Paper

The Idea of Social Inclusion

Ruth Levitas
University of Bristol

The idea of 'social inclusion' is now the central legitimating concept of social policy in Europe and elsewhere. There is a general agreement that inclusion is a good thing, and that exclusion is a bad thing, both because it is unfair, and because it damages social cohesion. There is also very little clarity about what inclusion or exclusion actually mean, and indeed to some extent the unifying function of these terms depends on that lack of clarity. But to address the questions of this conference – what do we know, and where do we go – we do have to consider what is meant by social inclusion..

The central point that I want to make is that the idea of social inclusion may be either ideological or utopian, and it is better that it be utopian. This contrast draws on the work of Karl Mannheim, who uses the term utopia in a distinctive way. It is, despite its undoubted problems, a distinction which many social scientists and commentators have tried to make, between ideas which serve to preserve the status quo and those which operate to transform it. For Mannheim, a utopia is not, as it is in colloquial usage, an image of a perfect but unattainable society, or even of a good society. Rather, utopias are ideas or orientations which 'when they pass over into conduct, tend to shatter, either partially or wholly, the order of things prevailing at the time' (Mannheim 1939:173). A utopia is a 'transformative idea'. Ideologies, on the other hand, are ideas which turn out, to sustain things as they are rather than being effectively transformative. Mannheim suggests that ideologies and utopias share the characteristic of being 'incongruous with reality', that is, they are not an accurate characterisation of the 'reality'. Representations of the social cannot be analysed in an absolute manner. They have to be understood in terms of the deployment of these ideas by specific groups pursuing particular projects in particular historical circumstances.

This reminds us that the proper question about the idea of social inclusion is not what does it mean, but what do we mean by it – or rather what is meant by it, by whom? Like all the concepts through which we try to represent the world to ourselves – including concepts such as 'society', 'community', 'structure', 'network', 'system' – it is a metaphor. How is this metaphor used, by whom and for what purpose? And how might it be used, perhaps for other purposes? What are the political consequences or possibilities of this particular metaphor? What kind of society is actually, or can be, implied by the term social inclusion?

This last question is also a question about utopia, in the more conventional sense of ideas of a good society or the projection of desire for a better world. The envisioning of a better world, or the 'imaginary reconstitution of society' has a methodological contribution to make to social policy both in terms of analysis and in terms of direction. Most political programmes and many discussions of social policy contain an implicit model of the good society. We can rebuild this implicit utopia in much the same way as archaeologists rebuild artefacts and accounts of societies from excavated fragments. Utopia thus operates as an analytical tool, in revealing this underpinning model – and also sometimes in exposing inconsistencies and contradictions as well as hidden assumptions. It helps us to answer the question of what is actually meant by social inclusion, what images of the good society underpin it, and how genuinely transformative or otherwise it is as currently deployed.

These are important questions in the European Union, since all member states are now required to produce biennial National Action Plans for Social Inclusion. These plans (referred to in a recent document by the Orwellian shorthand NAPinc) were first required in 2001, following the Lisbon and Nice summits in 2000 and 2001. The UK, like other countries, produced its plan by repackaging its existing policies under the prescribed headings, so it did not make headlines or produce any immediate change in direction, and most people are unaware of its existence. In fact, although these plans are called plans for social inclusion, they are actually part of an EU strategy against social exclusion. Social inclusion is not necessarily the simple obverse of social exclusion, and there is work to be done examining the shifting discourses of 'social inclusion' deployed by different groups. But as far as European social policy is concerned, understanding what has been meant by social exclusion is a necessary starting point.

I should perhaps explain that I come to these debates not as an expert in social policy, but as a social and political theorist with a particular interest in utopianism, and also as a methodologist with an interest in official statistics and the concepts informing them. I became involved in social exclusion debates in the 1990s initially because I was simply puzzled at the sudden prevalence of a concept which was both absolutely undefined, and apparently universally understood, and which otherwise rigorous academics adopted without embarrassment. This conceptual sloppiness was actively encouraged by the amount of research funding available for investigating social exclusion.

In looking at EU documents in the mid 1990s, and subsequently at public debate in the UK, it was possible to detect three different discourses, labelled RED, SID and MUD, which show just how various the meanings of social exclusion can be. The first is a redistributive discourse (RED) which derives from social policy writers, and which sees social exclusion as a consequence of poverty. Thus Peter Townsend (1979:32) argued that poverty should not be understood in terms of subsistence, but in terms of people's ability to participate in the customary life of society: 'Individuals, families and groups can be said to be in poverty when ... their resources are so seriously below those commanded by the average individual or family that they are, in effect, excluded from ordinary living patterns, customs and activities'. Although 'resources' here does not simply refer to cash incomes - and importantly includes access to collectively-provided services - a central element in the RED approach has been that since social exclusion results from poverty, raising benefit levels to reduce poverty is crucial to reducing exclusion. Within this broad framework, social exclusion is understood to mean something more complex than is colloquially understood by poverty, in that it is dynamic, processual, multi-dimensional, and relational; and it allows space for the understanding that discriminatory and exclusionary practices may be causes of poverty. Nevertheless, poverty remains at the core. This kind of usage of social exclusion was commonplace in critical social policy throughout the 1980s and 1990s.

