Affective and calculative solidarity: The impact of individualism and neoliberal capitalism:

TL;DR: The authors examines the ways in which the self-responsibilized individualism underpinning contemporary concepts of the ideal European citizen, on the one hand, and the inequaliti...

Abstract: This article examines the ways in which the self-responsibilized individualism underpinning contemporary concepts of the ideal European citizen, on the one hand (Frericks, 2014), and the inequaliti...

Summary

Introduction

• This paper examines the ways in which the self-responsibilised individualism underpinning contemporary concepts of the ideal European citizen on the one hand (Frericks 2014), and the inequalities and anti-democratic politics that characterises contemporary neoliberal capitalism on the other, are co-constituent elements in creating an antipathy to forms of solidarity that are affective as opposed to calculative.
• The deep relationality that is endemic to both social production and reproduction, and that impels an affective, morally-led form of solidarity needs to be recognised academically and intellectually, and politically sustained, if the authors are to move beyond a narrow calculative self-interested vision of solidarity in Europe.
• It is the deep interpellation between these traditions that make it more unassailable than it first appears.
• As the move towards responsibilised individualism is not simply a by-product of cultural processes, the following section focuses on how the political economy of neoliberal capitalism undermines all but the weakest forms of solidarity.

Solidarity in Europe

• Solidarity is a widely invoked value in European politics (Juncker, Tusk, Dijsselbloem, Draghi and Schulz 2017).
• It is an over-arching principle underpinning the framing of all the major Treaties of the European Union from its inception in 1951, including the Single European Act (1986), the Maastricht Treaty (1992) and the Treaty of Lisbon (2006).
• In the latter case it is framed as a value binding together both citizens and member states (Sangiovanni 2013).
• Pre-publication version welfare terms (Baldwin 1990), especially in the European Union (Eriksen 2017), it is also used to refer to forms of recognition (Kymlicka 2015).
• 13) claims that, within the EU, the concept of solidarity is an ideological hybrid that is stretched and strained to meet the demands of different political situations, also known as Stjerno (2015.

Politics and Practice: Limits to Solidarity in Europe

• The limitations of the fluid and flexible framing of solidarity in EU law was exposed during both the financial and refugee crises when the ‘self-interest’ of member states became apparent (Kotzur 2017: 44).
• While leaders of the European Union claimed that Europe showed solidarity with periphery countries of the Eurozone during the financial crisis, the imposition of austerity as a result of bailout agreements disproved this (De Grauthe authors 2013).
• The terms of bailouts for countries in crisis can only be considered solidaristic in a distinctively calculative sense.
• The refugee crisis was framed as a burden, a problem to be resolved by quotas (Knodt and Tews 2017; Takle 2018).
• Before discussing these, it is necessary to examine the framing of solidarity in academic discourse, not least because there is an iterative relationship between academic, policy, and political framings.

Perspectives on Solidarity

• Solidarity is commonly interpreted as involving some binding or bonding between individuals and groups (Putnam 2001).
• It is simultaneously an object or goal of politics, a set of socio-political practices realising such politics, and a disposition towards practice; and its interpretation varies across disciplines.
• In sum, while solidarity is generally defined as a contingent and conditional social disposition, it is also recognised as a positive and affective disposition driven by the desire to alleviate or prevent the suffering of others (Rorty 1989; Arnsperger and Varoufakis 2003).
• As people have moral as well as self-interested motivations, values and norms are not only regulatory but are constitutive of social life (Vandenberghe 2018); they predispose people to be more or less solidaristic.

Calculative and Affective Solidarity

• There is a large body of empirical evidence substantiating the claim that the calculative model of solidarity is dominant in Europe (de Beer and Koster 2009; Mau and Burkhardt 2009; Paskov and Dewilde 2012, Paskov 2016, Taylor-Gooby 2011).
• People are reflective and capable of working out of ultimate concerns that include their obligations to others; they can and do have an external moral referent that directs social actions beyond self-interest (Archer 2000; Honneth, 1996; Sayer 2011).
• Even in a neoliberal capitalist society people are ‘often moved by a quite different set of motives, arising directly out of consideration for the claims of others.
• Given these dynamics, solidarity cannot be analysed as a singular undifferentiated principle.
• The tensions between more other-centred, affective, and self-interested, calculative (and exclusionary) dimensions of solidarity are real, even if the boundaries between them are org.ucd.idm.oclc.org/10.1177%2F1368431018786379.

