SOLIDARITY WITHIN EUROPE/SOLIDARITY WITHOUT EUROPE Open Access

The fate of dilemmas is that they cannot be fully solved; the origins of any dilemmatic construction must be sought in the impression that the question it poses is one of obligatory choice between two options, none of which is self-evident. Refusing this obligatory choice entails showing that the dilemma qua dilemma does not hold. In this respect, this paper does two things: it both uncovers a dilemmatic construction that remains implicit in the texts overviewed – and, therefore, makes a dilemma explicit – and rejects the dilemma as the wrong way of putting the issue.

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 solidarity within Europe or solidarity of Europe with the rest of the world. It starts out from the assumption that the answer to the question: ‘can solidarity in Europe exist and be enhanced while solidarity out of Europe is also aimed at?’ must receive a negative answer.

Until now, however, the dilemma has remained implicit in the two main places where it appears: European Union (EU) policy discourse¹ and political-philosophical discourse. The reasons for this implicitness range from neglect to uneasiness, but this paper is not centrally concerned with them. Rather, its central concern is the relative indeterminacy of ‘the rest of the world’ and the relative indeterminacy of the time for action, which this implicitness allows. The paper ultimately argues that these indeterminacies can be reduced by, first, inserting solidarity of Europe with the rest of the world into a particular realm, that of the social, and by, second, articulating the historical, colonial past of Europe to the future political project of Europe.

Regarding, first, the discourse emanating from the EU institutions, social policy and humanitarian aid have long been considered two totally separate areas. In this sense, the dilemma has, for a long time, remained implicit because the separation of those areas was not challenged. Generally speaking, however, resorting to dilemmatic constructions seems to be one of the most efficacious rhetorical tropes of political discourse. Second, the theoretical discourse on Europe has also, for a long time, neglected or refused to treat the two solidarities at the same time. As a rule (that is: with exceptions), the result was that thinkers who chose to write or talk about Europe did not consider it relevant to talk about Europe's relations to the ‘rest of the world’; and those thinkers who chose to focus on Europe's relation to the ‘rest of the world’ were not interested in the internal construction of Europe and, at the same time, were considered not to be interested in Europe and were relegated to the periphery of European affairs.²

Conceptually, both of these strands of discourse treat the same dilemma – and they both pretend not to. After acknowledging that there is a wide variety of usages of solidarity in both discourses, it is possible to see that this variety deploys in various ways the dichotomy of solidarity within and solidarity of Europe with the rest of the world. In each case, taking a closer look at the rather ambiguous and multiple understandings of the concept of solidarity helps uncover the implicit dilemmatic constructions.

The usual understanding of solidarity is that which holds society together; it is either needed because there are differences that must be overcome or it exists as the product of the idea of a homogeneous whole: at first sight, that is, the justifications for solidarity cover opposite poles. It could, for instance, be advanced that solidarity within Europe is needed because there is so much diversity within Europe that it would not otherwise (ie without solidarity) hold together; and it can be advanced that solidarity within Europe exists as the reflection of a relatively homogeneous society. Keeping this great flexibility of the concept in mind, the following definition can be proposed: solidarity is a recurrent specification of social bonds with a political view. In other words, it brings together, without disentangling them, a (often a posteriori) description of a certain social reality at a certain time, and a (often a priori) political project (Karagiannis 2006). Such a definition does not include connotations of a wilful distortion of social things or of an undercover political agenda: it merely brings together the social and the political in a way that is general enough to cover the manifold usages of solidarity. Thus, historically, solidarity has been used for, and come to mean, situations that vary extremely, either sustaining the established order or challenging it, either promoting generality or specificity, either acknowledging inequality or assuming equality.

This paper is an application of this definition and a way of practically thinking through the opportunities and the pitfalls of the concept: just as the social and the political are blurred in the usages of the concept that are overviewed here, so are ‘is’ and ‘ought’, or the descriptive/static and the normative/dynamic modes. However, it is argued, the central dilemma examined in this paper is posed in categories that do not neatly overlap with one of the two sides of the concept: the social versus the human and Europe versus the rest of the world are encountered in both ‘is’ and ‘ought’ modes. Finally, whilst it would be tempting to map the social onto Europe and the human onto the rest of the world, a close reading of the various solidarity discourses lead us to a paradoxical conclusion that keeps these clearly distinct.

