Solidarity and the EU in the context of hybrid threats: Narrative intersections (the case of Germany’s first permanent foreign deployment to Lithuania)

On May 22, 2025, German Chancellor Merz launched a roll call for the Lithuania Brigade of 5000 Bundeswehr personnel to be deployed in Lithuania, in response to the deteriorating security in Europe and growing hybrid threats to the Baltic state from Russia specifically. This development has re-narrated – one more time – the security narrative in Lithuania and Germany’s role in it. The roll call on the Cathedral Square in Vilnius was described by Merz as a sign of “our solidarity and our friendship”: “It is right here where we - Lithuanians and Germans together - show that we are ready to defend Europe’s freedom against any aggressor”. Adding to the understanding and theorisation of solidarity in the EU facing the changing geopolitical world in a crumbling multilateral world order, we interpret solidarity not only as a concept, but as an evolving narrative of strategic and ontological nature. It is the conceptual intersection of these two interpretations of narrative in IR and security studies that captures our team’s attention. We argue that strategic narratives that further a political strategy by constructing a “shared meaning of the past, present, and future of international politics”, while pursuing a clear goal to “shape the behavior of domestic and international actors” (Miskimmon et al. 2017: 6), also need to be accepted and appropriated by the audience whose memory and own security (security of Self) must resonate in consonance with such narratives. Our paper presents the results of the pilotanalysing influential, agenda-setting Lithuanian media covering this security initiative since May 2025. We are tracking a range of narratives and ask how local opinion-makers formulate and project a strategic narrative of solidarity vis-à-vis official narrative formulations; if and how historical references enter these narratives; and if and what (dis)information inputs and pro-Kremlin narratives surface in diverse media commentaries across political continuum. We test the effectiveness of the emerging – and potentially clashing - solidarity narratives through their three properties: (1) accentuation of the factual and emotive content, through the iterations, (2) amplification of emotions, through historical and cultural contextualisation of the content, and (3) diversification of emotions through narrative tactics that evoke news consumer’s involved attitudes to the constructed image (Chaban, Zhabotynska and Knodt 2023). Results aim to contribute to the discussion of solidarity not only within European security discourse, but also within the EU governance at times of uncertainty and hybrid threats.