What is the fifth estate? opendemocracy.net /can-europe-make-it/giuseppe-allegri-roberto-ciccarelli/what-is-fifth-estate Giuseppe Allegri and Roberto Ciccarelli For the first time since 1848, a renewed Europe from the bottom up is possible: with the new social coalitions of the Fifth Estate. ‘A spectre is haunting Europe’: the spectre of the Fifth Estate, which follows Sieyès’s Third Estate and the Fourth Estate of peasant workers and the proletariat. The Fifth Estate can become ‘ a new kind of proletariat’, but without any consciousness of class. It is made of stateless people, the outcast ‘precariat’ of Europe, to whom a new social figure is connected, ‘the included outcast’. This is the one who pays taxes, votes, expresses his/her opinion in real or virtual squares, but never comes out from the grey area between work and non-work. This stateless person is the puzzle of contemporary citizenship. It is the product of the current European governance: a system formed by national governments and global economic institutions deferring to a technocratic elite and to a form of statism without a State. The outcast is left outside parliamentary representation, trade union or existing business. It floats in the empty space created by the disappeared balance between secular citizenship and the state, state sovereignty and the authorities that govern their lives at a super-national level (the European Central Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank: the ‘troika’ which monitors the crisis of European states and their populations). Understanding the Fifth Estate The Fifth Estate is an existential condition for millions of workers, whether self-employed, temporary or freelancer workers, skilled or mobile workers, ‘precarious’ workers or simply working poor. They are knowledge workers, chain workers, communication or health care workers, mini-job workers, or contract workers in the arts and culture sector. The Fifth Estate, however, is also the condition for millions of non-working people in the age of unemployment in the European Great Recession (2008 onwards); a condition that affects the existence of young people Not in Education, Employment or Training (NEET) as well as that of those over-40s and -50s.