The materials that the paper draws on are, on the hand, policy or policy related documents: European Commission communications, documents by the European Office for Emergency Humanitarian Aid (ECHO) that address a large audience, speeches of EU officials; and the Draft Constitution. On the other hand, the paper centrally uses texts that, written by political philosophers, also purported to address a wider European/global public.

Solidarity within Europe is epitomised by the ‘unique European Social Model’ (European Commission 2000). Solidarity of Europe ‘with the rest of the world’, is mainly entrusted to humanitarian policy, that is, urgent operations. The first solidarity is thus exclusively concerned with the inside of the EU, whilst the second, geared towards the outside, aims at catastrophe relief in the humanitarian domain (and much earlier, when it was still used by development discourse,³ at structural economic changes). The dilemma that is made explicit and criticised in this paper resides in the interstice between these two areas of solidarity, as it were, the social and the humanitarian and can be formulated like this: 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.

In the EU documents treating of the social and of relations to the rest of the world the concept is understood in various ways. A helpful distinction can be made between the static and the dynamic modes of representing solidarity. In the first, static mode, solidarity belongs to ‘the values and interests’ of the European society(ies),⁴ as says the Draft Constitution (2004): Art I-3, Obj. 4).⁵ Though a value is not the same thing as an interest, we can, for our purposes, assume, that the very fact that solidarity is so self-evidently understood to be a European interest turns it into a value. Another way of speaking about solidarity in this mode, to be found in the Draft Constitution too, sees it as one of the ‘fundamental characteristics of the society composed by the member States’ (2004): Art I-2).⁶ Overall, the static mode is one that purports to rescue a dwindling solidarity, and for this reason, it can be called pragmatic.

By contrast, in the dynamic mode, solidarity is something that is aimed at, it is something that must be achieved. Underlying this mode is the assumption that solidarity is not, or not yet fully, there. It is seen as an objective (Draft Constitution Art I-3)⁷ – but it is also seen as the means to something else (a bringing together of means and goals in terms of ‘the commitment to solidarity’ and ‘solidarity as the commitment to x or y’, which can be found in almost every text about solidarity). Insofar as solidarity remains a principle, this mode can be called normative.

Unfortunately for the elegance of the argument but significantly regarding the implicitness of the discourse, the dilemma described earlier does not lie in this distinction: each mode does not neatly correspond to one of the two areas examined. Quite to the opposite, both modes can be found in both broad policy areas: this points at the similarity of the understandings of the concept used in the policy mainly concerned with solidarity within Europe and in the policy mainly concerned with solidarity with the rest of the world. Thus, we find the concept's ambiguous oscillation between what is (as core value, an acquis) and what ought to be (as a challenge) in both cases: on the one hand, the Title IV of the Charter of Fundamental Rights, treating of the fundamental rights associated with the socio-economic existence of European citizens is called ‘Solidarity’ – and the Commission, writing on the Social Agenda, refers to ‘the vision that binds us together’ (European Commission 2004a). On the other hand, one of the objectives of the same agenda, five years earlier was the promotion of solidarity (European Commission 2000: 4.3.1. [p. 23]). Similarly, on the one hand, in a brochure explaining humanitarian aid to the public, ECHO writes: ‘Humanity and solidarity are among the core values of the European Union, which is why the bloc is one of the largest humanitarian donors in the world’ (2005a: 2) On the other hand, The EU Commissioner for Development and Humanitarian Aid, Louis Michel, talks of solidarity, in this context, as being a ‘major political challenge’ (Michel 2005)

At the same time, again in both policy areas, the ‘rescue’ of solidarity chronologically-conceptually precedes its pursuit: this is the challenge for humanitarian and social alike, which also exists in a weaker version, where solidarity is depicted as a means. Regarding humanitarian policy, there is, first of all, an understanding of solidarity being the means for a better life for the people who receive the aid.⁸ But solidarity as instrument is also more pernicious: before ECHO was set up,⁹ the low visibility of the EU's aid had been strongly problematised (European Commission 1991)¹⁰ and later the EU acknowledges quite explicitly, ‘… Humanitarian assistance … became a key element of the EU's international presence’ (EU 2004: 1). The same phenomenon is encountered with regard to social policy's solidarity, in particular in earlier versions of the struggle against economic globalisation.

