Solidarity could be defined as the readiness to assist and support, that is, the emotional and normative affirmation of one’s obligations towards others. Might we think of solidarity as grounded in the recognition of our given connectedness, a connectedness that makes us concerned? Concern here refers to both meanings of the word: the issues, which one cares for, that matter to us, and those with whom we are involved or implicated.  To say that we are concerned can mean both, that it is our task to respond to something and deal with it and that we care for it, worry about it. Concern in this double sense is always relational; to be concerned is not a matter of personal choice but a matter of the given (and increasing) entanglement of our co-existence. It relates to existing relations that demand our response (see Butler, 2012). Such relations on one level result from our common humanity, from simply being in the world together (also, of course, with non-human lives). I would like to suggest that on this general level it is care, and not solidarity that arises from concern. On another level, specific relations are constituted by our specific way of being in the world, the practices we engage in and through which we are connected to others. In practice, such entanglements reach far and wide. I would like to speak of solidarity with regard to such specific relations, constituted by our acting, but despite us being involved in generating them beyond our personal choosing.

Some have said that only within bounded communities, particularly the nation state, can solidarity in the sense of a willingness to assist and support be lastingly institutionalised on a large scale (Münkler, 2004; Kymlicka, 2015). They have held that beyond such bounded communities, efforts to assist others remain voluntary humanitarianism often based on short term charitable affects. However, not only is it clear that national ‘solidarity’ has a history of fierce struggle for the institutions of welfare behind it, and that we can therefore not assume any ‘natural’ solidarity binding such communities; there is also much empirical evidence that the readiness to assist and support has often extended far beyond such pre-defined communities, be they the nation, the family, an ethnic or other identity group.  In fact, it is these practices of solidarity, that – and this is my claim – are the force of institutional change. Solidarity cannot only sustain institutions of assistance and care, it is also the social force that can invent and bring about new such institutions. When old institutions of sharing, of reciprocity, care and responsibility, those for example, limited to a defined in-group, jar with experiences of connection and concern, then solidarity between those who are concerned, can bring about new institutions.

This is what Featherstone (2012: 4) termed ‘solidarities from below’: solidarities which expand or transform existing institutions of solidarity, create heterodox narratives of concern and obligation, establish new connections of assistance and care, and demand their institutionalisation. Solidarity is thus about assistance and care that is perceived as normatively warranted and just. It carries within it a moral core that evaluates the relation between (perceived) de facto relations and existing institutions of assistance and care. The transformative force of solidarity, however, lies not merely in its critique of injustice, but also in its imaginative power to invent new institutions of care and support and thereby make the world otherwise (see also Featherstone 2012: 6).

Nina Glick Schiller and Ayse Caglar (2016: 30) hold that it is the recognition of our human commonality that is at the core of such shared efforts for social justice. They use the term cosmopolitanism for such forms of assistance and collaboration. Glick Schiller (forthcoming: 12) sees them as acts of ‘expressing solidarity with those others who share the same or similar experiences’, those who ‘face the same underlying political economic processes but are also subject to differentiating cultural framing of these processes, including narratives of nation, race, religion and gender’. While I would agree that a recognition of commonality plays a part in the emergence of solidarity in as much as any notion of injustice requires an assumption of commensurability¹, I would argue that this recognition is only one facet of solidarity, and possibly not (always) the central one. There need not be a sense of commonality in the sense of sharing the same or similar experiences, whether differentiated by governing classifications or not. Solidarity can be grounded in a more basic acknowledgement of connection that is irrespective of the perception of commonality or difference and can extend between those who do not share even remotely similar experiences.  It is precisely the recognition of the fact that we are put into utterly different positions by these very political economic processes, which makes our experiences utterly incomparable (even beyond the difference-creating cultural framings), which underlies the sense of injustice that in turn, gives rise to solidarity: It is the recognition of the injustice of actually being implicated in political economic processes in truly different subject positions.

Let me take the example of the pro-migrant initiatives that self-organised around 2015 in Germany. Many of the people active in them started from a charitable impulse to help those in need. In these acts of help there was often the experience of commonality, and this also often led people to a different recognition of the other. There were at the same time also deep experiences of difference: differences of norms and values, differences of tastes and aspirations, needs and aims; experiences, thus, of existential unintelligibility. Such experiences of difference were equally quotidian as the recognition of commonality; and they were often hard to deal with; they made labouring together more exhausting, led to misunderstandings and frustration on all sides, disappointments, sometimes conflicts about how to move on, and what to aspire to. Experiences of commonality were never free of experiences of difference, and to some degree made impossible what Nikita Dhawan (2013) has called a ‘common language’.