In EU documents in the mid 1990s, however, the opposite of social exclusion was social integration, in a discourse which represented paid work as the primary or sole legitimate means of integrating individuals of working age into society. The excluded are those who are 'workless', or, in the case of young people, at risk of becoming become so. Unlike RED, SID leaves little room for the reward of unpaid work through the benefit system, and glosses over the ways in which paid work may fail to prevent exclusion (for example by being poorly paid), or even cause it where long and asocial hours block other forms of social participation. Much of the rhetoric and policy of New Labour, before and after the 1997 election, was rooted in this very different understanding of social exclusion, in which the key element is labour force attachment.

The third approach is a moral underclass discourse (MUD), which emphasises moral and cultural causes of poverty and which is centrally concerned with the moral hazard of 'dependency', and thus with workless households rather than individual labour market attachment. MUD tends to replay recurrent themes about 'dangerous classes', to focus on consequences of social exclusion for social order, and on particular groups, such as unemployed and potentially criminal young men, and lone parents, especially young never-married mothers. In Britain, therefore, the 'Social Exclusion Unit' set up by Blair in 1997 was primarily concerned with 'problem groups' such as rough sleepers, truants and teenage parents.

To oversimplify: the three discourses differ in what the poor/excluded are seen to lack: In RED, they have no money; in SID they have no (paid) work; in MUD they have no morals. By the late 1990s, the dominant discourse had shifted decisively towards SID. I want to stress that this is a model, not a classificatory scheme. It helps to clarify different meanings of social exclusion, sometimes unwitting movements from one meaning to another, within the same speech or over periods of time. For example, applying it to the Nice criteria for the National Inclusion Plans, one can see a mixture of RED and SID. The objectives of the Nice Summit were: facilitating participation in employment and access by all to resources, rights, goods and services; preventing the risks of exclusion; helping the most vulnerable, and mobilising all relevant bodies in overcoming exclusion. The first objective encapsulates both SID (integration through employment) and RED (access to resources). But the juxtaposition does not define their relationship very precisely. The sequence – employment and then access to resources – tends to prioritise SID over RED, if less so than in the mid-nineties when the discourse was one of integration through employment. And most of the funding available in the EU for the reduction of exclusion is directed at labour market programmes, favouring SID.

Member states do have considerable scope to construct this in different ways. Britain's plan is essentially a repackaging of the policies contained in its annual audit of progress in tackling poverty and social exclusion, the 'Opportunity For All' reports. It is the OFA reports, and the indicators used in them that are key to unpicking the idea of inclusion now embedded in government policy and rhetoric. And here too, the key word is, as their title suggests, opportunity. The emphasis is on opportunities for people to climb out of poverty, not on the abolition of poverty itself. Inclusion does not necessarily imply a redistributive agenda.

Using utopia in the first, analytic, sense, the underpinning model of a good society is a meritocracy in which, as the British Prime Minister Tony Blair says, 'people rise to the highest level their talents take them' (Blair 2001b). Blair's model of a good society is one with a high social floor in the form of a means-tested safety net as high as possible consistent with current levels of taxation, and meritocratic social mobility. Market capitalism can then be allowed to run its course, and there is no need to worry about high incomes at the top (Hutton 2001). Thus during the 2001 election campaign, Blair called for 'a genuine enterprise and entrepreneurial culture, vital and vibrant as that of the USA, and open to as many' (Blair 2001a). The presumption is that even extreme inequality does not result in better educational chances for the children of the rich, nor in inequalities of health or access to healthcare. Although society may be unequal, equality of opportunity and high social mobility, mean that the unequal rewards are 'fair'. The problems and absurdities of this kind of meritocracy have been amply demonstrated in the dystopian mode by Michael Young in The Rise of the Meritocracy (Young 1958), and more recently by the children's writer William Nicholson in The Wind Singer (Nicholson 2000).

The nature of this implied good society is usually concealed, partly as a consequence of the metaphor of exclusion itself. The danger of the inclusion/exclusion metaphor is that it evokes a dichotomous image of society, in which there are insiders and outsiders, and only the very marginal are a problem. If the idea of social inclusion is understood simply as the opposite of exclusion, and exclusion is understood in terms of a mixture of SID and MUD, it is in Mannheim's terms ideological. It is part of a discursive legitimation of the status quo. It implies lifting or coercing some marginal groups over a threshold above which inequalities are deemed to be the outcome of individual attributes, whether innate or acquired. The primary division in society is seen as between small groups of marginalised outsiders, and the included majority. Other inequalities, notably that between the super-rich and others, are regarded as irrelevant, and thereby legitimised. Of course, the UK is one of the most unequal societies in the EU, so its adherence to the meritocratic model is extreme. But the general emphasis in the EU remains on the role of paid work both as a vehicle of social integration and as the primary means of distributing the social product. Policies for poverty reduction are essentially policies to promote employability and employment.

The question is, however, whether the idea of inclusion has the potential to be a transformative idea. Here, I think, the issue is rather more complex.