The epitome of the oscillation between the pragmatic and the normative can be found in the balance that the European texts try to strike with regard to their appeal to reasonableness and rationality, on the one hand, and emotions, on the other hand. It is most clear in the case of humanitarian aid where emotions are mainly mobilised, for instance in ECHO's motto on its posters: ‘Solidarity is at the heart of Europe!’ (ECHO 2003b), which is also evidently a positioning of this solidarity as central, just like in the case of its characterisation as a core value. It is striking that the most explicitly material solidarity of the two is the one that appeals so strongly to emotions. However, this materiality is reinforced by the fact that the aid's implementation, resting ‘on fundamental principles of impartiality, non-discrimination, independence and neutrality’ (ECHO 2005: 4), strongly appeals to reason and reasoned principles that allow the values and emotions to act efficiently. The case of the concept of solidarity in social policy is more complicated. Despite its constant position in the social ‘values’ that confront economic ‘necessities’,¹¹ the texts have managed to turn it into a reasonable, reassuring device: thus, both all that ought to be maintained in the framework of the famous ‘European social model’ and all that ought to be ‘modernised’ (EC 2000: 20), changed, or cut down, depend on ‘solidarity’, are decided on its basis.

Despite this great conceptual vicinity, the two ‘substantive’ solidarities have remained unconnected. Very recently, however, an attempt at (re)connecting these two areas has been made, via the promotion of the European Social Model to the rest of the world.¹² In a recent seminar, the EU Commissioner for Employment affirmed that ‘(…)solidarity should be viewed in a global context’ (Špidla 2005: 3). And, borrowing the emotional register from humanitarian aid discourse, he added: ‘The challenge has been to place social development at the heart of all policies’ (ibid.). And indeed, on the website of the International affairs division of the Directorate for Employment, social Affairs and Equal Opportunities, the ‘social dimension of globalisation’ is the central theme. Referring to a report by the World Committee on the Social Dimension of Globalisation, the site insists on importance of the regional level for social policy.¹³ The other side of the same coin is the concern with the effects of globalisation inside the EU, in a way that tends to see the outside and the inside as co-extensive. The fact that this is presented as a vision that has a long history (European Commission 2004b: 2)¹⁴ should not lead us to neglect the novelty of a rather positive approach to diversity within the EU (ibid.)¹⁵ and to immigration (European Commission 2000: 11).¹⁶

That both EU policy discourses share in the same ambiguities with regard to their use of the concept of solidarity, that both envisage it as, at the same time, existing and to bring about, a goal and a means to achieve goals, rational and emotional, is an indicator as to the two policies’ similar understanding of what solidarity is. However, this similarity is not only left unacknowledged but also, clearly so, to the detriment of one solidarity, the ‘human’ solidarity with the rest of the world. This is most evident in the most general European texts such as the Draft Constitution or the Charter of Fundamental rights, where there is an oscillation between a solidarity that clearly, first, belongs to the social realm, and second, to the present and a solidarity that belongs to the realm outside Europe – not characterised as social or otherwise – and in an indefinite time, between the past of a value and the future of an interest. This wavering expresses an implicit dilemma. To avoid making the dilemma explicit, the EU institutions recently opted for an attempt to merge the two solidarities. But this merging again appears as privileging one solidarity, the social one, by contrast to the other one, the humanitarian one. Why?

One of the reasons for this is that the ‘unique European Social Model’ has been ‘marketed’ in such a way as to fulfil both internal and external purposes: European solidarity in the social area has wilfully served for the – passionate and absurd – pursuit of the European identity.¹⁷ However, the most important reason for this is that the definition of the first solidarity (and the definition of its context) is much more precise in the first than in the second case: the first solidarity is social and it is defined by opposition to the economic domain at the same time as their common development is advocated.¹⁸ The second solidarity is asymmetrically distinguished from the first one: it is implicitly advocated in the name of ‘humanity’ and is much broader than social solidarity. Equivalently, as we will see in the next section, whereas ‘European societies’ designate a fairly precise entity, ‘the rest of the world’ remains indeterminate.

However, the issue is not only one of comparable precision. For, in the case of solidarity of ‘humanitarian aid’, we can also point out that it is explicitly defined against the political and that it is clearly translatable in material terms: this a-political solidarity, the EU says, is centrally about giving money to others (ECHO 2005: 4). It is only an apparent paradox that, claiming the highest moral grounds, solidarity of ‘humanitarian aid’ is basely material. We can ultimately observe two different trajectories for the two solidarities: if the first one starts by pointing at differences (among European societies, welfare states, etc.) and ends up pointing at commonality (ESM, European society), the second one claims to start by the most, evident common feature – humanity – and ends up pointing at ‘otherness’: poverty, catastrophe, calamity, fates that are relegated to Europe's past. Both understandings are old understandings of solidarity – the first privileging the keeping together of the group; the second privileging the bringing together of differences – but it is clear that they differ in motivational force, in the ‘sacrifices’ they demand and in the degree of morality in which they are steeped. Thus, the two solidarities’ descriptions of social ties differ so crucially that they end up portraying different future polities.

