Abstract
The recent massive arrival of war refugees has challenged Europe’s political unity and fanned the flames of anti-Muslim populism. Both discourses have been framed in terms of ‘shifting solidarity’ between the European Union member states, their citizens and the refugees. At stake, the article argues, is the delineation of the collectivity linked by the obligation of solidarity. Drawing on insights from research conducted among Polish-born migrants in Germany about their practices and attitudes towards helping the refugees, and critically engaging with social theory, this article offers a new understanding of transnational solidarity. Transnational solidarity, it argues, needs to embrace the tension between cosmopolitan and particularistic ideas around belonging. The article suggests defining transnational solidarity as an outcome of socio-culturally and spatio-temporally specific interpretations of the norm of solidarity. As a heuristic device, transnational solidarity helps us to understand the shifting alliances for and against refugees in Europe.
Solidarity in open societies
Modern societies are open, shaped by migration and mobility of people, ideas, commodities and images (Urry, 2000). But what holds them together, or – in other words – how is solidarity in open societies possible? Social theory’s engagement with solidarity dates from the phase of consolidation of nation-states and discursive and institutional production of a homogeneous, territorially bound, national society, united by language, history and values (Anderson, 1991). The welfare state of the 20th century remains the paradigmatic institutionalized form of solidarity conditioned by social cohesion of ‘supposedly culturally homogeneous nations’ (Oosterlynck et al., 2016: 765). This model of solidarity is stabilized by an international system of remedying crises with the help of individual and collective private and public humanitarian aid, as part of global management of injustice and inequality; it is successful as long as the indigent ‘Other’ stays where she is, it is far away, in her ‘home country’ (Beck, 2007, 2010).
Massive international migration and the consequent diversification of European societies is thus not an easy fit with the idea of a territorially and culturally bounded solidarity. The so-called ‘refugee crises’ in 2015, when more than 1 million people from Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq, and other war-torn and conflict-ridden countries arrived in Europe seeking refuge and asylum, challenged this latent, national and welfare-state ‘system of solidarity’ (Glick Schiller, 2016: 1). This very moment of turbulence produced new multiple and contradictory discourses and practices of solidarity in Europe.
Social theory seems to struggle to classify what solidarity with refugees is in fact. Is it a form of national, cosmopolitan or transnational solidarity? Is it national as soon as refugees become our neighbors, with (at least some) rights and obligations as fellow nationals, and thus a part of an institutionalized national system of social redistribution? Alternatively, is the impulse to help refugees a form of a cosmopolitan attitude that reaches beyond political, national, ethnic and religious belonging? Is it solidarity, or merely humanitarian aid to engage in help for refugees outside our own nation-state? Is it a form of cross-border solidarity if one engages in another country, for example as a German volunteer in the Mediterranean?
One goal of this article is to offer a refined definition of transnational solidarity as a form of solidarity emerging in Europe. We do so by analyzing what drives people in Europe to help refugees. We consider this question to be of particular interest in the light of conflicting discourses around the influx of refugees and the scope of helping them on the territory of the European Union. We conceive of solidarity as a norm of acting for the benefit of the other (individuals or collectives), which is embedded in particular socio-cultural and spatio-temporal contexts. We believe studying migrants helps to address the multiplicity of norms of solidarity.
These contexts produce particular normative ideas about belonging and thus establish why, when, how and to whom the help should be provided. These normative ideas oscillate between universalism and particularism; cosmopolitanism is a normative idea at one end of this spectrum according to which solidarity applies to all humans irrespective of their belonging to particular groups. On the contrary, national ideology limits the scale and scope of the norm of solidarity to nation-state citizens and/or the population inhabiting a state territory. However, ‘national solidarity’ is just one possible form of particularistic norm, and class, gender, racial or ethnic belongings can equally draw boundaries around the collective of those obliged to help and those eligible to receive it.
To illustrate our arguments, we draw on the results from an online survey conducted in July and August 2016 among people born in Poland and residing in Germany as part of the ‘Solidarizing in Europe’ project. 1 In what follows, we first engage with various attempts to define solidarity beyond nation-states. We scrutinize how this body of work conceives of boundaries of belonging as a norm behind solidarity. We then move on to discuss the results of our study. In the concluding section of the article, we argue that transnational solidarity is more than merely acts of help across nation-state borders. The transnational character of solidarity relates to friction between norms, which are rooted in more than one socio-cultural context and are particularly ample in the context of trans-border migration, but not limited to it.
