Social solidarity and deservingness

Abstract

The notion of social solidarity involves formal and informal practices, with various levels of institutionalisation. It builds on normative assumptions and discourses of reciprocal expectations of mutual help, on (perceived) ideas of sameness or neediness in relation to, among other, class, ethnicity, and/or gender and on notions of deservingness that are entangled in such ideas. In this contribution, we discuss how the intersection between institutionalised social solidarity in European nation-states and notions of deservingness informs who is seen as worthy of being part of welfare arrangements. Where ideas of solidarity and deservingness intertwine with legal categorisations of belonging, the results are exclusionary policies that often restrict migrants’ access to national welfare policies, and hence meaningful societal participation. Furthermore, we discuss migrants’ experiences with expressions of solidarity beyond the national realm, exploring how ideas about migrants’ deservingness become linked to their economic usefulness within the European (integration) project.

Introduction

The notion of social solidarity remains a buzzword in public and political discourses that has recently resurged in the context of the war in Ukraine (European Commission, 2022), or the COVID-19 pandemic between 2019 and 2022 (Flynn, 2022). The national responses we could observe illustrate the tensions and constraints inherent into the notion of solidarity, as inclusionary and exclusionary practices are highly differentiated (Bruzelius and Ratzmann, 2020). Who should we be solidaristic with, and on what grounds? How do we define the boundaries of belonging to a community of solidarity?

Despite its wide use, the term ‘social solidarity’ tends to remain vaguely defined in research and policy. Broadly speaking, expressions and acts of solidarity can be found on the individual and institutional level. Institutionalised practices of social solidarity emerge from formal, state policies, such as those intended to reduce geographical disparities between territories, or to re-distribute income between richer and poor populations. However, welfare states were and remain linked to ideas of ethnicity, race, class and gender, allowing for differential treatment and intersectional discrimination. Since ‘social control and racism […] are integral to the ideology of social welfare’ (Jacobs, 1985: 7), allowing for the unequal inclusion of resident groups, we wish to explore how practices of solidarity link to discourses of reciprocal expectations of mutual help and support between people, as well as on ideas of sameness in relation to class, ethnicity, and/or gender. We explore how solidarity is embedded in assumptions of ‘intersectional deservingness’ (Assouline and Gilad, 2022) defining the shared community of solidarity (see Lahusen and Theiss, 2019).

To unpack these dynamics, we focus on institutionalised social solidarity via the national welfare state, which functions as a distributor and gatekeeper (see keyword ‘Welfare State’ for further critical examination). Solidarity is underpinned by specific ideas and norms (see keywords ‘Discipline’ and ‘Suspicion and Surveillance’) about who should be included and under what terms. Our focus lies on immigration into and within the European Union (EU) and the effect on their welfare systems, commonly portrayed as a challenge to social solidarity (see Kymlicka, 2011), to explore how assumptions of deservingness motivate social solidarity.

After a brief historical backdrop, we interrogate the factors that lead to social solidarity towards immigrants, who are traditionally considered outsiders in host states and their pre-defined communities of solidarity. We rely on deservingness as a particular category of analysis (see van Oorschot, 2008), understood as societal expressions directed towards those deemed worthy of solidarity, often intertwined with migrants’ legal categorisations, and other markers of differentiation (e.g., race, class, religion, ethnicity). Next, we seek to understand the link between formal and informal solidarity, delving into how legal exclusion from entitlements to state-provided benefits and services can be complemented, and potentially offset, by less formalised expressions of social solidarity (e.g., civic society solidarity movements). Finally, we discuss the possibility of transnational solidarity using the EU and its free movement regime as a case study.

Historical backdrop: solidarity in the welfare state

Public discourses often present the European welfare states as an institutionalised form of social solidarity among individuals (Lahusen and Theiss, 2019; for a critique see Tabin and Leresche, 2019). First conceptualised by Thomas Marshall (1950) under the term ‘social citizenship’ (see also Powell, 2002 for a critical appraisal of the concept), such formal welfare arrangements provide citizens with access to state-funded and state-managed benefits and services, underpinned by a social contract that defines the conditions of support. This social contract, or formal welfare arrangement, commonly establishes the terms under which financial redistribution, as an expression of social solidarity between individuals with different needs and incomes, is enacted. Individuals within such closed and socially exclusive communities are expected to share risks and sacrifice some of their financial resources for the benefit of others (Halfmann and Bommes, 1998), rendering European welfare states mostly protectionist (Entzinger, 2007). The nature of the underlying social contract varies by country context; patterns chosen to finance welfare arrangements, whether tax- or contribution-based, remain a national prerogative (Carens, 1987) that determine the way financial redistribution is operated in practice, and have to be accepted and supported by the nation-state's citizens (Morel and Palme, 2019).