On the dilemma, posed by the European institutions’ texts, between social solidarity and human solidarity, or between society and humanity, can be mapped the dilemma between Europe and the ‘rest of the world’, that is implicitly or explicitly posed by thinkers on Europe.¹⁹ It is in the context of a debate on Europe's place in the world, cosmopolitanism and republicanism, that this dilemma emerged; and it should immediately be noted that this debate addressed the relations between Europe and the US. Although a book has recently been published, which brings together all the contributions – including invited ones – to this debate (Levy et al.2005), I only closely look at four contributions, two by Europeans, Jürgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida, and two by Americans, Richard Rorty and Iris Marion Young, which were immediately available to the general, Anglophone public.

It seems an uncanny coincidence that Habermas’ article ‘Why Europe needs a Constitution?’ first appeared in September–October 2001. In this article, Habermas was arguing for a Constitution of the European Union that would, both as a means of convergence and as symbolic result, crystallize a political project for Europe. The broader argument was that, on the one hand, the European integration already expresses a tradition that is distinct from the Anglo-American model²⁰ and that, on the other hand, this distinctiveness has not been made clear enough and can, thus, not mobilize the European people enough.

In this text, there are two main uses of the concept of solidarity, both of which refer to what I have called ‘solidarity within Europe’: these are social solidarity and civic solidarity. First, in the section of the article that is entitled ‘Globalization and social solidarity’, solidarity is seen as a ‘formative background’ that is provided by ‘the political tradition of the workers’ movement, the salience of Christian social doctrines and even a certain normative core of social liberalism’ (Habermas 2001: 4). The reason why Habermas invokes such a tradition of social solidarity is his belief that for normative arguments in support of the maintenance and enhancement of a European social welfare to be truly effective, they must appeal to some already existing tradition.

Second, civic solidarity appears a few pages later, when Habermas argues that European nation-states do not have a communitarian – to be short – understanding of themselves. Thus, ‘a civic, as opposed to ethnic conception of “the nation” reflects both the actual historical trajectory of the European nation-states and the fact that the democratic citizenship establishes an abstract, legally mediated solidarity between strangers’ (Habermas 2001: 8). This ‘civic solidarity that provides the cement of national societies’ (ibid.) is a ‘striking innovation’ produced jointly by democracy and the nation-state. The reason why Habermas invokes this ‘solidarity among strangers’ (ibid.), the product of a ‘painful process of abstraction’ (ibid.), is in order to argue that there is no reason why one more step in such a process of abstraction could not be taken, from the civic nations to the European one.²¹

Even though Habermas clearly intends to keep the social and the political (or ‘civic’) apart, in both concepts of solidarity, he offers a description of a social reality and tradition with a political and normative view. There is no mention, in this text, of solidarity of Europe with ‘the rest of the world’. However, mentions to how Europe and European countries relate to their outside are described under the section: ‘Sharing a political culture’. There, Habermas talks about ‘the well-taken – and only too deserved – critique of our aggressive colonial and Eurocratic past; the critique of Eurocentrism itself emerges from continuing self-criticism’ (Habermas 2001: 11). (A little bit later, in the same section, he invokes again solidarity within Europe, the ‘solidarity among strangers’ which has historically been based neither on ‘assimilation’ nor on mere ‘coexistence’. And, though there is no direct conceptual link – apart from a ‘moreover’ – the next phrases address the challenges of immigration and multiculturalism.)