Solidarity within and beyond nation-states
Solidarity – understood as acting for the benefit of the other – is a social norm (Baurmann, 1999); as such it is rooted in ideas on whom, when and how to help, whether the help should be out of fairness, a sense of justice, or the desire for social peace and cohesion, and if help should lead to mutual obligation or not. As Baurmann (1999) argues, such normative schemes are needed to motivate people to act in a desired way despite the fact that the action might conflict with their self-interest. Historically, the welfare state institutionalized such norms, relieving citizens of the need to decide on obligations of solidarity and sanctions towards those who do not follow this obligation (Stjernø, 2004: 290). In modern nation-states, accordingly, it is the community of citizens to which the norm of solidarity applies. In the absence of comparable legal regulations at the global scale, the debate on solidarity beyond nation-states focuses on which other principles guide the boundaries drawn around those included by the obligation of solidarity.
Durkheim’s ideas around the relationship between the forms of collectivity and solidarity pertain in most contemporary debates. Durkheim (1997) distinguished between two different forms of solidarity – mechanical and organic – as source of social cohesion. 2 Mechanical solidarity holds society together as a result of a common belief system, values and norms shared by individuals. As a ‘collective conscience’ is easier to achieve in societies of relatively simple social structure, Durkheim associated this type of solidarity with collectives of a smaller scale. Unlike the first type, organic solidarity is the consequence of the division of labor and the resulting interdependence between individuals in complex and larger, modern societies.
Durkheim underscores that both forms of solidarity ‘are two facets of one and the same reality’ (Durkheim, 1997: 86). However, they have an inverted relationship. As the specialization and fragmentation of modern societies grows, their social cohesion increasingly stems from organic solidarity, whereas the ties arising from a collective identity and a homogeneous system of norms and values are weakened. The communitarian approaches (Honneth, 1991; Putnam, 2007; Taylor, 1989) tend to emphasize the importance of mechanical solidarity as a feature of small-scale communities, and they are concerned with the decline of solidarity in the course of modernization and individualization (Bayertz, 1999: 15–16). Tiryakian (2005) argues, on the contrary, that accelerated globalization is leading to a ‘return’ of mechanical solidarity and holds the potential to enhance the positions of otherwise marginalized groups, but also the danger of reinforcing national solidarity. Similarly, Oosterlynck et al. (2016: 769–770) argue that the modern welfare state is based on a specific combination of different sources of solidarity, among them interdependence and shared norms and values, corresponding to organic and mechanical solidarity respectively. The coincidence of national and social solidarity (Calhoun, 1999) requires a separate debate, but suffice to say that the discursive formation of nation-states constructs national societies as bounded by the norm of solidarity, which is rooted in shared values, language and origin (ethno-cultural community: Wimmer, 2013), as well as executed effectively by its functional systems (social benefits, tax system, but also trade unions, etc.). In this national rhetoric, the boundaries of a solidary collectivity are congruent with the nation-state territory, and the population of state citizens (Baurmann, 1999).
Within this national understanding of solidarity, migration and migration-driven racial, ethnic, religious or cultural diversity pose a challenge to the social cohesion rooted in the presumed similarity of (national) cultural values and norms and the sense of collective identity they produce (Ariely, 2014: 575; Putnam, 2007). Accordingly, migration ‘may make it more difficult to build or sustain the feelings of shared belonging and solidarity needed to maintain a robust welfare state’ (Kymlicka, 2015: 1). Thus, in reaction to migration and the growing diversification of (western) nation-state populations, cultural assimilation (Brubaker, 2014) is displayed as the only capable means to re-establish the national form of solidarity and secure the existence of the welfare state. Empirically, these theoretical assumptions may be proved by testing correlations between the levels of social spending (or willingness to increase it) and the racial or ethnic diversification of the national population (Gerhards and Lengfeld, 2014; Mau and Burkhardt, 2009). The findings of such studies are often contradictory (Ariely, 2014: 573). The same argument holds true for solidarity among citizens of Europe. Such ‘European solidarity’ would depart from ethnic, lingual, religious diversity and arrive at a stable mechanism of a redistribution of rights, resources and risks (Ellison, 2012; Lengfeld et al., 2015). 3
If we reject the notion of solidarity that rests upon identity and belonging constituted through common culture, history, language and values, we arrive at the question of the ‘we’ beyond the norm of solidarity which is central to our article. Jaeggi (2001: 299) maintains that the ‘we’ is not necessarily fixed, but open with regard to various contexts of within-individual realms of experience. If political struggles establish bonds across (ethno-national) difference (Bandy and Smith, 2005; Mohanty, 2003), solidary collectivity emerges through practices rather than declared attitudes of solidarity. 4 In Jaeggi’s (2001: 298) words, there is no hidden essence of collective identities which automatically leads to solidarity.
