Scales and Notions of Solidarity in Europe's Migration Crisis

The article analyzes the contentious politics of solidarity in Europe's migration crisis. Calling for solidarity is not only a widely shared communicative action, the idea of solidarity implies a solidary action as well. However, these practices of solidarity are highly contested. In the summer and autumn of 2015, showing solidarity with asylum seekers and refugees was highly popular in Germany. Before and after that the public appeal to solidarity was more contested by claims on stricter security measures, for border control or fear of immigration. This raises the question who should act in solidarity with whom and on what grounds? I argue that different scales and meanings of solidarity should be considered in order to understand the conflicts on solidarity in Europe's migration crisis. It is demonstrated that solidarity inhibits different scales of solidarity (national, international, transnational) as well as multiple notions of solidarity (political, cultural, social, legal). For this purpose, the German media debate on solidarity in the migration crisis is analyzed from 2010 to 2015. By doing so, the public debate before the 'summer of migration' in 2015 is taken into account which shows that solidarity was discussed before the so-called crisis and that it has shaped the public discussion substantially. In order to examine the meanings of solidarity in its context and its interdependence to each other, the discourse network methodology is adopted. It highlights the relational aspect of discourses by studying the co-evolution of actors' media presence and their use of arguments in media debates. The results from the network analysis show a strong national-international divide in the scaling of solidarity. Claims on solidarity in the migration crisis are mostly linked to the EU and the relations between EU member states as well as to the meaning of political solidarity as cooperation among EU member states. This highlights the dominant role of national government representatives in the framing of the migration crisis in Europe. Accordingly, local and transnational scales of solidarity are rather rarely reported in the media. Solidarity claims based on shared identity (cultural solidarity) or redistributional demands (social solidarity) are less visible in the discourse. Additionally, counter-solidarity concepts such as security, sovereignty or demarcation are mostly linked to the national scale of concepts. This underlines the contested character of solidarity in Europe's migration crisis. It also helps to explain why the EU solidarity mechanism on the relocation of refugees was very much contested among the EU member states and failed in the implementation phase. These findings show that research on solidarity should take the discursive construction of solidarity in public debates into account. It emphasizes that understandings of solidarity are linked and stand in conflict with each other. Furthermore, it shows the use of a network approach for studying the contested idea of solidarity in times of crisis.