The same conceptual categories re-appear in a text that was published two years later. The article, written by Habermas and co-signed by Jacques Derrida, was entitled ‘February 15th, or What Binds Europeans Together’, alluding to the day of the massive demonstrations against the Anglo-American war in Iraq. Its main purpose was the backing of the argument that had been made earlier, wrapped in a call for a common European defence policy – but the context was now that of the war in Iraq and the ensuing ‘war on terrorism’; thus, the accent on the incompatibility of the American and the European worldviews was much stronger.²²

Solidarity within Europe, in its civic guise, clearly contrasted to the goal of competitiveness vis-à-vis extra-Europeans, is mentioned in the context of the need for the enhancement of the citizens’ political motivation: ‘The population must so to speak “build up” their national identities and add to them a European dimension’ (Habermas and Derrida 2003: 293). And repeating, in slightly more moderate terms the argument of the previous article, the main author adds: ‘What is already a fairly abstract form of civic solidarity, still largely confined to members of nation-states, must be extended to include the European citizens of other nations as well’ (ibid.) Social solidarity is referred to later in the paper, when, attempting to define an elusive European identity, Habermas writes that, an additional characteristic is the Europeans’ preference for ‘regulations on the basis of solidarity’ (Habermas and Derrida 2003: 295). Interestingly, towards the end of the article, solidarity is turned into an existing ethics: presumably, a tradition that can normatively be relied upon for the future.²³

Like in the previous article, there is no mention of solidarity of Europe with the rest of the world. The article deals twice with Europe's other: once, briefly, regarding Europe's internal diversity (which we can place close to the earlier article's brief reference to immigration and multiculturalism) (Habermas and Derrida 2003: 294); and a second, more substantial time, regarding colonialism.²⁴ Thus, despite the text's central focus on the outside of the Europea n Union, that which is mainly understood by this outside is the relation of Europe to the US or, in other words, the relations within the West. What seems problematic here is the casting of the rest of the world either in a present that is only very remotely relevant to the constitution of the European identity (very brief excursions into immigration, which are unconnected to colonialism, as if they were happening suddenly) or in a past that is definitively over, like colonialism. Pointing this out is not equivalent, for the purposes of this paper, to making an anti-Eurocentric critique: rather, our attention should be drawn on the erasure, from the relevant present of Europe, of solidarity with the rest of the world. Rather than cancelling the dilemmatic construction, this erasure sustains it.

Opening a short parenthesis here, we could note that, more than a decade earlier, Derrida had written a well-known text, originally a newspaper article too, called ‘The Other Heading’ (1992). In that text, Derrida explicitly asks the question of the ‘otherness’ of Europe, which he considered intrinsic to the European spirit, and, in effect though in other words, connects solidarity within Europe and solidarity of Europe with the rest of the world. Starting by considering himself an ‘over-acculturated, over-colonized European hybrid’ (Derrida 1992: 7), he suggests that ‘[Europe] advances and promotes itself as an advance, and it will have never ceased to make advances on the other … to colonize and to colonize itself’ (ibid.: 49).²⁵

On the contrary, it is striking that colonialism, not to speak of solidarity of Europe with the rest of world barely get a mention in the volume bringing together all the contributors to this debate. Two American contributions constitute exceptions, the first less explicitly than the second. Richard Rorty's contribution to this debate should be briefly mentioned – not least because he has previously been interested in solidarity (Rorty 1989) and because his own piece, published in a German newspaper the same day as the article by Habermas and Derrida, was entitled ‘Humiliation or Solidarity? The Hope for a Common European Foreign Policy’. The ‘solidarity’ of the title, however, only explicitly refers to ‘the solidification of the European Union into a powerful independent force in world affairs’ of the last paragraph. So the question in the title expresses another dilemma than the one between solidarity within Europe and solidarity with the rest of the world, a dilemma between the humiliation to which the Europeans would be subjected, if they did not follow the anti-Bush impetus of the February, 15 demonstrations and the solidarity that Europeans must show among themselves in order to resist that humiliation. Solidarity of Europe with the rest of the world is never mentioned. However, when repeating Habermas’ and Derrida's invitation to dream a cosmopolitan dream, Rorty mentions that this ‘idealistic self-definition [of Europeans] would be responded to around the world, in the United States and China as well as in Brazil and Russia’ (2003: 4) Europe – a future cosmopolitan vision born in Europe – is represented here as a call for responses elsewhere, in ‘the rest of the world’; as an example that would be followed.

By contrast, Iris Marion Young does not read Habermas’ and Derrida's Europeanism and cosmopolitanism as co-extensive. Her criticism on Habermas’ and Derrida's intervention argues that the latter was a ‘re-centring of Europe’ rather than ‘the invocation of an inclusive global democracy’ for which Young herself wishes. She thinks that ‘the call to embrace a particularist European identity’ (2003: 1), as she calls Habermas’ and Derrida's call for a European political identity, ‘means constructing anew the distinction between insiders and outsiders’ (ibid.: 2).

