Solidarization and Othering in Europe. Who Deserves to be European?

European solidarity was invoked ubiquitously in the last decade. Yet, Europe is far from a homogeneous continent. Reflecting this, the current literature finds considerable heterogeneity in with whom Western Europeans are willing to be solidaristic. Particularly that a core circle of bonding is formed, from which the peripheral countries are left out. In this paper I argue and empirically substantiate that this distinction is not fine-grained enough and that it does not theorize the underlying power distribution and dependencies which give rise to differential belonging to Europe. Partially because the literature omits the role of discourse. I posit that Western Europeans discursively include peripheral European countries as far as they are deemed to be "almost-alike" them. This self-referentially conditional sliding-scale of Europeannes is co-constituted by regional and institutional belonging in the mind of the \textit{Core} European. Empirically I rely on a quantitative index of discursive distance employed on HEADS, newly collected speeches by West European heads of government. The findings suggest a pattern of discursive exclusion of certain European regions, indicating the existence of at least four classes of Europeans in the minds and discourse of Western Europeans. The discursive exclusion increases after formal institutional inclusion in the European Union and decreases in response to democratic backsliding. The results suggest that not all European countries are treated as equally European, which is bound to create problems in the future of European integration.