This chapter works out what seems to be a paradox: secession, a process of splitting and division of Member States can lead to strengthening solidarity. The research question is whether a claim of secession contravenes per se the founding European value of solidarity enshrined in Article 2 (TEU). After a brief introduction, the chapter analyses the concept of secession, its meanings, effects and moral implications of a process of withdrawing from a EU Member State. It follows by analysing the concept of solidarity and its EU legal-politico perspectives. It finally concludes by presenting an alternative vision to the dominant presumption that considers that self-determination from a democratic state implies necessarily an egoist economic and political reason.

Part I contributes to a richer understanding of the conceptual aspects and conditions of transnational solidarity. The first five chapters raise crucial questions. What is the history of the concept of solidarity? How can transnational solidarity be defined and understood? What are the symbols and myths of transnational solidarity? How can different solidarities co-exist and how do we chose between conflicting solidarities? Through philosophical, sociological, historical, political, anthropological, psychological and ancient Greek thought, we are drawn into an interdisciplinary universe with transnational solidarity at the heart.

Since the EU treaties constitute solidarity as one of the EU’s fundamental values (Articles 2, 3 (2) TEU). In a community of law, the validity of this value depends on its capacity as a legal principle. This chapter asks what, if anything, the case law of the Court of Justice (ECJ) contributes to the discursive exegesis of solidarity as a principle of EU Constitutional Law. In order to answer this question, it offers an empirical analysis of the Court’s case law framing the notion of solidarity, providing a unique database evaluating all 122 cases elaborating on the concept. The analysis distinguishes three categorial types of solidarity (solidarity as charity, as mutual obligation and as risk mitigation) and three functional types of solidarity (embedding individual rights, embedding the Internal Market, rejecting limiting effects of national solidarity). The chapter identifies a number of missed opportunities, and a high degree of inconsistency. A more assertive and consistent approach to solidarity could, however, contribute to supporting a more inclusive constitutional discourse on European integration than the mere reliance on liberal constitutional principles.

The chapter explores the symbols and myths of EU transnational solidarity through a threefold analysis of transnational solidarity within, across, and beyond the EU. Based on post-Cold War study of the EU in global politics over the past three decades, it compares and contrasts transnational solidarity from communitarian and cosmopolitan perspectives before advocating a cosmopolitical understanding of EU transnational solidarity in a global context. The chapter examines transnational solidarity within the EU by looking at symbols and myths of communitarian, cosmopolitan and cosmopolitical solidarities. It then looks across the borders of the EU to consider the symbols and myths of communitarian, cosmopolitan, and cosmopolitical solidarities within the European neighbourhood. It then goes beyond the EU to analyse the symbols and myths of communitarian, cosmopolitan and cosmopolitical solidarities with distantly situated others through EU external actions. It concludes by arguing the need to clearly identify, in line with Carol Gould, transnational EU solidarities as overlapping networks of relations that share and support actions to eliminate oppression or reduce suffering. It further argues that cosmopolitical solidarities that network and share global ethics with local politics are more likely to take actions in concert that are caring and empathic towards distantly situated others.

This chapter asks how do international institutions adjust to changes in the number, diversity, and relative power of system members? It combines the Weberian concept of social closure and the idea of club goods to argue that, as IOs come under pressure to open up to new and more heterogenous members, the logic of closure creates incentives for incumbent members to create institutional designs that preserve their privileges. In the face of membership diversity, rules that promote procedural equality—i.e., consensus and majority voting rules—challenge status quo interests. In response, incumbents pursue designs that preserve clubs of like-minded actors through assimilative, hierarchical or exclusive multilateralism. The chapter discusses how self-determination, the principled basis for membership expansion, serves as a rule of closure. Then it considers the cases of the United Nations at its founding, the United Nations during its main period of expansion under demands for a New International Economic Order, and the G20, which many have pointed to as a new model of inclusive governance. Each case shows how expanding institutional membership may improve formal equality while triggering a decrease in procedural equality, creating institutional arrangements in which all are equal, but some are more equal than others.

Mass media are commonly held responsible for strengthening bonds of national solidarity and supporting relationships of mutual support among citizens as members of a political community. At the same time, mass media increasingly raise questions of global justice and through their coverage of distant suffering confront audiences with their moral responsibility to provide assistance to strangers. The notion of solidarity as grounded in global justice is therefore not only an abstract normative and legalistic principle but, sociologically speaking, is also linked to an expansive logic of building solidarity relationships of modern society as a community of strangers. To investigate this relationship between the media and (trans)national solidarity, the chapter discusses the role played by old and new (digital and social) media in establishing solidarity relationships among individuals across established borders of political community. It gives examples of mediated solidarity discourses in which mutual obligations between states and equal rights of citizens across borders are discussed controversially. It is argued that the Janus-faced nature of the media as a transmission mechanism for universal notions of justice (representing the world) and as the filter for the consolidation of thickened and contextualised relationships of solidarity within a community of equals (representing the nation) offers an opportunity for transnational solidarity mobilisation.

