Towards a Segmented European Political Order: The European Union's Post-Crises Conundrum by Jozef Bátora & John Erik Fossum

Author:Jozef Bátora & John Erik Fossum [Bátora, Jozef & Fossum, John Erik]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781351024310
Goodreads: 51134506
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2019-11-08T00:00:00+00:00

IV Solidarity under threat: The mutations of differentiated solidarity in Europe

To ground our approach to differentiated solidarity in Europe in empirical examples, we focus on the cases of the migration/refugee crisis and the Euro crisis, both of which have been several years in the making. Both of these crises have fostered social discontent, have fuelled (and been fuelled by) deep socio-economic changes, and have subsequently challenged traditional sources of identity, unleashing unprecedented cross-country solidarity mobilisation but also equally unprecedented (in the history of the EU) waves of xenophobia and nationalism (Brunkhorst, 2011; Closa and Maatsch, 2014; Delanty, 2008; Trenz, 2016). We particularly focus on the public expressions and justifications of solidarity, that is, the ways solidarity is both performed and contested in public debates among the Europeans. Such an approach is different from measuring public attitudes on solidarity in the sense that it takes into consideration the performative force of solidarity and the way in which dispositions of solidarity are shaped by public discourse (Boltanski, 1999). Appeals to European solidarity follow specific narrative threads, and actors who move within the contentious European space draw on such narration to engage with each other meaningfully. Crucial to such an approach is the role of the media in staging the vulnerability of others as an object of our empathy as well as of critical reflection and deliberation (Chouliaraki, 2013:22). Although EU media – the press especially, as it is mostly newspapers that have received the attention of researchers – have frequently opted to frame the coverage of the Euro crisis or the refugee crisis in terms of solidarity, they have often done so in a negative context, that is, to show why solidarity is neither necessary nor merited (Michailidou, 2017; Mylonas, 2012; Tzogopoulos, 2013). As Kontochristou and Mascha (2014: 57) put it, referring to the coverage of the Euro crisis by the media in Germany and France, “blackmail tends to but should not replace solidarity as a mentality.” Thus, the theatricality of solidarity communication in the media creates a distinct virtual space of morality that links the spectators of suffering to vulnerable others and thus divides the roles of the potential donors and receivers of solidarity. The virtual media sphere creates the selective visibility for the subjects of solidarity (both the donors and the distant others), where they can be seen and heard, and also where we can consider the question of why we should act collectively in solidarity with others, strangers. The performance of solidarity through mediatised debates is currently changing the European space for humanitarian politics in important ways. In the current constellation of crisis-ridden Europe, solidarity contestations not only involve the governments of the Member States but also increasingly embrace confrontations between the citizens. This new politics of contested and mediatised solidarity can be traced along the dimensions explored in the following three subsections.

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