European solidarity: a semantic history

Abstract

‘European solidarity’ is one of the most frequently used words in contemporary public discourse, but what does it mean? This article investigates the historical and semantic background of the term in English, French, German, Italian and Spanish since the French Revolution, when ‘solidarity’ became a political keyword for the first time in European history. With the founding of the Holy Alliance in 1815 the idea of ‘European solidarity’ as an instrument for achieving political order on the continent emerged. A historical longitudinal analysis via the Ngram Viewer reveals that the frequency of ‘solidarity’ follows or depends on certain crisis moments in history, such as revolutions, wars or economic troubles. ‘Solidarity’ belongs to the history of emotions and propaganda but is not a stable value system that consolidates political culture. It also seems to play a greater role in the national rather than in the European context. As a European political expression, ‘solidarity’ is not genuinely European but borrowed from the national political vocabulary. Moreover, the article outlines the semantic field of ‘European solidarity’ by showing linkages between ‘solidarity’ and other words.     

Introduction: writing the contemporary history of European solidarity

Abstract

This introduction outlines the possibilities and perspectives of a history of ‘European solidarity’. While – given the high frequency with which the term is used in contemporary political debate – this is most certainly a hot-button issue, the topic has long been neglected by researchers on the history of European integration and European ideas. The reasons for this lack of empirical studies lie in the vagueness and the normativity of the term. This introduction thus conceptualizes ‘European solidarity’ as an analytical tool for research and discusses three major approaches to its historicization: first, deconstructing ideas and discursive notions of ‘European solidarity’, a term that has been omnipresent in primary sources in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; second, investigating concrete practices of ‘European solidarity’, for example in welfare-state policies or in the work of civil-society actors; third, looking at historical limits of ‘European solidarity’ which help to bring contesting perceptions and motives into view. Finally, the introduction addresses the question of the analytical benefits of a history of ‘European solidarity’: it points among other things to new periodizations that help to avoid a teleological orientation in European historiography, as well as to the detachment of the European integration process from the institutionalization of the European Communities.     

Show solidarity,live solitarily: the Nazi ‘New Europe’ as a ‘family of peoples’

Abstract

This chapter first investigates how the German Nazis used the term ‘European solidarity’ and demonstrates that the term meant political loyalty between European ‘peoples’ (Völker) in National Socialist discourses. Second, assuming that the Nazis’ objective in showing solidarity with or demanding loyalty from other nations was to increase strength in what they believed to be a conflict with ‘international Jewry’, it examines the logic of the Nazis behind including other European countries into their own camp in that conflict. It will be argued that the Nazis developed a sense of belonging with non-German Europeans based on three ideas: (1) the racist myth that all Europeans belonged to the ‘Aryan race’; (2) a Europe-wide consensus of the extreme Right on anti-Communism, antisemitism, and anti-democratic and ultra-nationalist worldviews; and (3) the existence of cross-border relations within Europe which led to shared experiences. The article draws on primary sources as well as on secondary literature about National Socialist concepts of Europe and about transnational academic, cultural and social relations in the National Socialist sphere of influence.     

The convictions of a realist: concepts of ‘solidarity’ in Helmut Schmidt’s European thought, 1945–82

