Introduction

As many of the contributions in this volume have revealed, ‘lived’ and ‘shared learned’ experiences of social solidarity have become culturally embedded across European societies. Historically defined ‘particularities’ of social solidarity across nation-states exist in a European continent where people have shared experiences of war, economic strife, migration, emigration and climatic disaster. But people have also shared philosophical enlightenment and, to a greater or lesser extent, a commitment to ‘institutionalised social solidarity’ as the legitimation of the ‘social contract’.

These ‘shared learned’ experiences have rendered solidarity central to the identity of the European Union (EU). As Józef Niżnik argues in Chapter Two, solidarity as a normative ideal was the organising unit of the discourse on European union in 1950. The establishment of the physical infrastructures and social and public policy programmes, which designed and sustained ‘institutional solidarity’ within national settings, also enabled transnational solidarity within Europe. Illustrating this, education systems are central to the institutional solidarity of nationstates, enabling a European network of higher education provision, supporting the knowledge economy and facilitating knowledge and cultural exchange and cross-national research and teaching. European programmes such as the Bologna Process facilitate a coherent and compatible system of higher education across Europe.

While these ‘concrete achievements’ illustrate the value of the transnational arrangements articulated by a range of European programmes, the recent global financial crisis has brought the contradictions inherent in the EU constitutional framework into sharp relief. Here the constitutional asymmetry within European integration places a higher value on policies and programmes that promote economic competitiveness and market efficiency over human rights, equality and social solidarity (Scharpt, 2002). Within the context of a competitive, knowledge-based global economy, education is regarded as crucial to the growth of the European economy. The EU's commitment to the education sector is self-evident, but even here the ‘contingencies’ of the global financial crisis have led to a proposed retrenchment of state intervention in key sectors of education across Europe. The current crisis has highlighted the role of the EU, and has introduced ambivalence into the discourse of social solidarity.