The conference opened with a presentation by Luís Russo (EUI, PhD researcher at the SPS department) who illustrated the trends in European transnational solidarity in the last five years, since the project started in 2018. He emphasised that support for European solidarity is real and that it is higher in 2022 than back in 2018.
Finally, he argued that European solidarity became more popular also as a consequence of the two pivotal crises the EU has faced recently: Covid-19 and the war in Ukraine. The reinforced willingness to pool resources in order to shelter the European community from adversity may be a reflection of a new predisposition to find European responses against common (external) threats affecting the whole block.
Dietlind Stolle, a professor at the EUI and McGill University, presented a macro perspective of the 2022 edition of the dataset. She looked at how the European publics react to the Russian invasion in Ukraine, how much support there is for aiding Ukraine and suggested the direction for future research.
The conference, organised in collaboration between the European Governance and Politics Programme and the ERC synergy project ‘Policy Crisis and Crisis Politics’ (SOLID), was preceded by a call for contributions for scholars who work with the SiE dataset on Solidarity in Europe. This data is released publicly every year in the fall, after the survey is fielded in spring and presented firstly at EUI’s State of the Union. Twelve papers were accepted and presented at the conference on a variety of solidarity-related topics, from the war in Ukraine to climate and attitudes towards migration to climate change, Covid-19 and differentiated integration.
Watch the recording of the talks by Luís Russo and Dietlind Stolle.