Following this argument, we arrive at the notion of cosmopolitan solidarity. Cosmopolitanism offers a prospect of ‘solidarity with others who are sometimes different from us’ (Stevenson, 2003: 32) and who do not belong to ‘our’ political community (Pensky, 2007). These two aspects are often intertwined in the literature, but differently accentuated. In reference to theories of justice, the cosmopolitan norm acts as a drive for people to engage in redistributive arrangements beyond self-interest (Pensky, 2007), and it involves empathy, reciprocity and relationships of obligation (Delanty, 2009). Following Habermas (1998), various authors refer to the view that human beings have specific moral obligations towards other human beings who deserve equal rights, recognition and respect, regardless of their (ascribed or voluntary) belonging to any fixed category such as gender, age, ethnicity or race (Sangiovanni, 2013: 218). While the reach of such moral obligation is global, it is not necessarily post-national, as it does not replace nation-states but is enacted by complementary, supra-national institutions (Habermas, 2004). 5 Importantly, feminist cosmopolitan perspectives help to address how the national understanding of solidarity obscures gendered apprehension of human rights, relations of obligations and a sense of reciprocity (Høy-Petersen et al., 2016; Reilly, 2007). Taking gender seriously implies rejecting an ethnic-homogeneous territorial understanding of belonging which equates difference with cultural otherness (Vieten, 2012).
These proposals for solidarity beyond the nation-state allude to quite different moral norms: either universal (encompassing all humans without exception) or particularistic (exclusive to a particular group). In this context, particularism could be defined along various lines such as political interests, or religious or ethnic belonging (Duyvendak et al., 2016). Also, particularistic solidarities could stretch across nation-state borders, as is the case of different social movements based on religion, class, or sexuality.
Yet, we argue, trapped in the false alternative of national containment or cross-border actions and moral commitments, the scholarship conducted to date has failed to develop a notion of transnational solidarity that would not simply transplant the national form of solidarity to a larger geographical scale (such as that of the European Union), but would consider the scale and content of the normative underpinnings of transnational solidarity as possibly distinct from the national (or cosmopolitan) ones. This fallacy, we argue, relates to the insufficient engagement with the notion of transnationalism that is often equated with the crossing of national borders.
Transnationalism as an outcome of social connectedness
Transnationalism concerns the outcomes and meanings of durable connections characterized by the fact that they exist between multiple locations, usually spanning two countries, and that they are maintained by non-state actors, some of whom are international migrants (Waldinger, 2015). A vast number of studies demonstrate how migrants maintain ties to their places of origin (Basch et al., 1994; Levitt and Glick Schiller, 2004; Vertovec, 2009). There is solid evidence for existence of such practices among Polish migrants as well (Barglowski et al., 2015; Nowicka, 2007). While migrants’ participation in social life in more than one country may vary in intensity and forms (Nowicka, 2013), the scope and importance of their impact on social formation (Guarnizo, 1997; Landolt, 2001; Levitt and Glick Schiller, 2004) is without doubt.
This is not to say that the powers of nation-states dissolve; 6 rather, connectivity provides a context in which the workings of nation-states can be identified through empirical research (e.g. Fouron and Glick Schiller, 2001). For example, simultaneously to the spread of cross-border infrastructures and media, people continue to adhere to a shared national grammar of interaction and signification (Eriksen, 2007). This is equally due to the persistence of nationally organized systems of education, labor and social support, as well as to the dominance of consumption of national (in terms of language and production) news channels and programs (Trappel and McQuail, 2011), which shape people’s perceptions of current affairs as well as their attitudes (Bryant and Oliver, 2009).
