Solidarity Beyond Borders

Ethics in a Globalising World

Janusz Salamon

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781472514448
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Ethics & Moral Philosophy

Solidarity Beyond Borders is a collection on international ethics by a multidisciplinary team of scholars from four continents. The volume explores ethical and political dimensions of transnational solidarity in the emerging multipolar world. Analyzing global challenges of the world plagued by poverty, diseases, injustice, inequality and environmental degradation, the contributors - rooted in diverse cultures and ethical traditions - voice their support for 'solidarity beyond borders'. Bringing to light both universally shared ethical insights as well as the irreducible diversity of ethical perceptions of particular problems helps the reader to appreciate the chances and the challenges that the global community - more interconnected and yet more ideologically fragmented than ever before - faces in the coming decades. Solidarity Beyond Borders exemplifies an innovative approach to the key issues of global ethics which takes into account the processes of economic globalization, leading to an ever deeper interdependence of peoples and states, as well as the increasing cultural and ideological fragmentation which characterize the emerging multipolar world order.

1

Solidarity Beyond Europe?

Steinar Stjernø

Introduction

At the end of the eighteenth century in France, the concept of solidarity was transformed from being a legal concept, referring to a common responsibility for debts incurred by one of the members of a group, into a sociological and political one.1 During the French revolution, revolutionaries occasionally used ‘solidarity’ instead of ‘fraternity’ to denote a feeling of political community (Zoll 2000). In the early nineteenth century, French utopians and social philosophers such as Charles Fourier began to use solidarity as a concept denoting attitudes and relations characterised by reciprocal sympathy among persons who were bound together in a community. Fourier argued that solidarity should include sharing resources with people in need, a guaranteed minimum income, and public support for families.

Pierre Leroux was the first to elaborate on the concept of solidarity in a systematic way when he published De l’humanité in 1840. Leroux’s point of departure was his criticism of a position that solidarity had to confront – Christian charity. He criticised Christian charity for being unable to reconcile self-love with the love of others, for considering the love of others as an obligation and not the result of a genuine interest in community with others. Besides that, equality played no role in Christian charity. Leroux wanted to supplant the concept of charity with the concept of solidarity, arguing that the idea of solidarity would be a more able component in the struggle for a justly organised society. He also rejected Hobbes’s and Rousseau’s idea of a social contract, and saw such a contract as a misconceived notion because it presupposed an atomised view of the individual (Leroux 1985 [1840]).

Others used the term ‘solidarity’ to denote the social integration found in small peasant communities. Most often, this form of solidarity was romanticised, and was seen as being threatened by capitalism, industrialisation and liberalism. The common concern of French social philosophers was to find a way to combine individualism and collectivism. Solidarity was seen as a solution, both for those who cherished romantic or reactionary ideas about returning to the harmony and stability that allegedly ruled in the old society, and for utopian radicals and the emerging socialist movement. The concern about solidarity and social integration, and opposition to liberalism, came to be an enduring characteristic of sociological and political thought in France.

Two hundred years later, solidarity has become a key concept not only in social democratic and socialist parties in Europe, but also in Christian democratic parties and in key EU documents. At the same time, it is a concept to which central social philosophers such as Jürgen Habermas and Richard Rorty devote considerable attention.

In this chapter, I discuss the meaning of solidarity in European party politics. I further examine the extent to which the idea of solidarity is found in EU documents. Finally, if there is a European concept of solidarity, to what extent does it have political and practical implications in the relationships of the EU with developing nations?

1 Aspects of solidarity

From its earliest usage, there were several ideas incorporated into the term solidarity. These ideas may be analysed by identifying four different aspects of the concept:

The boundaries of solidarity – and its degree of inclusiveness. With whom should we show solidarity? Who should be included and who should be excluded? Is solidarity limited to the family, a social class, the nation? Should we draw the line at our national frontiers or should solidarity include those who are oppressed in the poor parts of the world?