My argument is that it was in the face of experiences of commonality and difference – in a way irrespective of difference or commonality – that charity turned into solidarity. It was not by side-lining such differences and focussing only on the recognition of commonality, but in the face of the political nature of inequality – inequalities not merely in economic terms, but also in terms of the legal structures of world society that underlie them, which limit the right to have rights, and thereby the very right to life to the privileged citizens of a few western democracies – that solidarity arose. First and above all it was the experience with German Asylum law and Asylum administration, which appeared as counterproductive and unjust. This novel experience of German law and German administration – novel to the middle class German citizen – led to a new sense of entanglement with the encountered suffering. Being obstructed from effectively helping, the injustice of the European border regime putting so many lives at peril (lives that could have been saved), the injustice of state distinctions between deserving and undeserving refugees, appeared in a new – more personal – light. The acts of helping that began with compassion with those in need, turned into anger in front of obstacles hampering the possibility of an improved situation. From this re-orientation from a ‘victim’ towards an equal whose possibilities to be equal were senselessly violated, arose solidarity. The experience of administrative obstacles to helping politicised compassion (see also Theodossopoulos 2016: 180). It remained compassion, nonetheless, in the sense that the suffering, now evidently caused not only by the reasons that led people to leave their homes, by flight itself, but also by the reception in the place of refuge, remained the suffering of the other – one that German citizens in no way had to undergo themselves. There were some who had experienced flight themselves during or after the Second World War, and who pointed to that experience as a reason for their engagement. For most of the younger ones, such experiences of life-threatening circumstances and of uprooted-ness and rightlessness were in an existential sense unimaginable. Inequality with regards to legal status, life chances and vulnerability were drastically evident every day; and precisely because they were so drastic, they clashed with the experience of the other as potentially equal – even if different. They engendered a feeling of injustice. Thus, solidarity arose because of the experience of vast inequality – and the realisation of its deeply political nature, and its injustice, an injustice of entirely fortuitous nature due to national belonging, which determined all life chances.

As I have mentioned above, the perception of commonality does play a role here in as much as any visions of social justice depends on the recognition of commonality. Positing a basic commonality means to say that we are the same in some respect, even if different in others. It denies complete difference, which would produce incommensurability. Politically, commensurability, that is the acknowledgement of some commonality that makes us equal in some respect, is the necessary move from which difference can be related to injustice: only when we recognise each other’s commonality, can differences be termed inequalities, and only if we consider ourselves comparable in some ways, can such inequalities be unjust.

However, in this case, shared experiences were not the root of solidarity; rather, solidarity was founded on the acknowledgement of connection, of a recognition of being implicated by sharing in a situation, even if in vastly different subject positions. This acknowledgement of connection can thus cross distances of difference by the acknowledgement that we need to concern ourselves with what concerns us. Such concern can then lead to the identification of shared projects of emancipation, and also to expressions of commonalities, but it can equally form the base for the readiness to struggle for ways of living together.

Is it possible to be in solidarity with others so vastly unequal without reaffirming the structures of power that create their need for solidarity and our capacity to ‘give’ it? If solidarity is not about assistance within bounded communities, or support amongst equals to better their lot, questions of power-relations and hierarchies of knowledge are central (see Mohanty, 2003). This is why in some ways solidarity needs to be independent from perceived commonality: Any such perception might misunderstand the other. Assumptions of commonality might presume forms and contents of shared humanity that privilege one’s own experiences of the human condition. It might foreclose learning from others what they aspire to, what it is to them to be human, and what their lot actually means to them. However, if solidarity is not just criticism of the status quo, but also the imaginative force to invent new institutions of assistance and care, we need to take inspiration from modes of being as possibilities of human life (Hage, 2012). The inventiveness of solidarity rests on this imaginative openness to learn of other possibilities of being in the world together.

Thus, for solidarity to have a transformative force, to imagine new ways of relating to one another and bring about new institutions of assistance and sharing, it needs to be rooted in concern, concern that is independent of recognitions of commonality or shared experiences but embedded in our given entanglement.

I want to venture the thesis that solidarity understood as such provides a glimpse of another base for a polity, namely our co-existence. In a context where institutions of assistance and care are so fundamentally bound up with the organisation of the nation state —social welfare, citizens’ rights, citizenship as such, the right to have rights (Arendt 1951/1968: 286)— and in which a divisive politics of dis-connection hold sway, solidarity arising from being concerned (in the sense sketched out here), means a fundamental transformation of the understanding of one’s political relations to others. To some degree, this transformation overcomes the claims to ownership naturalised through the nationalist organisation of world society. This politics is evident in the thousands of initiatives involving millions of people that have organised to engage in the creation of new forms of living together in various ways, of sharing in a body politic. They practically explore what society we want to live in; in their serendipitous explorations, they create such a polity, showing that it is possible.

Endnotes

1. The perception of injustice presupposes commensurability. Only when people consider themselves comparable to others, can inequalities be unjust. Commensurability rests on the perception of being equal in some respect, even if possibly different in others, of sharing a basic common humanity. [↩]

References

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