At the same time, transnationalism is not simply synonymous with the crossing of nation-state borders. This popular understanding is a result of what Scholte (2003) terms ‘methodological territorialism’ – the tendency of social sciences to assign (exaggerated) importance to territorial referents and see social processes as enclosed by the geography of nation-states. ‘Methodological territorialism’ oversees that the connectivity across space and time has always been shaping cultures, and thus power and meaning (Tsing, 2005), as well as social identities of people as ethnics, citizens, believers and women or men (Anthias, 2008). Importantly, connectivity results in interactions, in encounters, and they lead to new arrangements of culture (Tsing, 2005: 5–6).
We refrain from labeling migrants’ attitudes as typical of a certain national society (Nowicka, 2014) as they are local rather than national. It means they cannot be understood without the benefit of historically (and spatially) specific cultural assumptions (Tsing, 2005: 7). Yet the national logic also permeates social sciences, and so the available data on attitudes, opinions and discourses are available for an aggregated level of ‘national society’. 7 Throughout the text we thus refer to ‘Poland’ and ‘Polish’ and ‘Germany’ and ‘German’, while recognizing the porousness of national spaces, and the intercultural character of ‘national cultures’. At the same time, we acknowledge that the migrants we study are regularly exposed to particular corpora of Polish literature, film, news and discourses (in terms of language and production), which we could refer to as their ‘cultural repertoire’. These Polish ‘cultural facts’ are reaffirmed in everyday social interactions (Andersson, 2008: 42), and differ in many respects from the cultural repertoire that Polish migrants interact with in Germany. In the process of people migrating and establishing connections across borders, the culturally specific and taken-for-granted, local norms and values move, circulate and interact with other culturally specific local norms and values, a condition which Tsing (2005) terms ‘friction’. ‘Friction’ is a potentially productive space in-between, where migrants engage with old and new ideas and practices. Focusing on this condition means for us to study multiple, emergent and competing norms, values, attitudes and practices.
Transnationalism as we understand it is thus an outcome of the multiple belongings, practices and dispositions coming together. This understanding of transnationalism has consequences for how we think about solidarity. First, if the incorporation of individuals into nation-states and in various (more or less formal) structures spanning their borders is not a contradiction (Levitt and Glick Schiller, 2004), the notion of solidarity ought to acknowledge this simultaneity. Second, it has to recognize the possibility of multiple norms underpinning attitudes and practices of solidarity. Consequently, the notion of ‘transnational solidarity’ has to engage with the boundaries of belonging that signal or enact a conscious connection, empathy or obligation to a particular collectivity, and the actual practices of assistance.
We believe that the polyvalent and competing norms underpinning the emerging ‘transnational solidarity’ are detectable in what people think and do, and can be determined by juxtaposing the local cultural contexts in which they are embedded. We know from our past research that local contexts of current and past residence shape migrants’ acceptance of non-white people in the public and private spheres (Nowicka and Krzyżowski, 2016), while the migrants are also exposed to images producing empathy for the needs and rights of those who are socially, culturally and geographically distant (Kurasawa, 2007).
Case study: Migrants’ solidarity with refugees
We chose to study Polish migrants in Germany as examples of migrants whose attitudes and practices of solidarity towards new refugees in Europe reflect at least two, at times contradictory, cultural contexts establishing norms of solidarity with refugees. Studying media in Germany, we can identify a discourse on solidarity stressing the humanitarian obligation towards those who are in need of immediate help, regardless of their belonging to a political community, nation or imagined ‘culture’ (Holmes and Castaneda, 2016; Vollmer and Karakayali, 2017), reflected in individuals’ engagement with refugees (Karakayali and Kleist, 2016). We also observe a public discourse which tries to re-establish the order of solidarity based on an exclusive, culturalist, nationalist and racist logic in Germany (Hentges, 2017; Zick and Klein, 2014), and more prominently in Poland (Wrzosek, 2016). According to recent surveys, Poles are more likely to think that refugees increase the likelihood of terrorism and unemployment in Poland, than are Germans (Pew Research Center, 2016). In parallel, we observe shifts in how solidarity is understood between the member states of the European Union, fueled by the decisions of new conservative governments in Hungary, Poland and Slovakia not to accept refugees on their territories.
The design and implementation of the study
The survey was conducted between July and August 2016 with the help of a computer-assisted web interview (CAWI). Real Time Sampling (RTS) was used to reach the target population, a unique method that uses a random selection of cookies tracking visits to particular websites, in our case German IP addresses visiting websites in the Polish language. Due to the limited knowledge of Polish language among people without Polish origin (European Commission, 2012), this strategy is very effective. The sample included 2500 people born in Poland and residing in Germany (controlled by the initial questions in the survey).