The EU is cloaked in expressions of solidarity. Despite the fundamental role that solidarity plays, cracks have appeared and become more evident across Member States. The euro – a transnational single currency – was a bold endeavour when first established, and its adoption was expected to generate a leap forward for by making European integration stronger, and more resilient. The prolonged battle of the sovereign debt crisis that emerged in 2009 tested the limits of solidarity: a confrontation waged on multiple levels, playing into constitutional frameworks and socio-economic divisions, and exacerbating fault-lines between states. Yet despite frequent arguments made to the contrary, solidarity was a feature of the financial crisis, albeit of a particular kind. The legitimate expectation of what role different concepts of solidarity ought to have played (particularly where fiscal redistribution is concerned), compared to the role it actually served, ensured that an expectations deficit opened. This chapter examines solidarity within the EU’s legal framework in the context of the Eurozone crisis. It analyses the ramifications of the idea of solidarity, variously defined, and the implications it may have for the future direction of the Union as it faces ever-greater challenges.

The author understands solidarity primarily as a legal concept of co-operative projects of forming an ever further expanded democratic legal community (Rechtsgenossenschaft). Solidarity is complementary to justice, and principle of democracy that is self-legislated includes both sides. Self-legislation, solidarity and justice are equally universal concepts. The first section of the chapter is a brief diagnosis of modern society under conditions of global crisis. Democratic solidarity must stand up to two crucial experimental checks, one is normative and the other factual. The second section of the chapter draws some political conclusions related to the most fundamental problems of the present world society. The final section tries to specify four changes political agencies need to adopt to save democratic solidarities under stress from globalisation.

Solidarity is a concept strongly linked to the twentieth century and its burning issues of conflicts between capital and labour in a secularised world. The pressing issues at the beginning of the twenty-first century transcend secularity and pose challenges for a post-secular, globalised world of migration and movements of human beings. Since the end of the Cold War, and especially since 9/11 in 2001, the re-emergence of (often conservative) religions and the role of religious affiliations have given rise to many reflections and motivated many research projects on issues related to conflicts, minorities and religious perspectives. This chapter reflects on the challenges, difficulties and potentials for trans-religious expressions and forms of solidarity based amongst others on earlier research. What emerges out of the transformation of social structures, state structures and belief structures that take place alongside major technological changes might be understood as a situation of paradoxical conservatism or ‘subversive traditionalism’. This is a conservatism and traditionalism that continues to demand access to the benefits of modernity and ‘modern life’, while at the same time seeking to preserve a traditional or conservative (gender) order. It also gives rise to perhaps paradoxical forms of solidarity.

The article claims that the type of postnational democracy envisaged by its most outspoken advocates amounts to pouring new wine into old bottles. In order to be sufficiently lively and socially significant, such a postnational democracy would have to draw precisely on the type of cultural resources that also feed into national solidarity. In this understanding, a postnational democracy would be different from national democracy only in name.

This book has been conceived in a period where transnational solidarity and co-operation seemed to be moving backwards rather than forwards. A prime example of this decline of transnational solidarity being the so-called refugee crisis in Europe in 2015. After the Brexit referendum in the UK in June 2016, and presidential elections in the USA later the same year, the political agenda turned inwards, focusing primarily on internal national perspectives in relation to areas such as environmental protection, aid to countries in the Third World and trade with the outside world. Recently, the EU has experienced a number of crises, among others an economic and financial crisis and later the refugee crisis. These crises have challenged transnational solidarity in Europe.

The impact of freedom of movement in the EU on the restructuring of national social citizenship has been subject to vigorous debates in both political and academic discourses. This chapter draws on the insights of critical citizenship theory to move beyond the individualistic approach to transnational rights in liberal cosmopolitanism, on one hand, and the static approach to solidarity in defence of national closure, on the other. Rather than a fixed collection of social rights and a finalised national project, social citizenship can be understood as an open-ended process shaped by ongoing collective struggles over needs and social inclusion. Relations of solidarity and reciprocity can emerge in such processes rather than being a precondition external to them. The chapter then considers the political significance of non-institutionalised forms of contestation over the social rights of migrants that resist and challenge the individualist and discriminatory logics in the governance of free movement. As practices geared towards constructing new solidaristic relations and identities across borders, these acts of (social) citizenship articulate an alternative understanding of mobility as social and spatial practices that enable collective engagements and set in motion inclusive forms of solidarity that traverse the boundaries of the national, the European and the legal.