Introduction

The 2008 financial crisis highlighted the European Union's enormous regional and national economic inequalities. It also revealed significant social distance between the citizens of different European Union member states and the persistence of national stereotypes. This prompted a shift from exclusive attention to European identification to a new focus on European solidarity. This chapter is motivated by that interest.

Pan-European solidarity guided integration efforts since the creation of the European Coal and Steel Community in 1951 (Sangiovanni 2013). More recently, the Treaty of Maastricht and the Lisbon Treaty situated solidarity as one of the European Union's central objectives. The latter, in particular, includes a solidarity clause (article 222), according to which ‘The Union and its Member States shall act jointly in a spirit of solidarity if a Member State is the object of a terrorist attack or the victim of a natural or man-made disaster’. The practical instantiation of this solidarity clause, the EU Solidarity Fund, is just one of several institutions, including the structural and cohesion funds, through which the European Union has pursued this objective over the years. Intergovernmental conflict and the mobilisation of nationalist sentiment that has followed the fiscal and debt crisis of several EU member states can in fact be traced to legal and policy debate on how to render these principles, institutions and policies compatible with the strict fiscal requirements of the monetary union's Stability Pact and article 125 of the Lisbon Treaty (the so-called no bailout clause) according to which: