Citizens’ Solidarity in Europe systematically dissects the manifestations of solidarity buried beneath the official policies and measures of public authority in Europe. In this exciting and innovative book, contributors offer comprehensive and original data and highlight the detrimental factors that tend to inhibit or annihilate solidarity, and those that are beneficial for the nurturing of solidarity.

This open access volume provides evidence-based knowledge on European solidarity and citizen responses in times of crisis. Does the crisis of European integration translate into a crisis of European solidarity, and if yes, what are the manifestations at the level of individual citizens? How strongly is solidarity rooted at the individual level, both in terms of attitudes and practices? And which driving factors and mechanisms contribute to the reproduction and/or corrosion of solidarity in times of crisis? Using findings from the EU Horizon 2020 funded research project “European paths to transnational solidarity at times of crisis: Conditions, forms, role-models and policy responses” (TransSOL), the books addresses these questions and provides cross-national comparisons of eight European countries – Denmark, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, Poland, Switzerland, and the UK. It will appeal to students, scholars and policymakers interested in the Eurocrisis, politics and sociology.

The European Union has evolved from a purely economic organisation to a multi-faceted entity with political, social and human rights dimensions. This has created an environment in which the concept of solidarity is gaining a more substantial role in shaping the EU legal order. This book provides both a retrospective assessment and an outlook on the future possibilities of solidarity’s practical and theoretical meaning and legal enforcement in the ever-changing Union.

This book sheds light on how member states and EU neighbours reacted to the COVID-19 pandemic through the lens of European solidarity, what they expect from the EU, and other member states, and how they are ready to contribute to common action. The volume reveals how European countries experience and perceive solidarity from the EU and towards the EU in different policy dimensions, such as intra-EU mobility, healthcare and financial and economic aspects of Europe’s recovery. The book offers national perspectives and perceptions of solidarity and concrete aspects in different policy areas. It includes a Foreword by the Vice-presidents of the European Parliament Katarina Barley and Othmar Karas.

This book explores the processes through which European solidarity is constructed. More specifically, it investigates how the media's framing of European identity can facilitate and/or impede the emergence of European solidarity on the individual level. Through an online experiment that tested the effect of two different media identity frames on individual solidarity during the European debt crisis, the author argues that the exposure to news articles using a value-based identity frame boosts solidarity compared to an economic identity frame. This interdisciplinary work will be of interest to scholars of political sociology, political communication and political psychology, as well as any researchers who study European integration.

Inclusive Solidarity and Citizenship along Migratory Routes in Europe and the Americas links non-essentialist concepts of solidarity and citizenship to migration in different empirical contexts. The chapters in this edited volume analyse how civil society initiatives renegotiate societal structures in solidarity with people on the move, noncitizens and racialized individuals, and in doing so advance theorizing and contribute to current debates about citizenship and solidarity. Focusing on solidarity among members of the so-called ‘majority society’ in Europe and the Americas, this book offers a compendium of chapters that analyses particular practices of solidarity – both material and symbolic – as well as the mindsets, discourses, and broader societal contexts that provide the fundament of these practices. As these empirical cases demonstrate, the main argument of the book is that solidarity is not necessarily based on a pre-established and exclusive community, but that more inclusive solidarities arise through collective practices, the emergence of new subjectivities, and the mediation of differences. Furthermore, the book argues that it is analytically fruitful to associate concepts of citizenship with solidarity by proposing the concept of ‘solidarity citizenship’ in order to bring into view societal modes of relating that are constitutive of collective as well as individual subjectivities. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of the journal Citizenship Studies.

This is an open access title available under the terms of a [CC BY-NC-ND 4.0] License. It is free to read, download and share on Elgaronline.com. This thought-provoking book examines the socio-legal mechanisms that drive EU constitutional tensions, as well as the role of principles and values in re-directing EU law and policy towards a democratic Social Europe. It addresses the current limits of Social Europe in relation to different areas of EU law, offering a critical assessment of the present status of EU integration.

This book examines the ‘European refugee crisis’, offering an in-depth comparative analysis of how public attitudes towards refugees and humanitarian dispositions are shaped by political news coverage. An international team of authors address the role of the media in contesting solidarity towards refugees from a variety of disciplinary perspectives. Focusing on the public sphere, the book follows the assumption that solidarity is a social value, political concept and legal principle that is discursively constructed in public contentions. The analysis refers systematically and comparatively to eight European countries, namely, Denmark, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, Poland, Switzerland and the United Kingdom. Treatment of data is also original in the way it deals with variations of public spheres by combining a news media claims-making analysis with a social media reception analysis. In particular, the book highlights the prominent role of the mass media in shaping national and transnational solidarity, while exploring the readiness of the mass media to extend thick conceptions of solidarity to non-members. It proposes a research design for the comparative analysis of online news reception and considers the innovative potential of this method in relation to established public opinion research. The book is of particular interest for scholars who are interested in the fields of European solidarity, migration and refugees, contentious politics, while providing an approach that talks to scholars of journalism and political communication studies, as well as digital journalism and online news reception. The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.tandfebooks.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.

In an age of terrorism and securitized immigration, dual citizenship is of central theoretical and political concern. The contributors to this timely volume examine policies regarding dual citizenship across Europe, covering a wide spectrum of countries. The case studies explore the negotiated character and boundaries of political membership and the fundamental beliefs and arguments within distinct political cultures and institutional settings which have shaped debates and policies on citizenship. The analyses explore the similarities and differences in the politics of dual citizenship, to identify the dominant terms of public debates within and across selected immigration and emigration states in Europe. The research demonstrates that policies on dual citizenship are not simply explained by different concepts of nationhood. Instead, concepts of societal integration, which may well be contested in a given polity, are extremely influential.

This open access collection is devoted to an in-depth, qualitative analysis of practices of cross-national solidarity in response to the current political and social crises, from citizens’ initiatives to networks of cooperation among civil society actors. The book analyses existing informal groups at the grassroots, furthering transnational solidarity in three thematic areas: disability, unemployment and immigration. Contributions assess how civic groups respond to the various crises affecting Europe, especially the economic and refugee crises, presenting new findings from a systematic comparative study conducted in eight European countries (Denmark, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, Poland, Switzerland, and the UK). The research will be of interest to scholars, students, journalists, policy-makers and activists interested in civil society, social movements, charitable actions, altruism and solidarity, as well as European studies and the socio-economic challenges of current European crises.