Bürgergesellschaft and the Crisis of the German Social Model

Abstract

The far-ranging social reforms that the German government began implementing in the early 2000s were accompanied by new social imaginaries. The concept of Bürgergesellschaft, initially indicating a mere preference for the benefits of a functioning civil society became a reference point in reformist debates and for the enactment of the so-called Agenda 2010. This reformist programme envisaged the abandonment of Germany’s corporatist welfare and labour market regime — characterized by ‘high equality low activity’ (Streeck 2009) — and the adoption of new political arrangements that would be construed around ideals of flexibility and self-reliance (Lessenich 2005, 2008). As in the previous chapter, the structural conditions to which policy-making responds — but whose reality it also constructs — remain in the background of this enquiry, and the social policy of the Agenda 2010 will only be touched upon in passing. Also, the political dynamics of this particularly momentous episode of social-policy making are not my primary concern (they have been examined elsewhere, see Hassel and Schiller 2010, Hegelich et al. 2011). Instead I investigate the intellectual history of the Bürgergesellschaft concept, its role as a social imaginary and its reformist potentials in a context of sociopolitical crisis.