The foundation or sources of solidarity. Is solidarity built upon self-interest, class or religion? Is it founded on ‘sameness’, homogeneity and equality? Or does it spring from our interaction with other human beings, ethics, altruism, or the empathy we have with those who are suffering or are oppressed?

The goal of solidarity. Should solidarity strengthen the working class in the struggle between classes? Should it unite different classes or the nation? Should it contribute to social change, reform or revolution, or should it create harmony and social integration and surmount class conflict and differences?

The degree to which collective interests pre-empt individual interests. To what extent does solidarity imply that the individual should relinquish his or her autonomy and freedom in order to secure collective interests? To what extent does it permit individual freedom and self-realisation?

How these four aspects were combined and structured determined the content of the many different ideas of solidarity that developed in Europe. Here, I concentrate on the two most important concepts of solidarity in European politics. First, the labour movement and social democratic parties developed a concept of solidarity in the struggle for justice and more equality. Second, social Catholicism and the Christian democratic parties formed an alternative concept of solidarity which was linked to justice and subsidiarity (see below). Today, the values of the umbrella organisations of the two types of parties, the European Socialist Party and the European People’s Party, reflect these two concepts of solidarity.

We can distinguish between basic values, adjacent values and peripheral values (Freeden 1996). Basic values are those which the political party has declared to be precisely that, as indicated by the use of the terms ‘basic’, ‘fundamental’, ‘core’, ‘central’ or equivalent adjectives in the party programme. Adjacent and peripheral values are other values mentioned in the programmes without the same accolade. Basic, adjacent and peripheral values are what Gallie (1956) sees as being essentially contested concepts. Their meanings are not given and they are the object of continuous struggle, interpretation and re-interpretation by contesting participants. Values are identified by terms such as ‘freedom’, ‘justice’, ‘equality’, ‘solidarity’, ‘responsibility’, ‘human dignity’, ‘subsidiarity’, ‘love of one’s neighbour’, etc. When a set of basic values is linked together and defined in a stable way, we have a complete political language.

The analysis is based on key documents – texts that have been authorised by social democratic and Christian democratic parties and their transnational organisations, such as platforms and programmes, and by the Catholic Church through papal encyclicals. In addition, I discuss values in key documents of the European Union (for a discussion of the sources, see Stjernø [2004]).

2 Labour movement solidarity

The prototype for solidarity became the working-class solidarity that developed during and after the industrial revolution. Working-class solidarity was based upon the fusion of self-interest with the interests of the class. The individual was expected to subordinate himself to the collective and to realise his interests as a member of that collective. This idea of solidarity became known as class solidarity. It is based upon the common interest that workers have in opposing their class adversaries: it is solidarity between workers across national borders, epitomised in the famous slogan of the Communist Manifesto of 1848, ‘Workers of the world, unite’. Others, including farmers, the jobless poor, and all those people living in non-industrialised countries which were overwhelmingly populated by the poor, were excluded. Karl Marx rarely applied the term solidarity in his writings or in his speeches. He was generally reluctant to apply emotive terms, but seems to have to preferred ‘fraternal feelings’ when he found it necessary. Supporters of Marx adopted the term in the 1860s, but during the last part of the nineteenth century and the first decades of the twentieth century, concepts such as brotherhood, fraternity and unity were applied as frequently as solidarity.

The revisionist of Marxism, Eduard Bernstein, contributed most to the modern idea of social democratic solidarity which became so influential, especially in Northern Europe. In his Preconditions of Socialism, published in 1899, Bernstein noted that Marxist predictions had not been fulfilled. Capitalism had survived a number of economic crises and recessions, and the working class had achieved higher wages and better working conditions. Social democracy could no longer wait for the breakdown of capitalism, but had to develop a concrete policy of reform and seek alliances with other classes and groups to establish a new majority in parliament. From this perspective, a restricted idea of class solidarity was not functional.

