SOLIDARITY WITHIN EUROPE/SOLIDARITY WITHOUT EUROPE

ABSTRACT

Both in EU policy discourse and in theoretical interventions on Europe, a dilemma was constructed, which has remained implicit. The dilemma in question concerns on the one hand, European solidarity, that is, solidarity within Europe and, on the other hand, solidarity of Europe with ‘the rest of the world’. It is posed in the usual either/or form: either Europe creates and strengthens its social solidarity (its society) or it creates and strengthens its human solidarity (or solidarity in the name of humanity or humanity); it cannot do both. The dilemma is the wrong way of putting the issue, since it is not only based on an asymmetry between the specificity of ‘social’ Europe and the indeterminacy of ‘the rest of the world’ but it also separates Europe's colonial history from the relevant present. The two solidarities need to be brought back together, both for conceptual and for pragmatic reasons.

Keywords:

• society
• humanity
• Europe
• ‘rest of the world’
• global
• political

Acknowledgments

I would like to acknowledge a generous Marie Curie grant that allowed this and other work on the concept of solidarity. Steffen Mau, William Outhwaite and Herwig Reiter gave helpful suggestions on an earlier version.

Notes

¹For practical reasons that have to do with the discourse examined but also for reasons that have to do with the construction of a political whole, I take ‘Europe’ and ‘EU’ to cover the same entity.

²A good example of the first case is the recent volume that brings together the contributions to the the debate on Europe initiated by Habermas: Levy et al. (2005). An example of the second case can be found in any academic department of European studies.

³Development policy's use of ‘solidarity’ has overall progressively receded in favour of humanitarian policy, since the former has been reconstructed on the basis of a shift of responsibility from the former coloniser to the former colonies.

⁴I will come back later to the problem of the singular or plural of the European social.

⁵Here, solidarity is understood as solidarity with the rest of the world.

⁶Other characteristics are justice, tolerance. The values of the Union are respect for human dignity, for freedom, democracy etc and they are said to be common to all member States.

⁷‘Objectives of the Union’: the third objective aims, among others, at a greater economic, social and territorial cohesion and at a greater solidarity among member States. What is immediately clear is that cohesion is different from solidarity in an implicit way that has to do with the subject aimed; cohesion should come about, presumably, at the level of whole of Europe (its one society, its economy and its territory) whereas solidarity should exist among member States.

⁸In ECHO (2005: 1), one reads: ‘For many, international solidarity provides the only hope for survival’. Compare p. 8 of the same document - ‘Respect for the humanitarian space is essential for the delivery of humanitarian aid – the only hope for survival for millions of crisis victims around the world’ – reveals the metonymy: solidarity is the same thing as humanitarian aid. In EU (2004: 6), one reads: ‘Above all humanitarian aid expresses the European Union's solidarity with the world's most vulnerable people’.

⁹ECHO itself is presented as ‘an instrument of solidarity’, in ECHO (2003).

¹⁰‘[I]nternational and European public opinion is rarely aware of what the Community is doing to aid the victims of disasters and fighting’ (EC 1991: 1) – and thus, the Commission ‘acts more as a banker than a partner’ (EC 1991: 2).

¹¹‘In the past, social policy has enabled the European Union to manage structural change whilst minimising negative social con sequences. In the future, modernising the European social model and investing in people will be crucial to retain the European social values of solidarity and justice while improving economic performance’ (EC 2000: 6).

¹²The impulse for such a passage from one solidarity to another has certainly come from the outside (the ‘global’), since the EU based its whole discourse of uniqueness on the development of something different inside. It is nevertheless interesting that the EU responds to such an impulse with its own example, which results in a variety of levels of the ‘social world’. The references to ‘one society’ formed by the Member states co-exist with the references to a slightly different ‘one European society’, the references to the different social systems of the Member states and the idea of a global ‘community’, in which charity – one of the expressions of the existence of a society – occurs: ‘… while strong parallels could be drawn, it was also of course important to recognise the rather different political contexts of the EU and the global community. The global community too often involved fragmented charity for debt defaulters. Within the EU, in contrast, the Lisbon strategy involved a cooperative effort by member states which enjyed sovereign equality …’ (EU 2005a: 12).

¹³‘The WCSDG also highlights the importance of a strong social dimension in regional integration if it is to be a stepping stone towards a more effective social dimension of globalisation’ (EU 2005b).

¹⁴‘The EU has long pursued policies, both at home and internationally, which seek to ensure that economic and social progress go hand in hand’.

¹⁵‘The EU must also ensure that it exercises its external policies in a way which contributes to maximising the benefits of globalisation for all social groups in all its partner countries and regions’.

¹⁶‘While the essential role of the Member States’ social systems in creating a cohesive society must be recognised, they now face a series of significant common challenges … this calls for a reflection on the role of immigration as part of a strategy to combat these trends (demo pressures)’.

¹⁷Balibar (2003) fruitfully proposes to see European agency as having priority over an elusive European identity. For a similar accent on the multitudes of Europe and the definition of borders see Wagner (2005).

¹⁸‘[T]he objectives of employment, solidarity and social inclusion cannot be separated from the globalised economy, where the competitiveness and attractiveness of Europe are at stake (European Commission 2004: 4).

¹⁹The paper does not review Eurosceptic views, since the debate in which these views are expressed concerns the passage from the national to the European level, which is beyond the paper's ambit.

²⁰‘With a view to the future of a highly stratified society, we Europeans have a legitimate interest in getting our voice heard in an international concert that is at present dominated by a vision quite different from ours’ (Habermas 2001: 6).

²¹The second reason is that he sees the conditions for such a step (civil society, public sphere, political culture) as sourced in the empirical depths of the first process of abstraction.

²²For instance: ‘For us, a president who opens his daily business with open prayer, and associates his significant political decisions with divine mission, is hard to imagine’ (Habermas and Derrida 2003: 296).

²³‘In the context of the workers’ movements and the Christian socialist traditions, an ethics of solidarity, the struggle for ‘more social justice’, with the goal of equal provision for all, asserted itself against the individualistic ethos of market justice that accepts glaring inequalities as part of the bargain’ (Ibid. 296).

²⁴‘Each of the great European nations has experienced the bloom of its imperial power and, what in our context is more important still, each had to work through the experience of the loss of an empire. In many cases this experience of decline was associated with the loss of colonial territories. With the growing distance of imperial domination and the history of colonialism, the European powers also got the chance to assume a reflexive distance from themselves. They could learn from the perspective of the defeated to perceive themselves in the dubious role of victors who are called to account for the violence of a forcible and uprooting process of modernization. This could support the rejection of Eurocentrism, and inspire the Kantian hope for a global domestic policy’ (297).

²⁵Derrida already poses the question of the newness and oldness of Europe and its critics, wondering: ‘Is there then a completely new ‘today’ of Europe beyond all the exhausted programs of Eurocentrism and anti-Eurocentrism, these exhausting, yet unforgettable programs?’ (ibid: 13).