Towards European solidarity

Abstract

First lines:A s we reflect today on the challenges facing Europe, the organizers of this ALEA conference asked us all to discuss the reality and possibility of European solidarity. It is appropriate to discuss this concept in Warsaw, almost 40 years after the creation of the independent trade union Solidarność and the massive strikes that would pave the way to the fall of the Iron Curtain. So much seems to have changed. As Ivan Krastev has argued, "Eastern European societies have lost the three sources of their "Solidarity moment," namely the communist state they opposed, the economy of deficit that brought them together on a day-to-day basis, and the sense of national dignity they preserved against the internation-alist orthodoxy of official Marxism." (2005: 43) This progressive disintegration of the social bonds in the East has benefitted populist governments that exploit jingoism and contest the basis of the European project – a "de facto solidarity" between states and societies, to paraphrase the famous 1950 Schuman declaration. The collapse of solidarity in the West and South of Europe within societies and across states has also been acute for decades.