The average age of the research participants is 43, and women make up 54% of the sample. This corresponds with the statistical information on the Polish population in Germany (Zensus, 2011). Half of the respondents declared having a bachelor’s or master’s degree, which corresponds to the increasing levels of education of emigrants from Poland (Slany and Ślusarczyk, 2013). Most of the respondents (75%) have settled in Germany permanently, while the rest live in Germany most of the year. Forty-one per cent have lived in Germany for over 10 years, and 28% have German citizenship. The majority (63%) visit Poland on a regular basis, usually once every six months or more frequently, and 29% have a household both in Poland and Germany.
Based on our past research (Nowicka and Krzyżowski, 2016) and driven by our research question, we suspected that ideas around ethnic, gender or religious boundaries could be relevant for how the respondents to our study decide on who is entitled to their solidarity. To establish the imagined ‘we’, in the first part of the survey we presented the respondents with randomly generated vignettes. These 18 vignettes each presented a hypothetical refugee – a man, a woman, or a family, a Christian or Muslim, who seeks asylum in Europe because of discrimination, war or severe poverty in the place of origin. Each description was followed by a question about whether the respondent would accept the described person(s) as an inhabitant of the same country, an inhabitant of the same city, a neighbor or friend. The questions made a distinction between Poland and Germany when referring to ‘the same country’.
The survey also included direct questions to encompass the cross-border connections with Poland established by the studied migrants, their media usage as sources of information on refugees, social networks, practices of voluntary support to refugees and other groups, as well as attitudes to a number of issues currently being discussed in both countries. To make up for the lack of a control group, we formulated most of the questions in the same way as existing surveys in Germany (Infratest dimap, 2016; Zick and Klein, 2014) and Poland (CBOS, 2015a, 2015b, 2015c, 2015d), enabling us to juxtapose their results with our analysis. In order to support our theoretical argument, we make use here of the descriptive statistical analysis. To focus the contrasting aspects, we applied a cross-tabulation technique.
Boundaries of solidarity
Our analytical strategy sought to detect how the respondents set the boundaries of collectivity in regard to those who are eligible to receive their help. The survey included explicit statements on the motivation to help as well as the vignettes, which provided different kinds of information about the imagined ‘solidary collectivity’, which we discuss separately below. In addition, we took into consideration the results of comparative or attitudinal surveys from Poland and Germany, to set our data in context.
Nineteen per cent of the survey respondents declared that they help refugees. Helpers are better educated than non-helpers (58% compared to 47% completed higher education), are female (63% compared to 52%), and are to be found among those who have been living in Germany for a longer period of time. They assist refugees by providing material or monetary donations, offering translation services or teaching German, and organizing joint events or activities. Twenty-two per cent declared they had been involved with helping refugees prior to 2014, but the majority started to help in 2015 or 2016. This help is on a rather irregular basis or limited to a few hours a week.
The majority (60%) of respondents strongly agree with the statement that people whose human rights have been violated should receive help, and 52% agree that the same is true for people who have escaped life-threatening situations. Fewer than half of respondents (47%) think that people who have escaped persecution for their political beliefs and actions should receive assistance, while even fewer respondents (37%) are convinced that help should be offered to those who are discriminated due to their transsexuality or transsexual orientation. Women tend to agree more strongly with each of the statements than men. We believe that the level of agreement with these statements corresponds with a cosmopolitan normative ideal underpinning solidarity. It entails a general acceptance of basic human rights, in particular the right to life, as a universal principle. Violation of this right is unspecific to a country or a group, and thus people seeking refuge when their human rights are violated or life is threatened cannot clearly be excluded based on their social identity.
In the time immediately preceding our study, the German media had explicitly linked persecution for political beliefs and discrimination due to sexual orientation with three countries: Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia (Jäger and Wamper, 2017), during the debate on inclusion of these three countries on the list of the so-called ‘safe countries of origin’. 8 A similar discussion has been absent from Polish public space (Wrzosek, 2016). The lower agreement with the survey statements which narrow the obligation of help to specific forms of discrimination could thus be interpreted as related to this particular media discourse in Germany. When asked directly about their acceptance of the German government’s plan to reject asylum seekers from Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia, 49% of our respondents expressed strong support for the governmental decision; this result confirms the impact of the media coverage. The relative lack of support to provide help to people who are discriminated against due to their sexual orientation corresponds, though, also with the relatively high level of prejudice towards homosexuals in Poland as compared to Germany (EUFAR, 2012; Pew Research Center, 2014; Zick et al., 2011). From other studies, we know that these attitudes prevail among migrants from Poland (Nowicka and Krzyżowski, 2016), while the level of prejudice towards homosexuals in Germany is comparatively low. On the other hand, the greater support for protection of discriminated minorities among women than men is consistent with the results of various past studies (Hertel et al., 2009; Sotelo, 2010).
