Introduction

This chapter explores how citizenship and its alleged subversion are constructed and codified in contemporary governance discourse and public policy in the UK. Zorbaugh's words illustrate how a contemporary ‘vertigo of late modernity’ – a pervasive sense of insecurity, fluidity and transformation, as identified by Young (2007), is not new. Rather, governmental conceptualisations of subversion are inextricably linked to fluid definitions of citizenship and the norms and priorities underpinning them in particular historical periods. The chapter examines four selected categories of ‘problematic’ citizen (or non-citizen): the ‘antisocial’, the workless, immigrants (and migrant workers) and Muslims. These populations are often collectively identified as ‘suspect communities’ (Hillyard, 1993), but there are important differences in how their forms of ‘subversion’ are conceptualised and responded to within public policy.

Subversion in this sense represents a process whereby an individual or population is viewed as challenging, reinterpreting, realigning or redirecting the perceived ‘original’ purpose of social policy or the ‘traditional’ settlement between citizens and the state. As will be shown, subversion may be codified as actual inappropriate conduct or illegitimate physical acts. It may also be associated with the failure to act, as in the perceived passive dependency of welfare benefit claimants. Subversion extends to the alleged values and orientations perceived to underpin behaviour, such as the ambivalent loyalty of Muslims to the secular state, the lack of a work ethic among welfare benefit claimants or the selfishness of the antisocial. Underpinning these various definitions of subversion are two key ideas: that it represents a challenge to the authority of government and that it is a manifestation of individuals abdicating their responsibility to the state and to their fellow citizens. Discourses of subversion also conflate the subversion of individuals with their membership of a population and its collective identity as potentially subversive, as in the case of Muslims above. The chapter will examine the variety of allegiances, identities, institutions and social processes perceived as being subverted, and their porous boundaries and shifting classifications.