The Relationship Between Competitiveness and Solidarity: a Theoretical Framework

Starting from the 1970s and 1980s, competitiveness has emerged as a key conceptual tool for the neoliberal restructuring of national economies, welfare states, and public policies as well as for the analysis of such transformations (Bruno 2009; Chiocchetti & Allemand 2019; Gough 1999; Pedersen 2010; Porter 1990). Moreover, the relationship between competitiveness and solidarity has gradually come to dominate the policy debates in many countries, flanking and partially replacing older dyads such as freedom and equality, individual rights and public interest, economic growth and social cohesion, liberalisation and social regulation, or the market and the social (Garben 2017; Jepsen and Serrano 2005; Scharpf 2010). This notwithstanding, such relationship has yet to be systematically explored in the literature. The present paper provides a novel theoretical framework for the analysis of the relationship between competitiveness and solidarity. Through a study of the primary and secondary literature, it shows that this relationship can be conceptualised in three divergent ways: as antagonistic, as mutually reinforcing, and as coinciding. In the first and most common case, competitiveness and solidarity conflict with each other: either one or the other must give in, and acceptable compromises between the two must be sought. In the second and most interesting case, competitiveness and solidarity sustain and strengthen each other: an increase in solidarity leads to more competitiveness and vice versa. In the third and most abstract case, competitiveness is defined as synonymous with solidarity or, conversely, solidarity is subsumed in the working of an ideal perfect competition. This finding has important implications for research on the welfare state and the design of social and economic policies, forcing us to acknowledge both the potential of self-reinforcing forms of ‘competitive solidarity’ (e.g. high-road industrial strategies, export-led growth, the social investment perspective, the performance-enhancing effects of internal and external competition) and its inevitable tensions and contradictions, requiring the deployment of forms of ‘protective solidarity’ or alternative developmental models transcending capitalist competition.