Abstract
I shall in what follows address the prospects for solidarity in present-day Europe, referring to Habermas’ account but taking it in a somewhat different direction. However, I shall begin closer to home.
In Norway, we just marked the two-year anniversary of the terrorist attacks that killed 77 people on 22 July 2011. I was reminded of the spontaneous reaction after the explosion outside the government building in Oslo. Both among the people on the street and among the academic experts, Al Qaeda was unanimously singled out as the most likely suspect. Grudgingly, and with profound disbelief, Norwegians a few hours later had to face the fact that the twin attack was carried out by one of their own: Anders Behring Breivik.
Then, in Wroclaw in Poland on 22 June this year, sociologist Zygmunt Bauman was about to give a lecture on ‘Ferdinand Lasalle and Social Democracy’ when a group of right-wing radicals interrupted, shouting anti-communist and anti-Semitic slogans against him. You may know that Bauman was forced to flee from Poland in 1968, having been sacked from his position at Warsaw University amid an anti-Semitic campaign orchestrated by the communist government led by President Gomulka.
I mention these two incidents because they throw concrete light on a topic that we philosophers are wont to discuss in an abstract manner: solidarity, or rather its negation, as highlighted in xenophobia, racism and anti-multiculturalism. In present-day Europe, Greece not excluded, these are issues potent with conflict, even violence, polarizing the population and redefining the political landscape.
In his lecture, Habermas points out that the present situation is one of a ‘democratic deficit’ that can be overcome only by a ‘transnationalization of democracy’. He then goes on to discuss the tendencies currently taking place to the effect that the European Union comes to enjoy a supranational legal status, meaning a primacy over the national law of the individual member states.
What interests me is not the changes in the medium of law as such, but their implications in terms of the growing democratic deficit that Habermas – I think for good reasons – looks upon with concern. To be sure, ‘global governance’ as exercised by international organizations over and above the national state level raises problems of asymmetry and paternalism, and so nourishes distrust among parties who are affected by decisions without actually co-authoring them. Democratic deficit fuels loss of legitimacy.
On the other hand, when it comes to tackling issues that are of a genuinely transnational as opposed to national nature, such as climate change, the problem is not that the political bodies make decisions that overstretch their sources of legitimacy. Rather, the problem is that these bodies fail to reach any binding decisions at all. To pick an example, at the environment world summit in Copenhagen in 2009, the Chinese government refused to accept that the so-called developing countries have a responsibility to play a lead role in helping to solve a problem – CO2-emissions – that historically has been created by other nations, such as the United States. Time and again, it is demonstrated that in a globalized world where major problems such as pollution transcend national borders, individual nation-states still retain – and make use of – the power to block decision-making of the global reach required. Indeed, the very nations that to the largest extent are responsible for the problem having arisen in the first place, are often least eager to implement measures to contain it – the United States being a case in point when it comes to global warming. Therefore, it is not as if the major challenge is to secure acceptance – legitimacy – for decisions made on a supranational level; on the contrary, the problem is that decision-making on matters that would probably meet with widespread popular support in all the affected countries, is simply not forthcoming. The asymmetry here is not between decisions made and national audiences’ viewing them with skepticism for lack of a role in co-authoring them; rather, the disjunction is between decisions urgently needing to be made, and the failure to make them, leading to frustration and a sense of impotence at grass-root level all over the world.
Regardless of which one of these two versions of the structural problem one is preoccupied with, the challenge – as Habermas says – is to provide democratic legitimacy for the supranational agencies now existing. What is needed, indeed long overdue, is a transnationalization of democracy.
I now turn to the issue of solidarity. Recall Habermas’ definition to the effect that obligations to show solidarity be distinguished from moral and legal duties. To quote: ‘It is the trust-founding Sittlichkeit of informal social relations that, under the condition of predictable reciprocity, requires that the one individual “vouches” for the others’ (2013b). Crucial here is the ‘expectation of reciprocal conduct – and on confidence in this reciprocity over time’ (ibid.). However, since solidarity is to be understood as a political act, it cannot – like the ethical obligations making up Hegelian Sittlichkeit – ‘rely on pre-political communities such as the family but only on political associations or shared political interests’ (ibid.). Being political, solidarity presupposes political contexts of life, thus something artificial not grown. It therefore has to do without the presupposition of a pre-existing, quasi-natural community. The political sense of solidarity is offensive and forward-looking.
This brings us to the specifics of the present, crisis-ridden situation in Europe. As Habermas observed in his speech at Leuven University in April this year, ‘systemic constraints [now] shatter the established relations of solidarity and compel us to reconstruct the challenged forms of political integration of the nation state … What is required is solidarity, a cooperative effort from a shared political perspective to promote growth and competitiveness in the Eurozone as a whole’ (2013a: 16 f.; emphases added).
To be sure, this statement sits well with the way in which Habermas introduces solidarity in today’s lecture: political solidarity, we were told, must be demanded as part of a common European effort to stimulate ‘growth and competitiveness in the euro zone as a whole’; such solidarity would require the countries to accept ‘redistribution effects that would be to their disadvantage in the short and medium terms’ but in their own interest in the long one (2013b).
Now, it does make a difference whether the agent called upon to show solidarity is an individual citizen or group of such, or a nation-state. If one state is the agent called upon to ‘vouch’ for others, it can, however, gain legitimacy for doing so to the extent that it, presumably being a democratic state, promotes and succeeds in gaining the support of its individual citizens for pursuing what would qualify as such an act of solidarity.
