Sustainable Capitalism in the Making? The Marshallian Citizenship Conceptualisation Expanded in a European Circular Economy

Abstract

In contrast to a linear system of take-make-dispose when it comes to production and consumption patterns, a circular economy aims at preserving and using resources to its maximum, promoting a longer durability of products and stands for the minimising of waste. This can be seen as a part of a broader paradigm of sustainable economic growth, which the European Commission and many of the European Union’s member states on the national level aim at integrating into society as a whole. Resource use is overall an issue surrounded by political conflict, and this since some argue that there are limits to how much growth that can be generated without using too much of the earth’s resources, while some mean that we can find ways to overcome these limits. In democratic societies, conflict is to a large extent handled on the basis of citizenship and political participation. In this theory-developing thesis, the citizenship theory as presented by T.H. Marshall is confronted with sustainable growth, with a circular economy as its specific dimension. The result shows that civil, political and social rights as presented in Marshall’s original historical study are all affected by a circular economy. When applying the developed theoretical framework to empirical material in the form of policy documents stemming from the European Commission and from member states of the European Union, it becomes clear that there are also other aspects, such as differing political ideologies and geopolitical concern, that is surrounding the idea of a circular economy in relation to the citizenship concept.