Within European welfare regimes, the aforementioned links of solidarity between state and citizens have historically been delineated nationally and based on a rather hegemonic discourse (Tabin and Leresche, 2019) at least since the emergence of nation-states (Soysal, 2007). Following this conceptualisation, redistribution commonly takes place within national borders, financed by the resources of the respective country, and relying on the idea that nationals are by definition homogeneous, because they share a common national ‘culture’, and have contributed to the financing of the welfare state (for a critique see the introduction to this special issue and keyword ‘Welfare State’). Limitations arise for racialised, classed and gendered resident groups whose ‘belonging’ is questioned and who fail to meet increasingly neoliberal expectations of labour market participation. Migrants and ethnic communities are more likely to be considered non-belonging, especially when they exhibit ‘unfavourable’ behaviour, such as short or fragmented work histories (Kootstra, 2016). The term welfare chauvinism (Careja and Harris, 2022) captures the ethno-nationalist and racialising political agenda that privileges ‘fellow’ citizens in welfare redistribution processes over immigrants (Ford, 2015; Wimmer, 2013), because the latter group's status as ‘strangers’ can provoke feelings of economic threat among the majority population (Mewes and Mau, 2013; see keyword ‘Banishment’ on Roma communities). Ethnic communities such as the Roma, although legally are national citizens, nonetheless are routinely subjected to political, socio-economic and cultural discrimination justified by their ‘otherness’, or ‘non-belonging’, and supposed lack of integration (Bhabha et al., 2017). Claims that the welfare state is reserved for ‘our own’ people are, however, increasingly hidden within public policy (Craig, 2013), therefore obscuring the intersectional deservingness that we find in such policy practices.

Redistribution within a pre-determined community of solidarity thus becomes a boundary-drawing exercise, whereby people group one another as ‘us’ and ‘them’ based on their perceived differences and similarities (Lamont and Molnár, 2002). Such symbolic boundaries manifest themselves materially in unequal access to, and the unequal distribution of, financial resources. Given the lack of opoportunity to participate in policy-making, non-citizens have no say in the formulation of the rules of financial redistribution, nor in the definition of legal categories of recipients, despite their monetary contributions. Instead, non-citizens sometimes co-finance national social protection without benefiting from it, while contributing to allowing social solidarity between national citizens to emerge (Tabin, 1999). For instance, states tolerate to varying degrees migrant ‘irregularity’, since those irregularised often participate in the economy (Bales and Mayblin, 2018) without having access to state-funded programmes of support (see Chauvin and Garcés-Mascareñas, 2014; Moffette, 2014) – forcing them to seek social solidarity outside of institutionalised forms of state support.

In this boundary-drawing process between insiders and outsiders of the welfare state, struggles for recognition by different groups as legitimate members of such ‘communities of solidarity’ and their respective social rights manifest. The results of such struggles may translate into inclusion for some, and exclusion for others (see Lamont and Molnár, 2002). As argued by Fraser (1998), social entitlements are not necessarily a given but emerge from contested interpretations over their content within a specific historic and cultural context, which can lead to the recognition and representation of the interests of certain resident groups more than others.

Solidarity and ideas of deservingness

Real-life substantive access to social entitlements depends not only on legal categorisations, as formalised solidarity expressions, but equally on the subjective interpretations by those applying the law, such as courts or street-level bureaucrats that provide social benefits and services (Lockwood, 1996; Tabin and Perriard, 2016). Informal or subjective perceptions about the conditions under which social solidarity with fellow (non-)citizens should be exercised are linked to stereotypes and broader ideas of deservingness. According to public opinion polls, immigrants commonly rank lower on the deservingness hierarchy than nationals of any status (van Oorschot and Meuleman, 2012). Deservingness is thus hierarchically applied towards various (migrant) categories and is often value-based (e.g., via labour, see Jørgensen and Thomsen, 2016), but also intersectional, and thus complex. A single-mother might rank higher on a deservingness scale, yet her ethnicity (e.g., Roma) and migration status might cause a lower notion of deservingness by others.

