184 M. Ferrera lively sense of responsibility for the welfare of the community’.6 Such sense of responsibility has been constantly eroding since the 1950s, especially within the ‘middle mass’ of employees and pensioners. The growth of social spending has been accompanied by an increase of taxes and contributions. But since the 1990s survey evidence has shown that the vast majority of citizens think that they pay far too much for the benefits they receive – which they consider as untouchable entitlements and property rights. When the Italian trade unions supported the first reforms of a hugely unbalanced pension system in the early 1990s, workers hurled iron bolts at their leaders: a striking departure from the times when old ladies brought flowers to the post office. The welfare state has indeed been retrenched in the last couple of decades and the access to benefits and services has been made conditional or even ‘contractual’ (i.e. responsibility-sensitive) in the field of unemployment and social assistance. The big ‘elephants’ of the welfare state (pensions and health care) have also been reigned in, but the prevailing justificatory narrative has focused here on the need for cost containment, sustainability, or compliance with ‘the demands of the EU’. The Marshallian ‘lively sense of responsibility’, the fact that the rights of citizenship cannot be severed from ‘the corresponding duties’ seem to have gone lost and appealing to them has today very limited political purchase. Even during economic crises or emergencies, consensus building must stay clear of duty-talk. Enter EU citizenship In his analysis of European citizenship, Paul Magnette has introduced the distinction between ‘isopolitical’ and ‘sympolitical’ rights (the distinction is drawn from the law and war practices of ancient Greece).7 Isopolitical rights are horizontal, as it were: they confer upon individuals belonging to a given political community the freedom to enter into the citizenship space of another community and enjoy the rights recognised by the latter. Sympolitical rights are ‘vertical’: they stem from a common authority which takes binding decisions for all the members of the participating communities – who in turn have some say on the content of such decisions. National citizenship is predominantly sympolitical: its scope and content are decided by central authorities through democratic procedures. Only in 6 7 Marshall, T. H. & T. Bottomore (1992), Citizenship and Social Class. London: Pluto, 41. Magnette, P. (2005), Citizenship. The History of an Idea. Colchester: ECPR Press.