Abstract

This article reconstructs concepts of ‘European solidarity’ in Helmut Schmidt’s political thought. Tracing Schmidt’s beliefs from the late 1940s to the period of his chancellorship and beyond, it shows how his concepts of European solidarity were shaped by the lessons he drew from the political and economic catastrophes of the 1920s and 1930s. The article reveals how Schmidt developed a largely functionalist understanding of ‘European solidarity’ that was grounded in both his generational experience and the piecemeal logic of European integration he derived from Robert Schuman and Jean Monnet. Schmidt believed that ‘European solidarity’ was not a given, but that it had to be consciously constructed through mutually beneficial intra-European cooperation. He was guided by two central convictions: that the interdependence of European economies made their cooperation both necessary and desirable; and that Germany’s unique historical burden and geostrategic location meant that its foreign policy always had to be embedded in a wider European framework. As West German Chancellor from 1974 to 1982, Schmidt then sought to translate these convictions into practice, trying to avoid a relapse into 1930s protectionism whilst at the same time hoping to avoid perceptions of German dominance in economic matters. Yet, he remained highly sceptical of any attempts to transfigure West European integration into a greater ‘European identity’, believing that the Cold War context made any such attempts futile since true European solidarity could only be practised on a pan-European scale. Putting these views in a broader context, the article concludes that Schmidt’s thoughts offer valuable insights into the relationship between constructions of ‘European solidarity’ and notions of ‘crises’, and suggests that the analysis of his pragmatic approach adds to new, less teleological narratives of European integration that are now emerging in the historiography.     

Mitterrand’s Europe: functions and limits of ‘European solidarity’ in French policy during the 1980s

Abstract

This paper explores the conceptualization and interpretation of ‘European solidarity’ by the French President François Mitterrand. It discusses the relevance of former concepts of foreign and European policy. It differentiates between a European idea and European institutions, also taking into account personal experiences. Finally, it analyses the correlation between different concepts such as ‘European solidarity’, ‘transatlantic solidarity’, ‘West European solidarity’ and ‘pan-European solidarity’.     

Italian Jews and their ‘political’ reactions to the fascist regime’s anti-Semitic campaign*

ABSTRACT

The article intends to emphasize the political redefinition of Italian Jews in reaction to the fascist aggression and its different answers ‘organized’. Since 1934 there arose strong divisions within Italian Judaism: the real issue of contention, however, did not reside in the attitude towards fascism, but in the judgement on Zionism and postponed a long-standing dynamics. A group of Jews, called ‘bandieristi’ from a magazine called La Nostra Bandiera, on the basis of a ‘fascist’ programme and anti-Zionism, tried to replace the official establishment of the Jewish representatives, the Union Community of Italian Jewish, as a reference to the fascist authorities. The Union was accused by the ‘bandieristi’ of being complicit with international Jewry and Zionism. The confrontation with fascism exasperated the Italian Judaism internal contradictions, putting in long-term dynamic light that preceded fascism and survived the early post-war years.     

Between diplomacy and solidarity: Western European support networks for Sandinista Nicaragua

Between the 1960s and 1980s, political crises in the Third World became a source of inspiration and action in Western European societies. The Sandinista revolution in Nicaragua was one of the most famous instigators of transnational activism. All over Western Europe, locally organised committees staged public actions, collected funds and educated their societies about the plight of this Central American nation, whose Marxist government faced strong international opposition from the Reagan administration as well as domestic social, political and economic turbulence. This article looks at Third World solidarity activism from a new perspective, assessing the active role of the Sandinista Liberation Front (FSLN) in the emergence and development of activism in Western Europe. It argues that FSLN diplomacy – initially by exiles and later by official diplomats – initiated the creation of transnational networks, driven by the quest for international support. They fuelled activism by providing activists with fresh information, contacts and avenues for action, but also cemented cross-border co-operation between activists and stimulated a ‘Europeanisation’ of local activism.     

The Calibanisation of the South in the German public ‘Euro crisis’ discourse

This article highlights the renaissance of the essentialist topos of the ‘lazy and irrational’ ‘Südländer’ (Southerner, Southern countries, South) in the German political and media discourses during the ‘Euro crisis’. It argues that it served to legitimate the political and economic measures taken in Southern European countries that pushed them into still more peripheral positions within the European Union (EU) and deepened the cleavage between North and South. Culture, or better culturalism and racism as its political ideological version, thus were used as a trap, as an intellectual battleground for justifying extremely complex economic and political decisions in a simplistic fashion throughout a crucial period of European history. The article furthermore demonstrates how a postcolonial reading may productively decode the processes of Othering taking place within Europe itself, especially between the so-called core and peripheral countries.     

