Revising Humanitarianism and Solidarity

Abstract

This chapter addresses three cases where governments have adopted explicitly Euro-critical or anti-EU stances linked to migration. The primary aim was to understand how nations that reject the established European narrative of international protection have framed their obligations to alleviate the suffering of war and conflicts. This has been broken into three conceptual areas for comparative purposes: humanitarianism, solidarity, and sovereignty. While observing areas of distinction between these states and the EU, the analysis suggests the difficulties involved in hardened contrasts between a cosmopolitan-humanitarian EU and national-sovereigntist states. Instead, the chapter presents a more nuanced picture of how states have developed distinct accounts of humanitarianism and international order. Moreover, there is considerable evidence that narratives of Europeanness developing on the liminal periphery have been reshaping core notions of “European” identity embodied in the official pronouncements of the Commission.