As elsewhere in Europe, the politics of activation are gaining ground in Germany's public sector. Activation is especially advanced in labour-market policy but relevant in all areas of welfare governance, although in different ways. Citizens are increasingly expected to take on greater responsibility for managing the challenges of welfare transformations, thus playing the role of what might be viewed as ‘government's little helpers’. As market subjects, they are expected to exercise control of public service and other providers in order to achieve greater cost efficiency and quality of services, and in turn gain greater choice of provision and voice in the policy process. These new roles provoke a number of tensions and uncertainties because the new policy discourse of activation does not sit easily with the institutional architecture of welfare provision. Nor can it be easily reconciled with traditional modes of citizenship in Germany, including the specific configuration of rights and responsibilities of individuals as citizens and service users, as well as those of the professionals who provide the welfare services. While new policy discourses of activation emerged within a matrix of marketisation, rights and responsibilities, there is no exact parallel of ‘active citizenship’, in its original Anglo-Saxon version, in the German policy discourse (see Bode 2008).

This chapter seeks to explore how the concept of active citizenship is framed by, and plays out in, a corporatist conservative welfare system using developments in healthcare in Germany as a case study. The aim is to highlight the tensions that render the creation of active citizenship a ‘patchy enterprise’ facing a number of constraints and uncertainties. This approach challenges the concept of policy convergence in welfare state analysis. It also departs from the evolutionary concept of citizenship as developed by Marshall (1963) and his followers.

Germany is an interesting case for exploring the uneven trajectories of active citizenship for a number of reasons. The German model of citizenship emerged beyond the notions of ‘nation’ and ‘state’; it is strongly based on rights and entitlement dating back to early attempts to establish welfare services in the 19th century.