From Karl Marx’s call to overcome the competitive strife amongst the proletariat for the sake of an internationalized class struggle to Émile Durkheim’s notion of mechanical and organic solidarity precipitated by the division of labor and Pyotr Kropotkin’s concept of mutual aid, the idea of solidarity has, since the nineteenth century, inspired and haunted the social, political, and cultural imagination. Even today, calls for solidarity are ubiquitous, playing a prominent role in the political management of such crises as the COVID pandemic, the energy crisis, or the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Societies are called to show solidarity not just through the display of symbols, such as the Ukrainian or the rainbow flags, but through concrete actions affecting everyday life, such as participation in mass immunization, tightening of economic belts, and lowering room temperatures.

As Heinz Bude provocatively observed, there has been a recent renaissance of the notion, conjuring up a phantasm of a common human origin and a goal that no longer mobilizes solidarity (solely) as a way of thinking about class, gender, race, and nationality. Furthermore, scholars from Donna Haraway to Bruno Latour have expanded the language of and demand for solidarity, drawing on the physicality of all living organisms, including animals, plants, and microbes. Human rights activists call for solidarity with marginalized and persecuted groups; Black Lives Matters appeal to solidarity to further racial equality. Union movements advocate workers’ solidarity, climate activists demand solidarity in an effort to move toward generational and geopolitical climate justice, while animal rights activists appeal to solidarity to reduce non-human suffering. Memory scholars, too, are increasingly drawing on the notion of solidarity in the hope that transnational memories of historical violence and suffering will promote new contemporary forms of internationalism and solidarity.

At the same time, against the emancipatory aspirations of liberal, bourgeois, and left-wing activists, a kind of exclusionary group solidarity has taken a hold on far-right populism. Exploiting economic and geopolitical crises to undermine the trust in liberal causes and democratic institutions, xenophobic, chauvinist, and nationalist groups promote an exclusionary solidarity that fosters fear of various Others.

For this panel, we encourage position papers that explore the historical, socio-political, and cultural dimensions and pressure points of solidarity in the context of Central Europe from a wide array of perspectives. Contributions might explore movements and expressions of solidarity on a historic arc or examine contemporary instantiations of national, transnational, and transcultural solidarity. They might reflect on theories and practices of solidarity (including the kinds of community or relationships that are imagined and/or constructed) or again examine artistic, literary, or cinematic expressions or representations of solidarity. Finally, positions papers might consider the political and cultural vocabulary of (instrumentalized) solidarity or investigate the possibilities of transnational, transcultural solidarity through “shared” memories of suffering.