Here, perceptions of welfare chauvinism are closely linked to markers of difference, such as ethnicity, gender, and class (Guentner et al., 2016). As highlighted by Simon Guentner et al. (2016, 402), ‘[t]he very concept of “deservingness” superimposes a moral criterion upon need’. Studying ideas of intersectional deservingness, Assouline and Gilad (2022) highlight how categories such as gender, religion, class, and race play a crucial role in how politics, the media, and also public administration and civil society react towards migrants, especially in the context of public expense restraints. As Wilm van Oorschot (2008) has shown with his CARIN (Control, Attitude, Reciprocity, Identity and Need) framework, several dimensions shape support for state-led financial redistribution. Such support is commonly based on assessments of an individual's (in)ability to have control over their neediness, (non) compliance with rules for accessing welfare benefits and services, their prior contributions to society, e.g., the social benefit system, how much support they need, and their identity. The latter relates to perceived differences in people, highlighting intersectionality e.g., between class and perceived belonging (i.e., ethnicity or race). For example, the case of the 2016 Brexit referendum illustrates how narratives about the alleged burden of intra-EU labour migration for the cost and financing of social protection can lead to limited formal solidarity with the respective resident groups (Morel and Palme, 2019). The results are stratified social rights depending on the welfare regime, immigrants’ legal status of residence, and their perceived deservingness (Mantu, 2021; Shutes, 2016). Consequently, strategies of financial redistribution may manifest themselves in unequal access to, and exclusion from, welfare benefits in practice, based on moral ideas about who ought to belong and be included. ‘Economic migrants’, considered in control of their socio-economic situation, are likely to encounter stricter sanctioning rules in German unemployment administrations than refugees, who are generally considered more deserving, particularly if they arrived in the country only recently (Gschwind et al. 2021).

Although migration status and legal categorisation are one of many determining factors, ideas of deservingness tend to be linked to the desirability assigned by states to different migrant groups within their territory. States prefer ‘tourists’, highly skilled professional workers, or seasonal workers, who can be easily steered through mobility schemes with often clear regulations on welfare access. These categories of immigrants are either assumed to create economic resources, without being ‘needy’ or reliant on public finances, or their access to social solidarity can be easily circumscribed (in the case of, for example, tourists and seasonal workers). Yet, such assumptions neglect to acknowledge that refugees can be highly skilled professionals, with the potential of filling local labour market shortages, as the recent example of forced migrants from Ukraine in 2022 exemplifies (Brücker et al. 2022). Within the realm of refugee protection, prior work has shown how the ‘deserving’ refugee becomes exclusively connected to those who are granted refugee status based on the 1951 UN Convention, relegating all other unsuccessful applicants to the category of ‘bogus applicants’ (Sales, 2002). As such, legal categorisations build on ideas of deservingness, separating the ‘failed’ or ‘bogus’ asylum seekers from the ‘real’ refugees and treating the former as undeserving of protection.

The generous treatment of Ukranians by the EU members states, which includes unconditional access to the labour market and social rights, is an example of intersectional deservingness ‘at work’: Legally, Ukranians have been recognised as in need of protection; the group awarded protection is comprised of mainly women and children considered by default vulnerable, and the need for protection is temporary (three years based on the Temporary Protection Directive). However, solidarity does not strecht out to persons with a temporary migration status in Ukraine whom EU states can exclude from temporary protection; in same countries, these persons were prevented from entering because of their ethnicity (for example, African students in Ukraine seeking to leave the country; Mantu, Zwaan and Strik, 2023). Thus, social solidarity for Ukranians is shaped by the intersection of legal staus, gender, age, and ethnicity, showing how intersectional deservigness creates hierarchies of entitlement.

Formal and informal expressions of solidarity

Social solidarity lies along a continuum of informal to formal expressions, which complement and compete with one another. Where migrants are formally excluded from the national welfare state, where they fear interaction with it (Meier et al., 2021), or lack the resources to do so, friends and family often materially provide intimate necessities (Serra Mingot and Mazzucato, 2018; Simola, 2020). Likewise, civil society actors, such as charitable organisations and contractors of social service delivery, seek to fill the gaps for those excluded from state welfare provision (Bruzelius, 2020), or act as brokers by mediating access for otherwise excluded migrant residents (Ratzmann and Heindlmaier, 2022). Hence, welfare, as in acts of solidarity that are market driven due to the goal to (re)intregate) non-citizens into the labour market, is not an exclusive prerogative of the state but is provided by a plethora of actors in less formalised arrangements (locally, but also transnationally). Yet, while solidarity practices by non-state actors could help to fill the gaps left by state provision, seeking to counter potentially emerging inequalities, one could question if that always is, and should be their role.