Thus, Iris Marion Young is the one who most explicitly poses the dilemma in clear terms, even though – following the usual division of labour between thinkers on Europe and thinkers on the global condition – solidarity within Europe holds no real interest to her, despite a mention at the very end of her article. Regarding solidarity of Europe with the rest of the world, rather than imagining the perspective of colonised people, as Habermas and Derrida had asked, Young asks Europeans to talk to formerly colonised people. Rather than seeing colonialism as an uprooting process of modernisation, as Habermas and Derrida had proposed, she proposes to see colonialism as ‘a system of slavery and labour exploitation’ (Young 2003: 3). In other terms, where Habermas and Derrida speak to the Europeans’ imagination, she speaks to their potential for communication and action; where they describe, she denounces. Much of her reasoning – as witness the quotes above – tends to the conclusion that if Europe puts an accent on itself, on redefining itself, as Rorty says, or on forging a political identity for itself, as Habermas says, then the inevitable outcome is the neglect of the rest of the world.

Despite this main and rather consistently followed line, however, there are two important discrepancies. Around the middle of her text, Young asks: ‘Surely invoking a European identity inhibits tolerance within and solidarity with those far away?’ (Young 2003: 2). If we choose to understand ‘tolerance within’ as what we have called ‘solidarity within’ – however minimalistically understood – then it is clear that, at this point, Young collapses the dilemma: solidarity within and solidarity of Europe with the rest of the world are directly analogous, and one does not inhibit the other. The parallel question is of course to know to what degree Young misinterprets Habermas’ and Derrida's ‘political identity’. More drastically, at the end of the article, Young suggests that Europe's ‘solidaristic culture’, along with its other many privileges, ‘position[s] European states and citizens well to take the lead in the project of strengthening international law and peaceful conflict resolution, and instituting mechanisms of global redistribution’ (Young 2003: 4). Here, the dilemma is again collapsed but the other way around: given that Europeans know solidarity within, Iris Marion Young says, then they should be the leaders of solidarity with the rest of the world. The paradox of ‘taking the lead’ and ‘being solidary with’ is not discussed; the idea that solidarity, rather than being the classically understood pact among equals, more often than not actually rests on unequal foundations is not touched upon (Karagiannis 2006).

The dilemma – implicit or explicit – is the wrong way to formulate the issue. First, because it rests on two fundamental indeterminacies. Second, because, in the current circumstances, European solidarity within Europe goes hand-in-hand with European solidarity towards Europe's outside. Third, because the concept of solidarity is both a description of a social situation and the articulation of a political project.

First, the two indeterminacies on which this dilemma is based concern the notion of ‘the rest of the world’ and the articulation between Europe's colonial past and its political future. Regarding ‘the rest of the world’ (an expression used mainly by EU policy discourse and by Rorty, in the examples given above), it has been noted that, in the theoretical debates on Europe, it has mainly meant the US – or other economically competitive areas of the world. The reduction is all the more problematic that, though setting Europe apart from the rest of the world may seem an ambiguous move, usage of ‘the world’ underlines the commonality of the space or experience shared by Europe and others (Karagiannis and Wagner 2006). But even if ‘the rest of the world’ is extended – as it should – to all regions, and particularly those that should be favoured by redistribution, it remains relatively indefinite when compared to the solidarity within Europe: this is so because a general, world-wide solidarity does not say anything about the nature of the solidaristic link other than a – laudable – ethical propensity. For this link to become substantive and, hence, meaningful it must be translated in social terms, just like the solidarity of Europe's social affairs. Only when solidarity with ‘the rest of the world’ will be a social solidarity – as it has been alluded to by policy rather than theory discourse – will it have any serious impact both on the weaker areas of the world and on the self-definition of Europe.

Concerning the articulation between Europe's colonial past and the future of its political project, here too, the step to be taken is rather straightforward. Making Europe's history relevant to its future seems unproblematic for most thinkers and policy makers; there is no reason why this general principle should not apply to one aspect of Europe's history that is the colonial experience. Immigration and multiculturalism in Europe are evidently a product of European imperialism and colonialism, and the only viable way forward for a future European polity is the acknowledgement of the richness and diversity that this history has produced and produces for the making of Europe.

