I.1 We Know It When We See It: Solidarity and Struggle

When this volume was initially conceived, Ruth Maddison’s exhibition titled ‘it was the best of times, it was the worst of times’ was on display at the Centre for Contemporary Photography in Melbourne. It included Australian solidarity posters from the 1970s and 1980s, documenting the struggles of the women’s movement, gay liberation, Vietnam, nuclear, anti-fascist and other protests; the fight for equality and equal pay, the fight against discrimination, as well as the fight for fairness, acceptance and respect for all, within Australian society.

With compassion and understanding flowing together in them, the feminist photographer’s pictures were seen to serve ‘a testificatory function – related to both a person who has witnessed these events (the artist) and an object used as evidence (the photograph)’.Footnote ¹ In the same vein, this volume’s point of departure has been that, by using the language of solidarity, we – consciously or not – participate in the politics of it. Authors’ testimonies on solidarity as a norm, a process, a practice, a vocabulary creating polyperspectivity – not so much in terms of what the author sees in individual cases, but in what they see directed by the actors under investigation over a span of time in history.

From the start, our intent has been to engage in a double move: to deploy history as an interpretive practice – a theory, a methodology, a philosophy – with which to engage law; and, simultaneously, to offer history as a substantive arena in which other interpretive practices from across a broader array of disciplines within the humanities and social sciences can engage with law.

I.2 Where From?

Solidarity appears in international discourse as a fundamental value, incorporated into international legal norms and fostering cooperation in a world of interdependent states to address calamities and power asymmetries.Footnote ² It is also cast as a principle of international law reflecting the unity and trust between states in achieving a common purpose by sharing benefits and responsibilities.Footnote ³ In yet another trope, solidarity figures as an ethical ideal that foregrounds the element of membership and belonging.Footnote ⁴ However, browsing international law textbooks, handbooks and anthologies suggests that solidarity has attracted far less scholarly attention and intellectual exploration than other core concepts such as justice, human rights and sovereignty, shaping our understanding of contemporary international law and politics. Neither has the genealogy of international solidarity been sufficiently addressed, although Martti Koskenniemi’s The Gentle Civilizer of NationsFootnote ⁵ has paved the way for a wider mapping.

Recent analysis on globally significant crises and emergencies, including the question of genocide and violations being committed by the Israeli government against Palestinians,Footnote ⁶ the war of aggression against Ukraine and their bearing on the economy on micro and macro level, food, energy and mass migration,Footnote ⁷ the COVID-19 pandemic and its repercussions on global governance,Footnote ⁸ the Trump administration and the rise of populism,Footnote ⁹ the constitutional crisis of the European Union,Footnote ¹⁰ the 2015 European refugee reception crisis,Footnote ¹¹ the 2008 financial crisis,Footnote ¹² as well as global heating and environmental challengesFootnote ¹³ reflect the extent to which solidarity is taken to have delivered or not. Yet, for all its merits, much of that analysis takes the concept for granted. It hardly offers any inquiry into baseline assumptions operating in law and policy debates: what is the problem that solidarity is invoked as a solution to, how are solidarity schemes narrated and which particular interests are pursued in its name?

I.3 Where To?

The novelty of this book lies precisely here; in the midst of reflexive invocations of solidarity in two prominently exposed armed conflicts, and in the aftermath of a global pandemicFootnote ¹⁴ we take issue with the concept’s structure, we identify critical junctures in the process of its development, including concepts it eclipsed, and map factors triggering changes in what solidarity denotes. Our engagement covers the whole spectrum of solidarity, be it as a means of short-term relief (through localism and interpersonal care), as a socio-economic redistribution scheme (state–citizen solidarity) or as a long-term arrangement in the form of internationalism (solidarity across countries). To achieve this breadth, our authors engage with solidarity as a trope in the history of ideas and reach out actively towards contemporaneous practices and applications of solidarity.Footnote ¹⁵

The following chapters focus on the actors, norms and processes through which solidarity evolves over time, the features of the various contexts within which it operates and the actions it has been used to legitimize. We explore transformations, manifestations and trajectories of solidarity, and we hope to inspire critical engagement with routine claims about international solidarity beyond disciplinary boundaries and mainstream legal and policy debates. A diagonal reading of the following chapters suggests that there are mutual relations between the practice of solidarity, its conceptualization and its community embrace. No alterations can be made to one pole without simultaneously affecting the two other poles. Hence, we cannot distil one single conceptualization that embraces the broad variety of approaches to solidarity that are played out in the substantive chapters, and that any attempt to carve out such an approach would collapse into false universality.