As an example, a continuum of formal and informal solidarity practices characterised the response to the increased migratory movement in 2015, when state structures are often overwhelmed by the arrival of large groups of refugees (Fry and Islar, 2021). Non-state actors stepped in at the local level to fill the gaps and provide basic social assistance, such as housing or food. At the same time, other informal solidarity acts by citizens or citizen networks are criminalised by states and the EU alike (see for example Schwiertz and Schwenken, 2020 on rescue missions in the Mediterranean and lawsuits against activists for human smuggling).

Such contestations over solidarity show themselves in the emergence of ‘sanctuary cities’. The development of urban policies in support of irregularised migrants is a response to migrants’ needs to access state-financed social support services, such as basic health care or housing, if they are disregarded or even legally denied at the level of the (central) state. In the European context, many of the irregularised migrants who benefit from such policies are rejected asylum seekers, many of whom are left in precarious situations by the disconnect between migration and social policies. The emergence of ‘sanctuary cities’ questions the monopoly of the (central) state in welfare policy delivery through the development of ‘localised’ solidarity practices (Kaufmann et al., 2021). Schwiertz and Schwenken (2020) hence argue that the various civil society initiatives that seek to renegotiate existing structures of social solidarity with people on the move and non-citizens challenge the presumption of solidarity exclusively based on belonging. Solidarity and self-help function further as political interventions, rather than being mere acts of charity, confronting the state with its failure to provide basic services (Ishkanian and Glasius, 2018). Criticism towards the attempt to create solidarity beyond borders argues that it depoliticises and dehistoricises the right of European states to exclude and select those worthy of protection and solidarity, while simultaneously neglecting colonial pasts and histories of exploitation (Danewid, 2017).

Yet, non-state actors do not remain free of judging ‘deservingness’. Access to essential social services, such as housing or emergency healthcare provided by the voluntary sector, can be based on employees’ own interpretations of need and deservingness (Assouline and Gilad, 2022; Glyniadaki, 2021). Research on voluntary sector organisations suggests that an essentialised and gendered version of migrant vulnerability can inform decisions about who deserves support (for EU citizens, see Mostowska, 2021). However, it equally points to the negotiations that take place within NGOs to resist state-imposed categorisations and the reproduction of discourses of social otherness and charity towards migrants (Kangas-Müller et al., 2023; Mesarič and Vacchelli, 2021).

Considering the complexity of moral ideas about social solidarity between individuals, research emphasises the need for a non-quantitative approach to capture how ideas of deservingness play out in everyday life and within the administrative structures responsible for decisions on welfare support (Laenen et al., 2019). Qualitative works have increasingly examined the often complex and competing rationales in the formation of deservingness judgements (Carmel et al., 2016; Novak, 2021; Ratzmann and Sahraoui, 2021).

Solidarity beyond the nation(al welfare) state – an EU exploration

Thus, the national character of solidarity has been increasingly challenged from below through the enactment of collective social solidarity practices. National(ised) ideas of solidarity can, however, equally be challenged from the supranational level. As such, the EU project allows us to reflect on the possibility of transcending nationally bounded forms of solidarity. Within the EU legal framework, solidarity has a constitutional dimension as a general principle of EU law that regulates the interaction between the EU and its member states. However, a concrete definition within this regulatory framework, regarding to whom solidarity is owed, remains absent (Küçük 2016).

Stefano Giubboni (2010) argues that a new social solidarity paradigm has developed in the EU, in part due to the case law of the European Court of Justice that has acknowledged EU migrant citizens’ entitlements to some financial solidarity. This judicially constructed form of social solidarity remains contested since welfare is a policy area that should be regulated at the national level (Schmidt, 2022). The EU lacks the democratic legitimacy to intervene in the redistribution of its member states’ financial resources (Davies, 2010; Thym, 2015).