Contingent meanings,shifting practices: grandmother to grandmother solidarity as transnational feminist praxis

Abstract

While ‘solidarity’ is frequently evoked in transnational feminisms, it is less clear how this concept is understood and practiced among different actors in different contexts. This article addresses this limitation by investigating a movement of some 10,000 older Canadian women who, drawing on longstanding commitments to feminist advocacy, have mobilized over the past decade in solidarity with ‘grandmothers’ impacted by AIDS in southern Africa. The article investigates one pivotal development within this movement as an entry point to consider the productive friction surrounding transnational feminist practice more broadly: the splintering of the campaign in 2011 into separate advocacy and fundraising networks. Drawing on archival materials and interviews, the analysis depicts how changing perspectives on advocacy within the movement, which became most evident in this splintering, provide critical insights into thinking about the complexities of ‘solidarity’ as transnational feminist praxis. In particular, it extends existing scholarship on solidarity-building, suggesting that theorizing ‘solidarity’ in this context requires an understanding of its contingent practices. It also draws on older Canadian women’s reflections to challenge notions that ‘Second Wavers’ do not adequately grapple with how differences in power and privilege shape and inform their movements.     

‘Le mot déclin est presque trop doux’: Michel Houellebecq’s (Euro)déclinisme

ABSTRACT

Michel Houellebecq’s views on the European Union have been consistently negative, recently declaring in an interview that anti-Europeanism is his ‘only political engagement.’ Houellebecq’s work takes for granted civilizational decline, what Oswald Spengler called the ‘decline of the West’, and regards the EU, described in Submission as a ‘putrid decomposition’, as central to this vision. The only way to revitalise Europe and to reverse this decline, Submission suggests, is by reinstating the traditions and moralities that have been eradicated in Europe by post-‘68 moral and sexual liberalisation. On this view then, only those cultures untouched by progressive politics can rebuild Europe and in Submission only the Muslim Brotherhood can provide ‘the moral and familial rearmament of Europe.’     

“Security,mobility, and the body – Syrian insurgent groups’ infrastructures and their geopolitical contestations through/by/in legal institutions”

Political geographers have repeatedly demonstrated how the ‘global war on/of terror’ has led to repressive and unjust international and domestic policies. Nevertheless, little has been said about the multifold intertwinements between such ‘Western’ perceptions and their shaping of anti-terrorism efforts within. To this end, this paper draws on recent feminist understandings of scale, global/local processes, and geopolitics, suggesting how these might be combined with current European participations in Syria, and its legal prosecution as ‘state-endangering actions.’ By visiting the sites where issues on security, mobility, and their interrelated body actions have been negotiated, I deploy an intersectional and multi-scalar analysis of how a layered system of gender-rendered and racialized patterns intersects with/in Germany's legal institutions combating terrorism wherever it may occur as well as the way multifold and different modes of support and logistics have been carried out through the European Schengen Area to Syria. Combining both feminist geopolitics and the vibrant work of (feminist) geolegalities, I offer another way of redressing Hyndman's call (2019) for expanding the tent of feminist geopolitics by not reversing the former, but through refocusing on embodied and material power-geometries and (legally) interconnected sites of an Islam-rendered, Western state-defined ‘war on/of terrorism’ simultaneously.     

Pandours,Partisans, and Petite Guerre: The Two Dimensions of Enlightenment Discourse on War

During the Enlightenment period a certain notion of war came to prominence in European thought. This notion, which I here refer to as ‘civilized war’, centred on the idea that European war-making in the eighteenth century was characterised by humanity and honour. This image of European war-making was sustained by a variety of intellectuals and even some military practitioners who reflected not only on the practice of war in Europe in this period, but on the practice of war among supposedly less ‘civilised’ peoples in other parts of the world and in Europe's barbaric past. In these other places, among other peoples, and at other times, warfare was characterised as altogether less ‘civilised’, less ordered, less humane and honourable, and was thus considered more ‘savage’. I will argue in this paper, however, that there were at least two dimensions to the Enlightenment discourse on civilised war: the first dimension stressed the moral qualities of civilised war, its honour and humanity above all; the second dimension emphasised its technical or rational qualities that gave European war-makers a decisive military advantage over non-European war-makers. These two dimensions applied to conventional or symmetrical war between sovereign militaries contending by massed fire power on the field of battle. They were less easily applicable to petite guerre, that is, unconventional, asymmetric or partisan war. Here, the two dimensions of the idea of civilised war were shadowed by persistent anxieties about the status of both dimensions of civilised war.     