The research question we pursued is straightforward in its openness: What does it mean to pose the solidarity question today? Beyond all analyses, solidarity remains first and foremost an event. In this book, leading authorities in law, philosophy and political sciences respond to the solidarity question, drawing on debates on international law, international aid, collective security, joint action, market organization and neoliberalism, international human rights across the North/South divide, African mobility, transnational labour in the digital age and populism. Its 12 chapters open up for differentiated understandings of solidarity in law and politics beyond discursive cliché or ideological appropriation, bringing crises of the past into conversation with the crises of today.

I.4 How?

The point of our volume is to capture the shifting nature of long-held historical assumptions on solidarity at a time of increasing legal, social and political urgency. Its contributors reject the celebratory language of solidarity, characteristic of the modernist period; Noll and Herzog provide non-heroic accounts of workers’ roles in their texts; Hansen offers an antidote to the romanticising of refugees, and Jamil, Joyce and Pahuja disown the consolation offered by a liberal account of solidarity. They all see their subjects at a distance and document their struggles in a daily routine. Equally, there is a rejection of cynicism; Mégret singles out instances of ‘unwanted’ solidarity without surrendering it outright, Karageorgiou gives the Christian intellectual history of solidarity a chance to account for itself and Okafor unfolds the South–North conflict while retaining ideational space for a solidarity beyond it. At stake is a more nuanced appreciation: not all solidarity is equally opportune and not all uses of solidarity terminology are equally valid.

In the Foreword, Martti Koskenniemi frames the question of solidarity in terms of ‘labour and struggle’. Drawing on Didier Eribon’s Retour à Reims,Footnote ¹⁶ he brings us back to the European post-war period, the time of the welfare state, social democracy and ‘communism’, asking ‘how does that compare with the second decade of the 21st century?’ He suggests that the newly found interest in solidarity may be attributed to the nostalgia it carries from post-war labour activists and the promise of a common project against sharper divisions and increased adversity – against the employer, the capitalist, the national enemy. Koskenniemi concludes that the staying power solidarity has ‘is a good thing’. Today’s inequalities and democratic decay make solidarity’s role as a platform for engagement key, especially when rethinking of how to live together in a world of identity and difference.

In Chapter 1, Patricia Mindus draws the reader’s attention to solidarity as a legal concept and its distinction from solidarity as a social practice. Her chapter documents the ubiquity of solidarity in the law and at the same time explicates their friction. She identifies historically critical understandings of solidarity in European law, including the traditional private law notion of obligatio in solidum, the general idea of solidarity as a cohesive force in society and the perhaps more specifically modern conception of social solidarity as generating duties on behalf of the state. In her last section, a phenomenological typology of interactions between solidaristic social practices and the law is sketched out, offering insights on the (non-exhaustive) ways in which legal scholars may relate to solidarity as social practice.

In Chapter 2, Sally Scholz focuses precisely on the question of costs of solidarity, which she formulates as a practice that involves risks. There is more to solidarity, she suggests, than merely opting to stand together for action in concert or collective action. Using an example of collective action responding to state-based treatment of migrants, Scholz shows that participants willingly assume contextualized social risks across an array of commitments to solidarity. They form a loose collective, both to mitigate individual risks and burdens from communal reactions to manifest solidarity. This collective also carries its own set of risks with it. Acknowledging that the burdens of solidarity fall differently or impact other social conditions in adverse ways, Scholz offers an account of solidarity that entails a willingness to share contextualized social risk equitably. This entailment informs obligations within the solidarity relation as well as beyond it.

In a similar observatory vein, in Chapter 3, Obiora Okafor walks us through Antinomies and Aporias in Official Human Rights Solidarity Argumentation across the Global South/North Axis, teasing out underlying, and oftentimes opposing, assumptions about the function of the international system of rights and obligations by actors in the South and the North. Through a quasi-empirical methodology, he offers insights into the reasons why states in the Global North tend to accept and focus on binding obligations in the civil and political rights area, while demurring regarding solidarity obligations in the field of economic and social rights. In an analogous move, he tracks why states in the Global South tend to argue in favour of binding obligations with regard to economic, social and cultural rights but not nearly as much regarding civil and political rights. The chapter exposes the ironic circulation and eclipsing of these antinomies and aporias in plain sight; their relationships to state sovereignty; and their connections to global power relations as ideationally constitutive forces. In fact, it invites the reader to observe how human rights argumentation on solidarity colludes that obligations of solidarity are asymmetrical, without this being reflected in the responsibility borne by states at the international level.

