Solidarity in the European Union and the resilience of the state as a communicative frame

Theorists and practitioners alike have expected that citizens’ political loyalty and solidarity would shift towards the European Union (EU) as political and economic integration intensifies. In this article, we show that the dominant frame of solidarity relations remains the nation-state even if many citizens accept the EU as a community of solidarity. Building on a unique dataset from 27 focus groups conducted in nine countries of the EU, we disentangle different forms and geographical levels of solidarity. We find that citizens acknowledge moral duties to help people in other member states affected by a disaster or crisis, especially if that crisis was not of their own making. However, they frame solidarity relations in the EU predominantly as relations among states. States are imagined as the actors that perform solidarity and, respectively, receive support from other states. In a similar vein, considerations of reciprocity and fairness in solidarity relations are discussed predominantly in an intergovernmental framing. Not least, our focus group discussions reveal that European citizens are sceptical about new competences for the EU in social policy and favour subsidiarity instead.