Abstract
In the context of the so-called refugee crisis, political disputes about solidarity become a central issue with member states applying competing concepts. At the same time, European cities use transnational networks to implement a new form of solidarity among municipalities via city diplomacy (Acuto, Morissette, & Tsouros, 2017). Analyzing the deadlock between member states and the emerging activities of cities, we scrutinize the limits of existing approaches to political solidarity (e.g., Agustín & Jørgensen, 2019; Knodt, Tews, & Piefer, 2014; Sangiovanni, 2013) to explain this phenomenon. Based on expert interviews and document analysis from a study on transnational municipal networks, we identify an emerging concept of solidarity that challenges the nation states as core providers of solidarity from within: transmunicipal solidarity focuses on joint action of local governments to scale out and scale up.
Highlights
Solidarity—or rather the lack of solidarity—had become a contested topic already during the Euro crisis from 2007 onwards
We focus on joint actions of comparable communities or political entities in the EU indicating solidarity with another in the refugee controversy
Based on the analysis of our data on transnational municipal networks (TMN) presented below, we found empirical evidence for another manifestation of political solidarity which is not covered by the existing concepts
Summary
Solidarity—or rather the lack of solidarity—had become a contested topic already during the Euro crisis from 2007 onwards. We will trace the question of whether the activities of TMNs in the field of refugee reception could be conceptualized as a new form of cross-border solidarity provided by government levels other than the national one. To this end, we firstly trawl through the growing theoretical debate on political solidarity in order to identify concepts to build on (e.g., Agustín & Jørgensen, 2019; Knodt et al, 2014; Sangiovanni, 2013, 2015). “institutionalized solidarity” (Agustín & Jørgensen, 2019, pp. 97–117) on the local level, focuses on local governments but is nurtured by the interplay of state and nonstate actors
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