’. Connected with this upsurge of interest in ‘citizenship’ is a growing support for the idea that ‘the institutions of constitutional freedom are only worth as much as the population makes of them’ (Habermas, 1992: 7). Such thinking may explain the increased interest in social movements since in many respects they can be seen to be the major sites of struggle and negotiation between the individual members of society, albeit working en masse, and the chief ‘institution of constitutional freedom’ in the form of the state.