The above discussion is part of a larger debate on whether transnational solidarity – understood as equal access to the host state's welfare system – underpins the exercise of the right to free movement for all categories of economically inactive EU migrant citizens, or whether it is something reserved only for mobile EU workers (de Witte, 2015). EU states’ reluctance to allow economically inactive EU citizens, jobseekers or unemployed citizens access to their welfare systems feeds de facto the exclusion of vulnerable and irregular(ised) EU citizens from any form of institutionalised solidarity. Current definitions of social solidarity, as expressed in the European Court of Justice's judgements, reflect political and popular debates about the deservingness of EU citizens and champion solidarity only for those who are legally resident either because they have sufficient resources to fend for themselves or because they are are economically active (Mantu and Minderhoud, 2023). This assumimgly leads to the renationalisation of solidarity, since responsibility for the most vulnerable mobile EU citizens is transferred back to their state of origin (Spaventa, 2017, 208). This vision mirrors neoliberal paradigms, under which redistribution and solidarity are reimagined based on productivity in the labour market and contribution to the national economy. In that sense, social entitlements have to be ‘earned’ (Dwyer et al., 2019), enforcing ideas of the self-sufficient and disciplined migrant worker (Anderson, 2013; see also keywords ‘Welfare Governance’ and ‘Discipline’).

Yet, this stratification by labour market status fundamentally neglects the heterogeneity of EU workers and the diversity of their needs (Morrissey, 2021). Compared to men, women are more likely to be in atypical, insecure employment or unpaid care work, which remains unrecognised and un-commodified in the highly gendered national labour markets, while social rights remain based mostly on waged work (Fraser, 2016). As a result, EU law and jurisprudence neither recognise familial care work as genuine work that creates EU ‘worker status’, nor as a valid reason to leave the labour market (Dean, 2018; Mantu, 2021). This highlights a hierarchy of entitlements based on intersectional deservingness, given that only regular paid work tends to serve as the legitimate basis for legal entitlements – those deserving of state support are only those in waged labour. Based on empirical research with migrant families, Louise Ackers (2004) shows how the disadvantages women – as those often, but not always, carrying the bulk of care work – face in the labour market become ever more acute in the context of migration. EU migrant women tend to face a double disadvantage, namely as EU migrants whose claims are derived from their status as migrants, and as women who tend to face unpaid or underpaid employment. When social class and ethnicity (such as being part of the Sinti and Roma community) intersect, the experience of accessing social security transnationally is marked by an intersectional disadvantage (Farris, 2017).

Conclusion

Welfare – as part of a marker of solidarity – has been increasingly withdrawn from people deemed undeserving, including migrants (see Keskinen, 2016). Social solidarity builds on normative assumptions and discourses of reciprocal expectations of mutual help, on (perceived) ideas of sameness or neediness in relation to, among other, class, ethnicity, and/or gender, and on notions of deservingness that are entangled in such ideas. Consequently, various forms of solidarity governed by different logics can be identified: formal(ised) and informal(ised) solidarity, institutionalised solidarity, market driven solidarity, transnational solidarity or localised solidarity. We belive that migration constitutes an important lens through which to interrogate these forms of solidarity and the underlying deservingness paradigms that define both their subjects and content. Furthermore, deservigness needs to be approached as an intersectional category as shown by the examples cited in the text.

To conclude we want to highlight three problematic issues in current debates and the framing of social solidarity. First, institutionalised solidarity and its formal expressions have successfully championed marked-driven solidarity, which leaves very little space for decoupling solidarity from notions of deservigness. This form of solidarity is linked to participation in the labour market and economy, which determines entitlement to redistribution via financial benefits. In the case of migrants, it is well known that they generally experience a more vulnerable situation than nationals. Can (neoliberal) markets produce forms of solidarity when built on flexible work arrangements, job insecurity, and poor pay that generates ‘in-work poverty’? Since many migrants are concentrated in the lower echelons of the labour market, they tend to contribute less financially, while being more at risk and in need of social solidarity. Second, the above observations are reified at the supranational level. Debates about the right of EU workers to export child benefits from their country of work and residence to their country of nationality (in which their children are resident) show that when ‘market’-driven solidarity derived from contributions through work intersects with mutually reinforcing ideas about deservingness based on gender, ethnicity and/or class (Morel and Palme, 2019), migrant workers are most likely to be treated unequally. Third, how should we understand the link between formal and informal solidarity? The institutional arrangements through which social solidarity is delivered as a public good seem increasingly insufficient to meet the demands made by citizens and migrants, opening the space for informal solidarity practices. Attempts to anchor social solidarity on other grounds besides sameness and deservingness create the conditions for more radical politics of belonging beyond the nation-state, but they need to content with European states (re)asserting their monopoly over the power to define who is entitled to solidarity via practices of criminalisation or illegalisation.