Cultural Processes: Individualism

• Research from cognitive science shows that deep-seated cognitive schemas frame political attitudes and values (Lakoff 2009; Leyva 2018).
• Values that are historically embedded (Cortois and Laermans 2017), including those emanating from the religious and political traditions of Europe (Brunkhorst 2009; Kapeller and Wolkenstein 2013), impact on how solidarity is conceptualised and enacted.
• While love and caritas underpinned secularised Christian solidaristic thinking, political ideologies were also informed by a ‘pessimistically inclined individualism’ deeply rooted in the Puritan tradition of Calvinism in Europe (Weber: 1976 [1930] 105-106).
• Given the moral endorsement of rational-legal acquisition as proof of God’s calling, it is not surprising that self-responsibilisation became a powerful norm in relation to the operationalisation of the welfare state, exemplified most recently in the institutionalisation of forms of ‘active’ and ‘responsible’ citizenship (Frericks 2010; 2014; Frericks, Maier and De Graff, 2009: Van Gerven and Osssewaarde 2012).

Political Liberalism and Responsibilised Individualism

• To recognise the role that secularised religious principles played in promoting responsibilised individualism within the welfare state is not to deny that there were and are other ideological forces at play.
• From Hobbes and Locke, to Rousseau and Kant, and up to and including Rawls, Western liberal political theorists have upheld a separatist view of the person and an atomistic perspective on society, largely ignoring the reality of human dependency and interdependency across the life course (Benhabib 1992; Kittay 1999; Vandenberghe 2018).
• Pre-publication version marginalised within these conceptual frameworks as relations are implicitly defined in utilitarian terms.
• Compassion and care remain defining features of the intimate personal world while calculation and instrumentalism are the governing legitimated ethics of the public sphere.
• That offers individualised forms of security, excitement and merit-based opportunities to those who succeed (Boltanski and Chiapello 2005: 163-4), may appear very remote from the form of individualism that provided moral endorsement for capitalism in the post-Reformation period, it is much more closely aligned with it than is commonly assumed.

Solidarity and the EU in the neoliberal era

• Affective forms of solidarity, the role of the dominant political economic institution of the modern era, capitalism, is also a crucial consideration.
• The EU is a prime example of this macroeconomic transformation: member-states joined together to form a single market, abandoned trade barriers and capital controls, adopted widespread privatisation and deregulation of key sectors, and implemented deep financial integration.
• Pre-publication version Figure 1 is a highly stylised representation of the conditions under which solidarity becomes activated; it is not meant to imply that affective values are impossible to cultivate under neoliberalism.

A more individualised Europe

• Various authors stress how the values of ‘rugged individualism’ promoted by neoliberalism undermine the sustenance of community relations and large-scale political unity (Giddens 1991; Wright 2010).
• An especially salient feature of the growing individualisation emerging within a neoliberal EU has been the widespread perception, among the European middle classes, that negative socioeconomic outcomes are more a result of individual shortcomings and personal responsibility, rather than the effect of oppressive and/or unequal external circumstances (Mau 2015: 18-21).
• According to Mau, it is the majoritarian-based middle classes that have assented to this shift of neoliberal market-based norms to the detriment of solidaristic, welfare-based modes of social cohesion.
• State supports have shifted from traditional social policies such as compensating for income loss and other transfers towards labour activation policies and human capital investment programmes.

A more unequal Europe

• The arrival of what Streeck has termed ‘oligarchic inequality’ is perhaps the defining consequence of the neoliberal era (2016: 28-29) with a persistent trend of wealth and income concentration at the top of virtually all national economies (OECD 2011), exacerbated since the crisis of 2008 (Piketty 2014).
• Because rising inequality is a core feature of neoliberalism, it is a fertile breeding ground for social conflict and anti-solidarity developments, particularly under simultaneous conditions of stagnant wages and job precarity (Standing 2011).
• Besides the crisis, the primary reasons identified for continuously rising inequality include the decline of union density and bargaining coverage rates across EU countries, the declining real purchasing power of minimum wages, the impact of globalisation and technological change, and growing rates of capital income, including higher returns on stocks, bonds and property sales.
• An exclusive focus on ‘shareholder value’ has facilitated growing wage disparities between senior management and workers, and encouraged profit reinvestment org.ucd.idm.oclc.org/10.1177%2F1368431018786379.
• Pre-publication version into financial trading rather than production and job creation (Davis and Kim 2015).

A more undemocratic Europe

• A knock-on effect of rising economic inequality is how it adversely impacts on the ability of those who are resource-poor to have their political voices heard and attended.
• First, businesses and their lobbyists use their considerable financial resources, media connections, and access to privileged information, to influence policy debates in ways from which most people are excluded (Johnson and Kwak 2013).
• Throughout the Eurozone crisis, EU policymakers chose austerity as the primary means to recovery: Portugal, Ireland, Greece, and Cyprus were compelled to sign up to structural adjustment programmes, while Spain, Italy, and France (among others) voluntarily committed to similar austerity measures in an effort to ward off financial speculation.
• The motivation behind such initiatives is intimately linked to the fiscal and monetary conditions expected by mobile investors and can be interpreted as an intensified phase of ‘constitutionalist’ reforms designed to homogenise and automate economic management in a world of liberalised org.ucd.idm.oclc.org/10.1177%2F1368431018786379.