Second, under current circumstances, solidarity within Europe goes hand-in-hand with solidarity with the rest of the world. Assuming that the latter solidarity is understood as making Europe part of a common ‘world’, that is as ‘global solidarity’, then this solidarity makes no sense unless it attributes egalitarian responsibility – that is, a responsibility that, based on historical ties of interdependence between poor and rich countries, renders the latter responsible for the former's welfare today – to the rich areas of the world like Europe, the US, or Japan. This leads us to see the relevance of a solidarity of Europe with the rest of the world to global solidarity. However, Europe, perhaps contrary to America or Japan, has no direction as such – unless a stronger sense of cohesion and ‘univocity’ is infused into it; unless there is a solidarity within Europe that can actually produce a globally responsible Europe. The point here is not so much to render Europe distinct from other international entities such as the US, as Habermas would argue, but, quite simply, to explicitly operate rapprochements between aspects of Europe that are considered separately. Arguments that consist in pointing out that, realistically, there must be a trade-off between solidarity within and solidarity with the rest of the world, first, crucially miss the point made earlier on the ‘unique European Social Model’: that institutionalised internal solidarity builds up Europe's character, as it were, also towards the outside – just as ‘humanitarian’ solidarity also serves as a mirror for Europeans themselves. Such arguments, second, perpetuate a dilemmatic construction that cannot be sustained on the face of the similarity in the usages of the concept of solidarity, as I hope to have shown. In other words, solidarity is not a scarce resource; it is as expandable as is the political will for it.

Third, in general terms, the concept of solidarity simultaneously fulfils a descriptive function (that can be brought close to the pragmatic mode of the policy discourse) and a normative function. The first function serves to describe social situations (or social bonds). The second serves to programmatically announce a political project. Thus, on the one hand, it is important to note that when – as is usually the case – a solidarity within Europe is referred to, the reference to a singular Europe pre-empts its solidarity. Logically, Europe would not need solidarity, if it were one. On the other hand, solidarity of Europe with the rest of the world is also characterised by the same, constitutive ambiguity: if ‘the world’ were indeed one, then Europe would not have to be solidaristic with any of the world's other parts.

This confusion between what there is and what there should be was traced in a more detailed manner in the discourse emanating from the EU institutions but can also be found in the theoretical discourse. From this perspective, internal solidarity has centrally been thought as being defined by the same qualities as the solidarity that used to characterise the nation-state: in these terms, European solidarity only involves taking a further step in largeness or in abstraction. But if this were the case, then in what sense would solidarity be a characteristically European feature? The contention, here, is that the strategy of theorists of solidarity within Europe – to expressly ignore a dilemma with which they implicitly work – has resulted in a conceptualisation of solidarity within Europe as a solidarity deprived of specific qualities of its own (since it emulates national solidarity) and a solidarity of Europe with the rest of the world as somehow distinctly European. This unlikely conclusion has paradoxically been made possible by, first, relegating solidarity of Europe with the rest of the world to the historical (and only punctually relevant) and cognitive (imagination) realms; by, second, retaining solidarity within Europe as a normative and political project; and concomitantly by, third, reducing the distinction between social and civic solidarity to the second term – which makes of the ‘social’ an unalterable entity that has the same characteristics under different polities.

In contrast, critiques of such theorisations of Europe, rather than ignoring the dilemma, have articulated it in the form of a pro-global South argument, which is simultaneously, it is claimed, a critique of the Eurocentrism of the previous authors. The main strategy here is to posit solidarity within Europe as globally irrelevant – certainly as irrelevant to solidarity of Europe with the rest of the world and as irrelevant to global solidarity in general, whatever this term may precisely cover: at the limit, it is a solidarity without Europe that is advocated. ‘Eurocentrism’ and ‘anti-Eurocentrism’, to use Derrida's terms, are, however, ultimately, fundamentally alike in that they illustrate very vividly that solidarity is a recurrent specification of social bonds with a political view. For, whether they pertain to keep the social still or, to the contrary, make of the whole world a ‘social’, they unavoidably use it with a political project in view.

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.

Dr Nathalie Karagiannis is a Marie Curie Fellow at the University of Sussex. Her current work focuses on a re-conceptualisation of solidarity in Europe. Her main publications include European Solidarity (editor), forthcoming, 2007, Varieties of World-Making. Beyond Globalisation (co-editor with Peter Wagner), Liverpool: LUP, forthcoming 2006, Avoiding Responsibility, London: Pluto 2004, and several articles and book chapters in social and political theory and political sociology.