European Values: Solidarity*

• Published date: 01 June 2021
• Author: Philippe Van Parijs
• Date: 01 June 2021
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/raju.12310

© (2021) The Authors. Ratio Juris published by the University of Bologna and John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution

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Ratio Juris. Vol. 34 No. 2 June 2021 (95–105)

European Values: Solidarity

PHILIPPE VAN PARIJS *

Abstract . This text will address three questions. Firstly, what roles has the appeal to solidarity

been playing in the process of European integration? Secondly, what does solidarity in the nor-

mative sense of an obligation really mean? Thirdly, to what extent can we and should we rely

on appeals to solidarity as we fight for a better Europe?

1. Solidarity and European Integration: Three Connections

There are three quite different senses in which the concept of solidarity has been

playing an important role in the process of European integration.

1

First, there is solidarity as a fact. This is the solidarity invoked in a famous pas-

sage of Robert Schuman’s declaration on May 9, 1950, commemorated every year as

the opening shot of European integration: “ L’Europe ne se fera pas d’un coup, ni

dans une construction d’ensemble: Elle se fera par des réalisations concrètes créant

d’abord une solidarité de fait .”

2

This passage was undoubtedly penned down by Jean

Monnet and reappears the following year in the preamble of the Treaty of Paris, the

treaty that created the European Coal and Steel Community, the first component of

what was to become the European Union. The word solidarité here simply means in-

terdependence . It is still occasionally used in this sense, for example, when architects

1 For a set of well- documented essays covering all aspects of solidarity in the European context,

see Coman, Fromont, and Weyembergh 2019.

2 “Europe will not be made all at once, or according to a single plan. It will be built through

concrete achievements which first create a de facto solidarity.” Full text of the Schuman Declaration

at https://europa.eu/european-union/about-eu/symbols/europe-day/schuman-declaration_en .

The French original at https://europa.eu/european-union/about-eu/symbols/europe-day/

schuman-declaration_fr .

* This text is a thoroughly revised version of the keynote lecture delivered on September 10,

2019, at the NoVaMigra conference titled European Values in the Charter of Fundamental Rights

(University of Milan) and on June 14, 2019, at the conference titled Solidarity and Mutual Respect

in the Domain of European Citizenship (Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic

Diversity, Göttingen). I am most grateful to the organizers of these two conferences and to their

participants for useful oral feedback, and to Andrea Sangiovanni and Juri Viehoff for very stim-

ulating subsequent written exchanges. This paper is here published within the framework of

the aforementioned NoVaMigra project, which has received funding from the European Union’s

Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under Grant Agreement No. 770330.

[Correction added on 16 August 2021 after online publication: the copyright line has been

updated in this version.]