We also asked whether the respondents agree with the statement that the presence of refugees enriches the culture of the receiving country: 17% agree, while 27% strongly disagree with this opinion. Sixty-one per cent of all respondents agree with the opinion that the presence of refugees in the country results in higher crime rates and 40% that it increases unemployment rates. There are no significant differences between female and male respondents, except that women are less likely to fear crime, which suggests that the discourse of women’s fear of (male and/or Muslim) refugees might be a part of masculine constructions of women as endangered in public space (Day, 2010). In our view, these results point to the fact that new refugees are not considered members – or equal members – of the imagined community within a national welfare state, even if they are eligible for some sort of humanitarian aid within the territory of Europe. In other words, the normative underpinning of solidarity here is a particularist and national idea with regard to belonging. On the other hand, Poles in Germany express much less fear of increasing unemployment related to the influx of refugees than Poles in Poland, where almost twice as many people would agree with this statement (TNS, 2015). This finding corresponds with the media and popular discourse in Poland depicting in particular Muslim refugees as a threat to social cohesion (Wrzosek, 2016), and the relative absence of such rhetoric in German media, which instead argued in an utilitarian fashion that refugees are beneficial to the German economy (Almstadt, 2017).
We were also interested in whether our respondents feel somehow connected to the new refugees by a common fate, as in the past Poles were granted political asylum in Germany. We therefore asked whether they themselves had had this experience (5% of the sample), or someone from their family (13% of the sample). Those helping refugees were more likely to have had experienced asylum seeking than the non-helpers were, yet in general, the respondents do not link their own fate with those of current refugees. At the same time, 62% of all respondents agree that Poland should help refugees because in the past Poles had to leave their country to escape political repercussions, and they received help abroad. We also explicitly asked about the attitude towards the ethnic Polish refugees from the former Soviet Union territories: 48% of respondents would give priority to their reintegration into Poland before Poland accepts new (Syrian, Afghan) refugees. Here we see that when the question relates to a more abstract community rather than a particular social group, the respondents are more likely to see commonalities in (dramatic) experiences of refugee Poles and the new, Muslim refugees. In particular, the ethnic Polish imagined community seems particularly strong, and those respondents who have German citizenship and have a German partner are more likely to support this particular opinion. Finally, 64% of our respondents agree that Poland should show solidarity with other EU member states in solving the refugee problem, which points to a sense of ‘European community’ united through the common obligation of humanitarian aid and just sharing of this burden among all members.
Those displaying positive opinions about refugees as members of the German or Polish society are more likely to have lived longer in Germany, and they are also more likely to read and watch German media, or use media in more than one language (German, Polish and any other). These results point towards the role of exposure to medially and socially transported knowledges, as our analysis proves that both factors – length of stay and German-media usage – are equally relevant (Krzyżowski et al., 2017). Therefore, we were also particularly interested in whether the Poles know and support the anti-Islamic rhetoric of the Pegida social movement in Germany which has enjoyed German media attention since 2014 (Vorländer, 2014) but remains unknown in Poland. Thirty-four per cent of all respondents declared their sympathy for Pegida, although only 8% declared to support it in an active way, for example by attending the organization’s events or engaging with it in social media.