When commenting on the so-called ‘blueprint for a deep and genuine economic and monetary union’, Habermas observed that ‘supranational democracy remains the declared long term goal on paper. But postponing democracy is a rather dangerous move’ (2013a: 5). Indeed, there is something risky about a ‘unification process which is planned for, but not by the people’ (ibid.). According to Habermas, what we witness today is that the authorities ‘more and more yield to the neo-liberal pattern of politics’. He continues: ‘A technocracy without democratic roots would not have the motivation to accord sufficient weight to the demands of the electorate for a just distribution of income and property, for status security, public services, and collective goods when these conflict with the systemic demands for competitiveness and economic growth’ (2013a: 6).
It seems to me that in this passage Habermas describes a situation sadly familiar to millions of Europeans – where solidarity understood as the demand for ‘a just distribution of income and property’ and for various public services to be enjoyed by all citizens, is cut short since this demand is in ‘conflict with the systemic demands for competitiveness and economic growth’. However, as I cited from today’s lecture, Habermas also says that what calls for political solidarity today is the need to ‘promote growth and competitiveness in the euro zone as a whole’. In other words, there appears to be a tension between speaking of ‘systemic demands for competitiveness and economic growth’ as what conflicts with the just distribution and equal welfare that solidarity craves, on the one hand, and speaking of mobilizing political solidarity for the sake of stimulating growth and competitiveness, on the other.
To call for solidarity to promote the very forces that are held be in conflict with what solidarity substantively upholds, would be a contradiction. Appeals to competitiveness will not mobilize solidarity; appeals to the values – bonds, life-forms – put at risk by giving political primacy to competitiveness, as does neo-liberalism, would.
Habermas is probably right that as long as governments continue to make decisions exclusively from their own national perspective – Germany being no exception – the structural imbalances between the economies of greatly divergent euro zone countries at the root of the crisis are bound to worsen. To put it more strongly: in the present situation, the very meaning of solidarity risks being perverted. Note that instead of agents demanding of themselves to show solidarity with others, the structure now prevailing is that of A demanding B to show solidarity with C. Wolfgang Streeck put the point well in an article in 2011: Political appeals for redistributive ‘solidarity’ are now directed at entire nations asked by international organizations to support other entire nations, such as Slovenia being urged to help Ireland, Greece and Portugal. This hides the fact that those being supported by this sort of ‘international solidarity’ are not the people in the streets but the banks, domestic and foreign, that would otherwise have to accept losses or lower profits … Essentially the new conflict alignment translates class conflicts into international conflicts, pitting against each other nations that are each subject to the same financial market pressures for public austerity. Ordinary people are told to demand ‘sacrifices’ from other ordinary people, who happen to be citizens of other states, rather than from those who have long resumed collecting their bonuses. (Streeck, 2011 [n.p.])
My point with respect to Habermas’ analysis, and in particular his plea for solidarity in the given political sense, is not that we reject it. We cannot do without it. But beware – not only is solidarity a scarce resource (had it been otherwise, we would not be in a situation where some need it badly). Solidarity relies on a set of sociological presuppositions fast becoming in short supply, as precarious as are its proper addressees these days, namely the precariat. What ‘unites’ the precariat, as Bauman has noted, is ‘the condition of extreme disintegration, pulverization, atomization’; unemployment and other structurally inflicted hardships translated into so many failures, or neglected efforts, on the part of the individual and for which he or she – not the structures – is held responsible, by himself or herself as well as by the authorities. Suffering perceived and lived qua strictly individualized denies commonality of fate, thus undermining calls to solidarity insofar as such calls appeal to shared commitments and bonds; in short, to the relationships of reciprocity Habermas spoke about. Absent the sociologically intact conditions of solidarity, present-day precarians tend to fear and fight each other, competing for increasingly scarce goods, be they jobs or welfare services.
In Europe, ‘Third Way’ social democracy is to a large extent co-responsible for this sorry state of affairs when it comes to solidarity. In the last two decades, the nation-state was redesigned to serve two functions: to create favourable conditions for attracting investment capital; and to see to it that its citizens obtain and exploit the skills they need in order to compete. As Habermas observed in 1999, the Third Way left ‘accommodated the ethical conceptions of neo-liberalism’, as seen in its ‘willingness to be drawn into the ethos of a “lifestyle attuned to the world market” which expects every citizen to become an entrepreneur managing his own human capital’ (1999: 53 f.).
The neo-liberal cult of personal responsibility sustained by Third Way social democracy needs to be fought if solidarity is to become a potent political force. Although I agree with Habermas that solidarity is not synonymous with justice either in the moral or the legal sense of the term, it is undeniable that acts of solidarity often spring from the feeling that the suffering of others is undeserved: their suffering appears intolerable because constituting an injustice. Collectively no less than individually, solidarity receives its urgency from feelings of anger, as witnessed in the Indignados that first emerged in Spain. Given the explosive rates of unemployment among young people, even those among them who have done everything right, the current crisis may represent a possibility for change: for creating a Europe where an alternative economy and society to the one dictated by the systemic need for competitiveness in the global market may be promoted – a vision worthy of the call to solidarity in its future-looking, intergenerational sense.