In 1910, Bernstein published his book Die Arbeiterbewegung (‘The Labour Movement’). Here, a whole chapter was devoted to ‘concepts of rights and the ethics of the labour movements’. By and large, these were concepts which, until then, had been alien to Marxist theory. According to Bernstein, socialist ethics should be built upon three core elements – equality, solidarity, and freedom. The problem was, however, that equality and solidarity had to be balanced against freedom. He argued that it was not possible to have a strong measure of equality and solidarity if one wanted to have freedom at the same time (Bernstein 1910). Thus, a new and more complex idea had been presented, the idea of social democratic solidarity. The same year, the Nestor of Swedish social democracy, Ernst Wigforss, published ideas that were similar to those of Bernstein. In France, Jean Jaurès did the same, albeit with a somewhat different emphasis. In the United Kingdom, Richard Tawney formulated a social philosophy that furnished the Labour Party with a set of ethical elements (Padgett and Paterson 1991), but here social democracy developed without making solidarity such a key term. In the following decades, socialists in other countries contributed their own articulations. Later, a fourth value or core element – justice – was added to the construction of socialist ethics.

Only a few socialist and social democratic parties introduced the concept of solidarity in their programmes before the conclusion of World War I. The establishment of solidarity as hegemonic among functionally equivalent terms such as ‘brotherhood’, ‘fraternity’, ‘worker unity’ took place at the same time that the meaning of solidarity was changed. Solidarity became a dominating value when the socialist parties of Europe became de-radicalised.

From an early stage, socialist parties had been preoccupied and engaged with international issues, and believed in international cooperation, international class-consciousness, and anti-militarism in foreign affairs as guiding principles. For instance, the German SPD refused to support Germany’s attempt to extinguish the revolt in Southwest Africa in 1905. Nevertheless, with some exceptions, European socialists generally did not condemn colonial policy, and even supported it until 1914 (Eley 2002). The First World War, when workers fought against workers, was a strong setback for international worker solidarity. During the first part of the twentieth century, socialist and social democratic parties continued to support the colonial system and resisted national independence for the peoples of the Third World, although they often expressed sympathy for the living conditions of people in the colonies. When in power, the Labour Party granted independence to India and Pakistan. The French socialists (Section Française de l’Internationale Ouvrière) fought against independence for Algeria and supported the Suez intervention in Egypt in 1956. Thus, solidarity in this period was primarily a solidarity within national borders, with the aim of reducing social risks and constructing a welfare state.

With increasing affluence, attention to suffering in poor countries of the South grew. The Norwegian Labour Party was a forerunner in using the language of solidarity about the relationship with poor nations in the 1953 election manifesto. For the protagonist of European social democracy – the German Social Democratic Party (SPD) – the concept of solidarity changed in 1959 with the Bad Godesberg Programme, which proclaimed solidarity as a basic value of socialism in association with justice, f...

Table of contents

• Bloomsbury Studies in Global Ethics
• Title
• Contents 
• List of Contributors
• Preface Roger Scruton
• 1 Solidarity Beyond Europe? Steinar Stjernø
• 2 Justice as Solidarity: Between Statism and Cosmopolitanism Sebastiano Maffettone
• 3 Moral Imagination and the Art of Solidarity Anna Abram
• 4 Human Solidarity in Need and Fulfilment: A Vision of Political Friendship Patrick Riordan SJ
• 5 What Are They Doing Here? – Jews in the Global Apartment House Jerome Gellman
• 6 Muslim Ethics in an Era of Globalism: Reconciliation in an Age of Empire Ebrahim Moosa
• 7 Morality and Social Solidarity from the Perspective of Chinese Philosophy Yang Guorong
• 8 Is Universal Solidarity Possible? Gerald J. Beyer
• 9 Towards a Global Ethics of Non-violence Charles P. Webel and Sofia Khaydari
• 10 Global Justice, Value Pluralism and Narrative Solidarity Janusz Salamon
• Index
• Copyright