From a similar vantage point of global divisions, but capitalizing on a sceptical approach, Frédéric Mégret comes to rebut the historical ‘truth’ that ‘solidarity is a social good’; a framing often encountered with international lawyers keen to emphasize its integrative function for the international community. In Chapter 4, he explores constellations where solidarity is unwelcome and understood as both objectively and subjectively undesirable. By examining different sites of international solidarity, including the inter-state and the transnational, Mégret distinguishes between solidarity that is unwelcome on account of its effects (when solidarity actually makes things worse), on account of who it is offered by (the ‘intuitu personae’ of solidarity), and on account of the burden of gratitude it creates (as part of a Maussian economy of gift and counter-gift).

The African perspective expressed in Chapter 5 resonates with the question of desirable solidarity and its contingency on power relations. Charles Mbele takes international mobility as a lens for the interplay of colonialism, capitalism and ongoing injustices with solidarity. Through an empirical account of what he terms the ‘Europeanization of migration’, consisting of a set of formal and informal cooperation strategies that further bordering and containment as disciplining practices, he contends that solidarity has given its place to enmity. Drawing on Mbembe and others, he concludes that, within current legal structures rooted into a neoliberal thinking of dignity and rights, solidarity as a radical tool seems unreachable.

Responding to a broader debate on solidarity and the international order, Eva Nanopoulos focuses on what she terms the ‘solidarity turn’ in the context of collective security. In Chapter 6, she interrogates whether solidarity truly marks a break from the ideas and practices of individualism and market fundamentalism that have shaped the global neoliberal order. To determine whether solidarity is the road to salvation or merely old wine in new bottles, she reads the evolution of the principle in the law of collective security against key neoliberal writings on war, peace and global order. Nanopoulos conveys the message that solidarity does not exist outside the systems of knowledge and structures that have shaped the international legal order and, hence, offers no easy way out of the crisis. It can be re-purposed in emancipatory directions but this, she warns, requires first and foremost a re-imagination of critique.

In Chapter 7, Gregor Noll asks ‘Will There Be Solidarity in Data-driven Societies?’ To what extent are the concrete historical circumstances in which solidarity emerged helping us understand contemporary preconditions of solidarity in cybernetics, AI and digitalization? To respond to this question, Noll tells the story of the transformative role solidarity played in the industrial revolution in the second half of the nineteenth century at the threshold to full-blown capitalism. Using the example of German labour conflicts and fugitive plantation slaves in seventeenth century Suriname as touchstones of solidarity and solidarity appeasement, he identifies a set of criteria for solidarity emergence which he tests on the contemporaneous context of digitalization. The issue is thereafter taken into the present: do the criteria critical for nineteenth century solidarity point to a particular ongoing or future practice of solidarity, under conditions of cybernetics, AI and digitalization? As these conditions undermine the central criterion of communal life and work, Noll denies that solidarity has a digital future.

Taking on that question, Lisa Herzog’s Chapter 8 discusses Transnational Workers’ Solidarity after the Pandemic, exploring the potentiality of digital communication that became normalized during the COVID-19 pandemic for emergent forms of transnational solidarity among those united by labour. She argues that historical forms of worker solidarity were often a combination of social and political forms of solidarity, responding to concrete local problems in concrete local settings. Through an optics of hope, Herzog provides arguments for why transnational worker solidarity is, today, needed maybe more than ever, and why they should be entitled to leverage commercial digital channels in its pursuit. Drawing on the example of digital technologies that allow not only the sharing of information, but also the connection of individuals across geographies, she concludes by postulating that workers should have a right to ‘know their colleagues’ along value chains.

Haris Jamil, Richard Joyce and Sundhya Pahuja’s Chapter 9, on Populism and Trans-National Solidarity, offers an account of solidarity as the antidote to the global rise of populist nationalism. In conventional accounts, populist nationalism is placed in opposition to liberal internationalism. This conventional approach struggles to account for the role played by international law and institutions in the global rise of populist nationalism and fails to see how simple reaffirmations of liberal internationalism risk repeating and intensifying crises associated to populism. Liberal internationalism also lends itself to a thin conception of international solidarity as pertaining between states and limited to their ‘co-operation’. Drawing on postcolonial critiques and Stuart Hall’s conception of ‘authoritarian populism’, Jamil, Joyce and Pahuja explore the structural connections between populist nationalism and liberal internationalism before setting out a more radical conception of trans-border solidarity which escapes the false opposition between them. It does so by reference to the example of trans-border solidaristic action in opposition to the commercial and political activities of the Adani conglomerate.

