Abstract:
The EADI General Conference 2014 under the title “Responsible Development in a
Polycentric World. Inequality, Citizenship and the Middle Classes” happened to be more
mainstream than maybe anticipated at the time when the topical focus was discussed
and decided upon in the Executive Committee. This was however no disadvantage for
the deliberations. Rather the opposite: thanks to an already ongoing process of also
critical engagement, the exchanges turned out to illustrate the diversity of assessments.
While the verdict on the current role of the middle class(es) remains pending, it became
obvious that more scholars than originally expected had started to reflect on this
phenomenon.i
Not by accident Göran Therborn (2012) already wondered if we are entering a century
of the middle class. He observed that the working class seemingly had been removed
from our memory. The project of a worldwide emancipation under the leadership of the
proletariat was instead replaced by a universal desire to obtain a middle class status. He
takes the evidence from the OECD report on global development perspectives (OECD
2011), which emphasized the need to consolidate the growth of the emerging middle
classes, and the advocacy role by Nancy Birdsall (2010) and the Center for Global
Development she heads as an influential think tank. In a world, so Therborn’s
conclusion, in which the relevance of the working class and of socialism has been
declared obsolete, the middle class society emerges as the symbol of an alternative
future (Therborn 2012: 17).