Conclusion

• Europe is experiencing the conflating impact of ideological and politico-economic forces that are anti-solidarity in the strong normative and affective sense of that term.
• This is compounded by the ‘winner takes all mentality’ of neoliberal capitalism that propels the upper classes and the aspiring middle classes to discredit forms of solidarity that are universalistic and affectively endorsed.
• They often incorporate unarticulated assumptions as to the nature of the human person that impact on how they interpret findings and frame theories (Mooney 2014: 21).
• Among these unexplored presuppositions is the one that modernity’s human relationships are atomised and hierarchical, with self-interest being asserted as the fundamental principle governing contemporary human relations (Jeffries 2014).

Figures

Figure 1 Four Expressions of Solidarity within Capitalism

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Title Affective and calculative solidarity: the impact of individualism and neoliberal capitalism
Authors(s) Lynch, Kathleen; Kalaitzake, Manolis
Publication date 2018-07-25
Publication information European Journal of Social Theory, :
Publisher Sage
Item record/more information http://hdl.handle.net/10197/9557
Publisher's statement Lynch, K., Kalaitzake, M.Affective and calculative solidarity: the impact of individualism and
neoliberal capitalism. European Journal of Social Theory (Journal Volume Number and
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Lync, Kathleen and Kalaitzake, Manolis (2018) Affective and Calculative Solidarity: The impact of
Individualism and Neoliberal Capitalism, European Journal of Social Theory, https://doi-
org.ucd.idm.oclc.org/10.1177%2F1368431018786379
Pre-publication version
1
Affective and Calculative Solidarity:
The impact of Individualism and Neoliberal Capitalism
The research SOLIDUS leading to these results received funding from the H2020 Programme of the
European Commission under Grant Agreement n° 649489.
Abstract
This paper examines the ways in which the self-responsibilised individualism underpinning
contemporary concepts of the ideal European citizen on the one hand (Frericks 2014), and
the inequalities and anti-democratic politics that characterises contemporary neoliberal
capitalism on the other, are co-constituent elements in creating an antipathy to forms of
solidarity that are affective as opposed to calculative. The active citizenship framework lacks
a full appreciation of the interdependency of the human condition and is antithetical to
universalistic, affectively-led forms of solidarity. The deep relationality that is endemic to
both social production and reproduction, and that impels an affective, morally-led form of
solidarity needs to be recognised academically and intellectually, and politically sustained, if
we are to move beyond a narrow calculative self-interested vision of solidarity in Europe.
Key words: self-responsibilisation, individualism, neoliberal capitalism, affective solidarity,
calculative solidarity
___________
In normative terms, solidarity is a macro-level expression of collective caring, a politicized
form of love. It involves the regulation of desires and is a deeply emotional, moral and
personal matter (Boltanski 2012: 109-110). Given its ontological origins in nurturing and
supporting vulnerable others, solidarity is closely aligned with secondary forms of caring (as
expressed through publicly supported health, education and welfare programmes), and with

Lync, Kathleen and Kalaitzake, Manolis (2018) Affective and Calculative Solidarity: The impact of
Individualism and Neoliberal Capitalism, European Journal of Social Theory, https://doi-
org.ucd.idm.oclc.org/10.1177%2F1368431018786379
Pre-publication version
2
primary care relations within families, friendships and households (Author 1 2007). People
are relational and ethical, as well as calculative (Archer 2000; Midgley 1991). As living to be
with and for others plays an important role in the structuration of social life (Vandenberghe
2018) it is a matter of political import. Its political salience is evident in the way love-as-
solidarity finds political expression, even among those who are most oppressed (Hardt and
Negri, 2009: 179-180). Given its embeddedness in social life, the commitment and capacity
to collectively nurture and contribute to the welfare of others, can, however, be both
culturally and politico-economically fostered or undermined (Author 1 et al., 2009; Crean
2018).
This paper analyses how contemporary cultural forms of individualism and the political
economy of neoliberal capitalism co-join to have a profound impact on the forms of
solidarity that are being embedded in Europe. At the macro-political level, neoliberalism
endorses a form of entrepreneurial individualism which is antithetical to solidarity, not least
due to the ways it promotes inequality. Responsibilised individualism is not solely a product
of neoliberalism however, it has deep roots in liberalism and in particular strands of
Christian thought. It is the deep interpellation between these traditions that make it more
unassailable than it first appears. The political economic forces of neoliberalism and the
cultural forces of responsibilised individualism align to promote particularistic welfare
regimes that are strongly calculative while delimiting commitment to universalistic welfare
systems that are based on more affective normative dispositions.
The paper opens with a brief analysis of the policy and practice of solidarity in the European
Union; it then examines different perspectives on solidarity and distinguishes between
calculative and more affectively-driven universalistic forms of solidarity. The paper
illustrates how both religious and secular intellectual traditions promote a self-
responsibilised interpretation of solidarity that is easily aligned with neoliberalism.
As the move towards responsibilised individualism is not simply a by-product of cultural
processes, the following section focuses on how the political economy of neoliberal
capitalism undermines all but the weakest forms of solidarity. In particular, it shows how