Pluralising political legitimacy

Does the Australian state exercise legitimate power over the indigenous peoples within its borders? To say that the state’s political decisions are legitimate is to say that it has the right to impose those decisions on indigenous peoples and that they have a (at least a prima facie) duty to obey. In this paper, I consider the general normative frameworks within which these questions are often grasped in contemporary political theory. Two dominant modes of dealing with political legitimacy are through the politics of ‘recognition’ and ‘justification’. I argue that in order to address the fundamental challenges posed by indigenous peoples to liberal settler states today we need to pluralise our conceptions of political legitimacy.     

The narratives of exclusion and self-exclusion in the Russian conflict discourse on EU–Russian Relations

The article focuses on the interplay of the narratives of ‘exclusion’ and ‘self-exclusion’ in the Russian discourse on EU–Russian relations. Since the late 1990s, this discourse has acquired an increasingly conflictual orientation, whereby the official foreign policy objectives of ‘strategic partnership’ with the EU and Russia's ‘integration with Europe’ are increasingly problematised across the entire Russian political spectrum. In the analysis of the Russian conflict discourse we shall identify two at first glance opposed narratives. Firstly, the EU enlargement has raised the issue of the expansion of the Schengen visa regime for Russian citizens, travelling to Europe. Particularly acute with regard to Kaliningrad Oblast', this issue has also generated a wider identity-related discourse on the EU's exclusionary policies towards Russia. Secondly, the perception of Russia's passive or subordinate status in EU–Russian cooperative arrangements at national, regional and local levels resulted in the problematisation of the insufficiently reciprocal or intersubjective nature of the EU–Russian ‘partnership’ and the increasing tendency towards Russia's ‘self-exclusion’ from integrative processes, grounded in the reaffirmation of state sovereignty that generally characterises the Putin presidency. This article concludes with the interpretation of the two conflict narratives in the wider context of debates around the project of European integration.     

Insurgents against Brussels: Euroscepticism and the right-wing populist turn of the Lega Nord since 2013

Under the leadership of Matteo Salvini, the Lega Nord has shifted away from its previous political identity as a voice for Italy’s north and has placed hostility towards the policies and institutions of the European Union (EU) at the heart of its rhetoric. Nowadays, the enemy is Rome no longer: it is Brussels, European institutions, and the threat to the national sovereignty posed by the EU. Borrowing from the Italian political philosopher Nicola Matteucci, we would describe Salvini’s Lega as a ‘populist insurgency’. That is to say, it is a populist party that marries the traditional populist evocation of the virtues of the people against the corrupt elites, with a pervasive glibness of analysis.     

The Diffusion of Sovereignty

Summary

The transmission of ideas about sovereignty and its related practices from one time, place, or intellectual context to another is sometimes characterised as a process of ‘diffusion’ or even ‘contagion’. Intellectual historians may use such metaphors but the explanations they provide are historical, not scientific. Sovereignty was transmitted when European states brought their forms of government to other peoples and when those peoples embraced such forms in declaring their independence from imperial rule. It was also transmitted when the idea of sovereignty was itself transformed in the course of these and other historical passages. In Foundations of Modern International Thought, David Armitage explores some of these historical passages, the outcome of which he sees as the world of sovereign states that defines the modern period and the disappearance of which would signal its end. In doing so, he illuminates the larger enterprise of writing the history of international thought or, as he prefers to call it, international intellectual history, inviting reflection on its relationship to other kinds of historical inquiry and the opportunities and dangers it poses.     