In Chapter 10, Peo Hansen demonstrates the relevance of economic accounts in the context of refugee reception and turns the solidarity narrative on its head. Through an analysis of the basics of Modern Monetary Theory (MMT), this chapter shows that mainstream ideas on the cost of immigration builds on a flawed economic conception, one that constrains both the scope of policy options and of our thinking about migration at large. Much of it is, according to Hansen, due to the heavy imprint of the orthodox ‘sound finance’ doctrine on migration research and policy which assumes that central governments face a budget constraint and solvency requirement much in the same way as households, municipalities and businesses. By shifting the perspective to MMT, Hansen offers tools to modernize migration research and policy, and so establish a realistic approach to both migration and the welfare state. As macroeconomic self-interest motivates immigration to a much larger extent, appeals to solidarity are not needed to do so.

In a similar vein, Bas Schotel’s Chapter 11 explores how an alternative understanding of law, as a public service, may reinforce solidarity and thus transform particular forms of economic relations. First, Schotel tracks how different solidarity conceptions relate to and can be distinguished from forms of cooperation based on neo-liberal market mechanisms. Thereafter, he focuses on the role of judges in adjudicating cases concerned with such mechanisms in a manner that promotes equality and fairness. For Schotel, elite experts, namely judges sitting on the bench of Western civil and commercial courts, may be the agents of change too, using normative legal resources to fill gaps or democratize structures, hard to address otherwise.

In the final Chapter 12, a similar invitation to rethink solidarity and its relationship with the law is extended. Eleni Karageorgiou positions the genealogy of the concept within early Christianity directing attention away from the commonly held position that it is primarily a conceptual outcome of the decolonization era. Linking the Pauline doctrine and writings of early theologians, such as Augustine, to the processes of modernity – of which notions such as international community, good neighbourliness and cooperation are a part – she traces solidarity to a Christian dynamic. This enables her to unpack the deep roots of international solidarity in international law and human rights in a messianic logic of love, sacrifice and debt. She tells a story of agape as a lived experience, where the conception of ‘solidarity’ is seen as a post-theological strategy to address human relationships in the present moment with past awareness (memory). By locating solidarity in the political philosophy of Paul and Derrida, Karageorgiou concludes that posing the solidarity question today confronts us with a ‘fatal’ choice between ‘chronos’, speaking to an eternally postponed promise, and ‘kairos’, which calls for a radically presentist loving politics.

If we were to cluster the contributions to this book following Madisson’s optic, a triptych of observation, doubt and hope would emerge. The first step, as the chapters by Mindus, Scholz and Okafor suggest, is careful observation, followed by the labour of categorization, at times against the grain of existing solidarity conceptualizations. Observation is followed by elements of doubt that the following chapters by Mégret, Mbele, Nanopoulos and Noll, bring to the fore, namely that law harbours a rather dystopian relationship with solidarity. Doubt continues to reverberate through the contributions by Herzog, Jamil, Joyce and Pahuja, Hansen, Schotel and Karageorgiou, but theirs is an analytics of hope, stemming from solidarity’s re-conceptualization and application, in digital workers’ solidarity, social movements, economics, the public nature of law and, indeed, its history of ideas.

Mindful of the limitations of our own optic, in particular as regards solidarity issues which were given short shrift in this collection, as those entailed by climate change or the demographics of ageing, two remarks are due. The first is that this volume, since its conception, was meant to experiment with the solidarity lens applied to contemporary debates as a frame and as an experience; not as a theory or an interpretative device. In that sense, our aim was not to offer an exhaustive analysis of ‘solidarity and …’ issues. We hope, though, to have triggered an appetite for the readers to continue the experiment by posing the solidarity question today in relation to subjects or practices whose effects may give rise to new struggles, in one way or another, for ‘solidarity’. For instance, one could ask what it would mean if the non-human and its practices were analysed through the lens of solidarity, connecting history to contemporary debates on post-humanism in law and politics.

I.5 Solidarity: Reopening the Case for Change

It is the best of times; it is the worst of times: our edited volume reopens the case for solidarity at a point where the evidence for states’ inability to form an international society is stark. A long history culminates and the nuances of our questions will be decisive. On what social relationships can a future justice be founded? How is it that our theology, economy and philosophy change, once they are examined through the lens of solidarity? What are the epistemic and ideological conditions of living out solidarity, what intellectual histories and histories of concrete conflicts come to a head in that concept today? Why is the law an uneasy resource in those struggles: ally and adversary in one? And what evidence has slipped from our sight over the years and must be re-exhibited?

The responses that these questions elicit on the following pages do not lend themselves to simple and straightforward judgments. But, apart from documenting their own observations, the authors of individual contributions to this volume perform themselves in their method of presenting evidence. This holds for Ruth Maddison as much as for scholarly authors engaging in the solidarity question. At the end of the day, all these modes of performance are each a suggestion of a future social, and deserve examination as such, beyond their surface depiction.