Showing solidarity in times of escalating crises

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Compared to the peaceful 1980s and 1990s, we now live in a much more warlike and crisis-ridden time – one would think. In fact, contemporary history records the Falklands War in 1982, the US invasions of Grenada (1983) and Panama (1989), since 1988 a civil war has been raging in Somalia, later in Rwanda, the Yugoslav wars break out, and the first intifada between Palestinians and the Israeli army begins etc. World history is a history of wars and crises.

But the people’s courage to live does not falter, their solidarity with those who are suffering, such as the Ukrainians, is reflected in large donations. People can’t do anything else. He is a communal being, “becoming the I on the first person,” as the Austrian-Israeli Jewish religious philosopher Martin Buber put it.

Solidarity and Saint Martin

Today, on the day of St. Martin, who according to tradition shared a cloak with a beggar, the focus is not only on international solidarity. It starts on a small scale – remember the neighborhood help during the Corona crisis. It continues in defined groups, such as employees, who fight in solidarity for rights and wages.

Solidarity is defined as give and take within a more or less large group (neighborhood, union, global humanism). This implies the danger of becoming too exclusive; to play off one’s own group to the detriment of other groups. That’s why solidarity also means “keeping an eye on those who don’t or don’t yet belong to your own group,” says sociologist Stephan Lessenich from the Ludwig Maximilians University in Munich.

Solidarity per se is not infinite. During the pandemic, neighborly solidarity was lost as the crisis continued and those in favor of and against measures drifted apart. Institutional solidarity communities (e.g. trade unions) eroded under the sandpaper of neoliberal and individualistic ideologies to the detriment of everyone.

Read the interview with political scientist Barbara Prainsack:

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Multi-crises also share the will for solidarity. Measures such as energy price caps or rent caps would “take pressure off the boiler,” say German economists. If these worries were taken away a little, people would have more emotional capacity to show solidarity with others. With threatened people in Ukraine, Israel, Iran or…

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Author

Klaus Buttinger

Editor magazine

Klaus Buttinger

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