Modern revolutions: An introduction to the analysis of a political phenomenon

This paper provides an interpretation of the movement of Arendt's thought in her Denktagebuch, from 1950 to 1973. This movement results in an incipient political philosophy based on new concepts of freedom, equality, and solidarity. As a contribution to debates on the normative foundations of Arendt's political thought, the paper seeks to show that her incipient political philosophy is based on an ethical understanding of the human condition as constituted by its openness to the divine, the worldly, and the (human) Other. Despite its fragmentary nature and its politically problematic indebtedness to theological traditions, Arendt's private thought nevertheless allows us to rethink her place in the history of European ideas. Beyond that, it also provides a powerful alternative to the view that ethical and political thought must remain ‘political not metaphysical’.     

Europe at the crossroads of three worlds: alternative histories and connections of European solidarity with the Third World, 1950s–80s

Abstract

Over the past few years, there has been growing interdisciplinary interest in the history of European solidarity movements that mobilized on behalf of the ‘Third World’ in the wake of the post-war decolonization process. Focusing on European campaigns against the Vietnam War and Pinochet’s Chile, this article aims at positioning these international solidarity movements in the broader history of North–South and East–West exchanges and connections in Europe during the Cold War. It explores some key ideas, actors and alternative networks that have remained little studied in mainstream accounts and public memories, but which are key to understanding the development of transnational activism in Europe and its relevance to broader fields of research, such as the history of Communism, decolonization, human rights, the Cold War and European identity. It delves into the impact of East–West networks and the Communist ‘First World’ in the discovery of the Third World in Western Europe, analyses the role of Third World diplomacy in this process, and argues how East–West and North–South networks invested international solidarity campaigns on ‘global’ issues with ideas about Europe’s past and present. Together, these networks turned resistance against the Vietnam War, human-rights violations in Pinochet’s Chile, and other causes in the Third World into themes for détente and pan-European cooperation across the borders of the Iron Curtain, and made them a symbol to build a common identity between the decolonized world and Europe. What emerges from this analysis is both a critique of West-centred narratives, which are focused on anti-totalitarianism, as well as an invitation to take North–South and East–West contacts, as well as the role of European identities, more seriously in the international history of human rights and international solidarity.     

International solidarity and ethnic boundaries: using the Israeli–Palestinian conflict to strengthen ethno‐national claims in Northern Ireland

While scholars have described vertical nation‐building narratives that genealogically anchor a specific group to a specific territory (Smith 1981; Eriksen 2002), I argue that, in addition to vertical strategies, expressions of international solidarity constitute horizontal nation‐building strategies. Expressions of international solidarity can be used to maintain local ethnic boundaries and reinforce local divisions. By adopting an ally, expressions of international solidarity also designate an adversary, making the boundary between the two a possible incentive for solidarity. In Northern Ireland, some Unionist and Nationalist political entrepreneurs rely on expressions of international solidarity with Israelis or Palestinians, respectively, to make adversarial ethno‐national claims to the nation‐state. This study examines flags, graffiti, murals and political speech on display in Northern Ireland that advocate for either Israelis or Palestinians. Through the concept of ‘borrowed legitimacy’, I acknowledge the strategic use of the ethnic boundary in expressions of international solidarity.     

From ‘la petite Europe vaticane’ to the Club Med: the French Socialist Party and the challenges of European integration

Abstract

Studies of the relationship of political parties to the European Community/Union (EC/EU) increasingly use the perspective of ‘Europeanisation’ to measure such relationships. There is also a case, however, for looking at Europe from the perhaps narrower but no less necessary point of view of intra-party dynamics: in particular, what kinds of challenge does ‘Europe’ represent to party managers and how do they deal with it? By analysing the relationship of the Socialist Party to the EC/EU at three key moments in the history of European integration, the author identifies some common tropisms which continue to operate even as the effects of ‘Europeanisation’ increase.