Firstly, there are already arenas in which the idea of social inclusion – and the very flexibility of the concept – permit activities which are informed by a different ethos from that informing European and UK national policy. Local perspectives are particularly important, given the fourth of the Nice Summit's principles: mobilising all relevant bodies. Local government and voluntary or third sector workers suggest that the language is permissive. Whatever the intentions of central government, they are able to develop appropriate local policies and legitimise them in terms of promoting social inclusion. At a conference at Britain's Local Government Information Bureau in 2001, the local authorities presenting their strategies were talking about anti-poverty strategies, that is, focusing on the 'poverty' in 'poverty and social exclusion'. However, what was also apparent was that the powers of local authorities to promote inclusion are constrained by funding, and there is a serious danger that the emphasis on the 'local' simply passes the buck of responsibility, while the necessary attention to redistributive and other policies at the centre is absent.

Secondly, many people construe the positive value of inclusion more widely than the EU or the Blair government. Factors that might be seen as part of an inclusion agenda include for example such as discrimination on the grounds of gender, ethnicity, disability, age, religion, sexuality. (In the EU such issues are dealt with by what is called the 'equalities' agenda. This addresses not equality in a distributive sense, but equal opportunities.) Other aspects of inclusion concern questions of rights and questions of recognition, and inclusion in the processes of decision-making rather than simply the outcomes of those decisions. There are issues of social participation, addressed by the Rowntree Poverty and Social Exclusion Survey in terms of participation in common social activities with family or friends (Gordon et al 2000). There are questions of human flourishing, addressed by Sen's focus on the development of capabilities (Sen 2001).

This is a broader agenda than that currently implied by the approach in the EU. Above all, it has a less exclusive focus on paid work as the route to inclusion, and thus a more comprehensive approach to the 'social' in social inclusion. All these issues are raised by the working papers of the Laidlaw Foundation, suggesting that Canada is ahead of the EU in developing a positive discourse of inclusion.

But there are still two possible programmes for social policy that result from this, a weak programme and a strong or utopian programme.

The weak programme requires critical social policy to continue to do what it traditionally has done: to continue to collect information about distributive and labour market inequalities, and about a range of other sources of discrimination and barriers to human wellbeing; to develop policies to address these; and to sell these policies under the rhetoric of inclusion. Such a programme does not necessarily require that we ask the hard questions about the relationship between inclusion and the social divisions of gender, ethnicity and class, or the compatibility between social inclusion and global capitalism.

The strong programme calls for something more, and this is a utopian project in the directive or constructive sense. The 'imaginary reconstitution of society' has also a constructive or architectural mode, not so much as a goal or blueprint, but as a heuristic device. As the French sociologist Andre Gorz puts it, 'it is the function of utopias, in the sense the term has assumed in the work of Ernst Bloch or Paul Ricoeur, to provide us with the distance from the existing state of affairs which allows us to judge what we are doing in the light of what we could or should do' (Gorz 1999). Such judgements are only possible against the yardstick of an imagined good society. Social policy generally operates primarily by piecemeal ameliorative programmes. This is particularly true of 'evidence-based' policy, and the pragmatic commitment to 'what works'. These are intrinsically constrained by evidence generated within a particular social environment, and solutions that 'work' within those same constraints. A utopian approach suggests the need to focus more on the kind of society we would like to build – assessing policies and programmes in terms of the contribution they make to this end, while making the yardstick itself explicit and open to democratic debate.

If 'social exclusion' tends to repress the question of the kind of society into which people are to be included, the positive formulation of 'social inclusion' at least potentially makes the nature of that society central (Askonas 2000). The idea of an inclusive society potentially forces onto the agenda this larger question of what kind of society we want to live in – and indeed, the question of who 'we' are. This requires a more holistic and co-ordinated approach than is generally characteristic of social policy, and a greater degree of institutional specificity than is generally offered by normative political theory.

For if the first virtue of a utopian approach is its holism, the second is its institutional specificity. The idea of inclusion itself appeals because of its generality and abstraction. This in itself suggests that it may be much easier to agree on the values that would characterise a good society - such as diversity, solidarity, a commitment to human flourishing, the development of capabilities, and so on – than on the institutional arrangements that would embody these. What, exactly, would an inclusive society look like? What degree of substantive equality is needed to deliver this? How can collective provision be made against the risks not only of poverty, illness and ageing, but also the hazards of environmental degradation which threaten the ecological viability of our current systems of social organisations? What are the implications of inclusion for immigration and asylum, and indeed for the very existence of national borders? Is inclusion compatible with global capitalism, and if not, what alternative institutions can be envisioned at local, national and global levels? If inclusion is to be a genuinely transformative idea, these questions have to be addressed, even if their answers specify some necessary limits to inclusion.

What this means is that 'social policy' as traditionally conceived is far too limited a vehicle for delivering social inclusion. ALL government policy has a bearing on this. So too has 'policy' beyond the nation-state itself. The questions of this conference - 'what do we know' and 'where do we go' in the delivery of an inclusive society - take us into questions of global futures and demand a form of thinking that is more radical and more holistic than the conventional field of 'social policy' permits. If the idea of social inclusion opens up this debate, then it may truly prove to be a transformative idea.

References

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