Selective Solidarities: Civil Society and the Relational Politics of the European Union’s Foreign Policy

This study examines the interactions between the European Union institutions and civil society organisations (CSOs) in the EU neighbourhood countries to analyse how the EU’s evolving foreign policy framework foregrounds solidarity as both a selective and an effect-producing practice. It probes how, in moments of conflict and crisis, EU narratives of support reveal patterned selectivities of who is recognised as deserving of solidarity, on what terms, and through what discursive and institutional gestures. By analysing how CSOs respond to these uneven distributions of solidarity, the paper offers a more layered understanding of how crises are narrated, how accession processes shape, and how local discourses are shaped relationally by broader geopolitical expectations and hierarchies. Centred on Georgia’s recent application for EU candidacy and the Foreign Agent Law, the study investigates how CSOs located in EU candidate countries navigate the tensions between formal gestures of inclusion and the structural asymmetries embedded in the EU’s selective practices of solidarity. The argument develops in three stages. First, it situates the inquiry within the wider politicisation of EU solidarity, outlining a conceptual framework grounded in relational narratives. Drawing on work on strategic and structural narratives, it shows how relational approaches illuminate how solidarity is allocated, withheld, or ambivalently performed within accession discourse. Second, the methodological section sets out an empirical strategy for tracing relational narratives through narrative analysis, enabling closer attention to how solidarity is invoked, negotiated, or contested by different actors. Third, by engaging closely with the unfolding of local contestations, the paper explores how CSOs narrate Georgia’s place within the EU’s moral and geopolitical community. It analyses how these organisations both grapple with the consequences of the EU’s selective solidarities–ranging from questions of internal and external legitimacy to shifting external perceptions–and articulate alternative visions of mutual support that challenge the EU’s selective geopolitical framing. The conclusion reflects on how CSOs mobilise narratives of solidarity to reconfigure understandings of accession politics. It argues that their interventions unsettle dominant patterns of selective solidarity and open space for more inclusive interpretations of the EU’s borderlands, offering insights into how external appeals to solidarity can reshape the Union’s foreign policy orientations.