The Politics of Selective Solidarity and Credibility in External Action

European foreign and development policy routinely invokes international solidarity. Yet, how and under which conditions solidarity is evoked, and what it practically entails remains subject to debate. Existing research typically approaches international solidarity either as a moral commitment or as a functional instrument serving geopolitical and economic interests. A core assumption underpinning both perspectives is that credibility precedes solidarity and erodes primarily through selectivity and incoherence. This paper reverses this ontological ordering. It begins with the observation that solidarity is rarely universal under varied political partnerships, legal mandates, budgetary constraints, and domestic pressures. Instead of treating solidarity as a fixed normative attribute that actors either possess or violate, the paper conceptualizes solidarity as a relational expectation structure: a set of politically negotiated expectations about what constitutes appropriate and meaningful support within specific external relationships. To substantiate this argument, the paper examines how German political foundations construct and operationalize solidarity claims in their engagement with third countries. As hybrid, state-adjacent organizations positioned between party politics, public funding, and transnational cooperation, German political foundations operate under dense institutional and political constraints while simultaneously claiming normative autonomy. The ideological diversity across foundations, along with their specific geographic and thematic focuses, allows for analyzing how solidarity expectations are formulated and translated at the boundary between state and non-state action. Based on document analysis and semi-structured interviews with experts and policy officers, the paper identifies what notions of solidarity various actors and conditions invoke, such as solidarity with societies in crisis, with political allies, and with institutional partners, and expectations they project onto the relationships. The paper argues that under conditions of geopolitical fragmentation, solidarity becomes less a stable source of credibility than a struggle of differentiated expectations. Examining how political foundations translate solidarity claims into engagement helps to understand the conditions under which solidarity is invoked and challenged. It contributes to debates on the crisis of the liberal international order and how accusations of hypocrisy and double standards arise from conflicts over what solidarity is taken to mean.