Join this two-day conference, which brings together cutting-edge research on European solidarity
Organised solidarity provides the members of a community with an insurance mechanism against adverse risks. This allows individual members to accept more risk, enabling the group as a whole to pursue more ambitious goals and defend its cohesion more effectively under conditions of adversity. Yet solidarity is costly, uneven, and breeds moral hazard. In a large and diverse union such as the European Union, these tensions make solidarity potentially very rewarding for all — but also very fragile.
The EUI-YouGov Solidarity in Europe survey has tracked European citizens' attitudes toward cross-border risk and burden sharing since 2018. It explores the determinants of public support across multiple dimensions: solidarity for what (issue specificity), solidarity how (instrumentation), and solidarity by whom and for whom (geography and reciprocity). The findings consistently reveal that European solidarity is more than superficial. It varies by crisis type, with strong support for external shocks such as pandemics and natural disasters, and weaker support for internally generated problems such as debt crises. By and large, European citizens view solidarity as a reciprocal benefit rather than a moral or identity-based obligation, and they prefer permanent arrangements of risk and burden sharing to ad hoc mutual assistance.
This two-day conference brings together cutting-edge research on European solidarity from a variety of disciplinary, methodological, and empirical perspectives — drawing both on the EUI-YouGov survey and on a wide range of other data sources and approaches. The contributions approach solidarity from multiple angles: geopolitical shocks, migration governance, legal and constitutional foundations, public opinion dynamics, and the social boundaries that define who solidarity is ultimately for. Together they advance our understanding of when and why citizens support cross-border risk sharing, how solidarity is operationalised across EU policy domains, and what forces — from war and crisis sequencing to elite framing and identity politics — shape its possibilities and limits in contemporary Europe.
This activity is co-funded by the EUI Widening Europe Programme. The EUI Widening Europe Programme, backed by contributions from the European Union and EUI Contracting States, is designed to strengthen internationalisation, competitiveness, and quality in research in Widening countries, and thus foster a more cohesive European Higher Education and Research Area.
At the EUI and the Robert Schuman Centre, we are dedicated to removing barriers and providing equal opportunities for everyone. Please indicate in the registration form your accessibility needs, if any. Alternatively, you can contact the logistics organiser of the event.
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