Finally, we consider the answers to the ‘vignette questions’ which relate to the acceptance of refugees, either in Poland or in Germany, if they were Christian or Muslim, a man, a woman or a family, fleeing discrimination, poverty or armed conflict. The analysis of the data showed that both the gender and religion of a refugee are the most relevant categories for respondents’ willingness to accept or reject refugees as inhabitants of a country, a city or as a neighbor. A Christian family seeking asylum is accepted by over 90% of respondents – irrespective of whether such refugees would reside in Poland or Germany, with a slightly higher number of respondents being willing to accept a refugee in Germany rather than in Poland. Least accepted would be a Muslim man, irrespectively of his reasons for fleeing his country. The role of religious belonging for delineating the border of a collectivity has gained in importance in Poland in the last decade (Bertram and Jędrzejek, 2015); the Polish government and parliament plans to restrict the inflow of refugees to Christians from Syria, and people from Ukraine and other post-Soviet countries. The European Value Survey data from 2014 demonstrate that only 7% of respondents in Poland would accept Muslims coming to live in Europe, while 25% of Germans shared this opinion (Tausch, 2016). But also in Germany, an increasing number of people (about 40% according to most recent surveys) would support a general immigration ban on all Muslims (Decker et al., 2016: 50).
The discrepancy between explicit (dis)agreement with the Polish anti-Muslim political consensus and the implicit (dis)agreement with accepting Muslim refugees in Germany points to a tension between the cosmopolitan ideal of providing help to people irrespective of their religious, ethnic or political belonging and particularistic tendencies to exclude those of different religions. Here it is important to consider the temporal aspects involved in these two norms: the respondents’ readiness to help refugees who require immediate humanitarian support (short-term effort) and them accepting refugees – in particular Muslim – as (long-term) members of their community of belonging (Vieten and Poynting, 2016). Through the prism of the time, these norms are no longer contradictory.
Conclusions: Towards a notion of transnational solidarity
The return of the concept of solidarity onto the agenda of European politicians, populists and many scholars is linked with hopes of restoring convergence and social cohesion, which is believed to be achieved through increased activities across state borders. Yet transnational solidarity, if reduced to mere trans-border bonds, fails to acknowledge the dynamics of people’s reactions to the challenge of refugees arriving in Europe’s territory.
In addressing this issue, we argued that to understand solidarity patterns, we need to realize who is included and who is excluded from the obligation of solidarity. Accordingly, our analysis of the theoretical proposals for solidarity focused on the boundaries and principles of belonging, under the condition that these cannot be regarded as synonymous with the borders of nation-states. Yet, while most proposals suggest alternatives, they are largely silent about the transnational nature of solidarity. Drawing on the literature on (migrant) transnationalism, we derived a definition of transnationalism which we then confronted with our empirical material. We have argued that migrants’ more or less explicit attitudes towards helping refugees reflect differently accentuated discourses that oscillate between cosmopolitan inclusiveness and religious and ethnic exclusiveness.
We believe that the transnational lens embraces the polyvalent understandings of solidarity. The tensions our study identifies between cosmopolitan and particularistic underpinnings of the norm of solidarity point towards the power of local socio-cultural and spatio-temporal contexts in which the norm of solidarity is embedded and altered. It is the presence or absence of certain (more or less cosmopolitan or more or less particularistic) discourses in Polish or German media, and in everyday conversations people have with family and friends which gives sense and meaning to the obligation of solidarity towards refugees. The migrants we studied are exposed to media discourses in Poland and Germany, unlike Germans who do not understand the Polish language; with their knowledge of German and the length of stay in Germany, possibilities and forms of social interactions change for migrants, contributing to this group’s internal differentiation of attitudes towards refugees. Moreover, a dense network of organizations and self-organized neighborhood groups who provide support to refugees in Germany offers a platform for social interactions and conversations on the very norm of solidarity and possibilities for its implementation (Karakayali and Kleist, 2016), and such opportunities are missing in Poland.
The tension between cosmopolitan and particularistic understandings of the ‘we’ and ‘us’ also hints towards the disjuncture of the norms behind solidarity, as well as the interrelatedness of norms while they are included in the cross-border circuits of knowledge. Through migration, locational solidarities become trans-locational (Anthias, 2008) and ‘frictional’, to borrow Tsing’s (2005) notion. The notion of transnational solidarity, we suggest, refers to the outcome of this process; it is a new arrangement, and a constantly self-renewing arrangement of solidarity as interconnection across differences (Tsing, 2005: 3–4). In this sense, the notion of ‘transnational solidarity’ is a heuristic device that enables us to better understand the attitudes and practices towards refugees arriving in Europe.
Footnotes
Funding
This publication was made possible thanks to the financial support of the Federal Government Commissioner for Migration, Refugees and Integration granted for the research-intervention cluster ‘Solidarität im Wandel?’ (‘Solidarity in Transition?’) at the Berlin Institute for Integration and Migration Research (BIM) at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin.