The Rise and Fall of an Idea: Analyzing Notions of Solidarity in the Euro Crisis and Europe's Migration Crisis in German Discourse Networks

The article analyzes the idea of solidarity in the Euro crisis and Europe's migration crisis and asks which notions of solidarity are debated in the Euro crisis and in Europe's migration crisis and which actors engage in the debate on solidarity in times of crisis. Solidarity is an important ideational resource for actors to engage on the discourse about the crisis and the future of Europe. Discursive institutionalist approaches demonstrate how ideas shape politics, but do not take different meanings of an idea as well as the role of agency in their studies into account. The present study focuses on the contested meanings of solidarity as well as on the agency dimension in the discursive struggles in both crises. In order to show the interdependence of actors engagement and their use of ideas in the crises debates the discourse network methodology is applied. For this purpose, German daily newspapers from 2010 to 2015 for both crises are coded. The analytical focus is on the one hand on bipartite networks by studying the formation of discourse coalitions and whether the same actors engage in and influence the solidarity discourse in both crises. A particular interest is on potential 'ideational leaders' which influence the discourse and are linked to key actors in the debate. On the other hand, concept networks are examined by theorizing powerful ideas as coalition magnet patterns. These patterns (can) contain different ideas and strongly structure the discourse. Eigenvector centrality as well as community detection algorithms are applied in order to investigate these aspects. I demonstrate that (German) government representatives and EU actors form dominant discourse coalitions in both crises, selectively accompanied by claims of leading journalists. Several notions of solidarity have been identified in the Euro crisis as minor coalition magnets, but claims on austerity in the Euro crisis have been 'ideationally hijacked' the solidarity discourse. This means that the most prominent coalition magnet patterns links solidarity with austerity. In the migration crisis, the meaning of political solidarity was more prone than shared identity claims (cultural solidarity) or redistributional demands (social solidarity). However, counter-solidarity ideas such as demarcation, security or sovereignty also played a role in the solidarity discourse in Europe's migration crisis. The contribution of this study is that it a) fills an empirical gap in the ideational literature on the multiplicity of ideas, b) elaborates the role of agency in discourses and c) demonstrates the relevance of the discourse network approach in the study of ideas and in particular solidarity as an idea in Europe in hard times.