Lync, Kathleen and Kalaitzake, Manolis (2018) Affective and Calculative Solidarity: The impact of
Individualism and Neoliberal Capitalism, European Journal of Social Theory, https://doi-
org.ucd.idm.oclc.org/10.1177%2F1368431018786379
Pre-publication version
3
three processes that are endemic to neoliberalism, namely, individualisation,
inegalitarianism and anti-democratic practices, promulgate the responsibilised individualism
and weak forms of calculative solidarity that are increasingly popular in Europe today
(Frericks 2014; Mau 2015; Van Gerven and Osssewaarde 2012).
The paper closes by discussing the importance of moving outside liberal (and neoliberal)
models of the human person that are implicit in much of the social scientific analysis of the
politics of solidarity and social change (Alexander 2014; Jeffries 2014). By default, if not by
design, these cognitive frames peripheralise the analysis of morally-led political activism
that could promote affective as opposed to narrow calculative forms of solidarity.
Solidarity in Europe
Solidarity is a widely invoked value in European politics (Juncker, Tusk, Dijsselbloem, Draghi
and Schulz 2017). It is an over-arching principle underpinning the framing of all the major
Treaties of the European Union from its inception in 1951, including the Single European Act
(1986), the Maastricht Treaty (1992) and the Treaty of Lisbon (2006). In the latter case it is
framed as a value binding together both citizens and member states (Sangiovanni 2013).
Solidarity is not just a generalized principle of moral guidance as it also has ‘legal
substantiations in EU primary law which can be made effective in court proceedings’ (Kotzur
2017: 44). The fact that Chapter IV of The Charter of Basic Rights, approved in Nice in 2001,
is titled ‘Solidarity’, and that is has subsequently established individual and collective rights
in the labour market, and rights to different forms of social protection, indicates that
solidarity has legal substance at EU level.
However, there is no agreed understanding of the concept within Europe: it may refer to
solidarity within and/or between nation states, or it may be used prescriptively to
encourage social solidarity, when solidarity may be absent or failing. It is also used
analytically to distinguish the boundaries of solidarity, to identify who is included or
excluded (Takle 2018). While solidarity is often referenced with respect to redistribution in

Lync, Kathleen and Kalaitzake, Manolis (2018) Affective and Calculative Solidarity: The impact of
Individualism and Neoliberal Capitalism, European Journal of Social Theory, https://doi-
org.ucd.idm.oclc.org/10.1177%2F1368431018786379
Pre-publication version
4
welfare terms (Baldwin 1990), especially in the European Union (Eriksen 2017), it is also
used to refer to forms of recognition (Kymlicka 2015). Stjerno (2015: 13) claims that, within
the EU, the concept of solidarity is an ideological hybrid that is stretched and strained to
meet the demands of different political situations. It is used instrumentally for political
purposes but has neither been clearly defined nor realised in practice within the European
Union (Grimmel 2017).
Politics and Practice: Limits to Solidarity in Europe
The limitations of the fluid and flexible framing of solidarity in EU law was exposed during
both the financial and refugee crises when the ‘self-interest’ of member states became
apparent (Kotzur 2017: 44). While leaders of the European Union claimed that Europe
showed solidarity with periphery countries of the Eurozone during the financial crisis, the
imposition of austerity as a result of bailout agreements disproved this (De Grauwe 2013).
The appropriate solutions to the crisis required supranational co-ordination and cross-
national collaboration; in short, pan-European solidarity (Wolf 2010). Nevertheless, the EU
response to this unfolding sovereign debt crisis was a largely individualized, nation-state
centered one; the crisis was interpreted as a product of periphery state profligacy,
irresponsible national management, and declining competitiveness. Economically powerful
nation states conceived of financial assistance in terms of ‘moral hazard’, making bailout
funds available on condition that debtor countries immediately undertook fiscal contraction
and structural reforms (i.e. liberalization and privatization across markets).
i
When the ECB did occasionally intervene to protect states in financial difficulty, it did so
only on condition that austerity targets were agreed and structural reform commitments
were firmly locked in (Henning 2017). Other supranational reforms, broadly beneficial to the
cause of intra-European national solidarity, such as establishing a Banking Union and
structural banking reforms have been impeded by individualized national interests and
concerns (Merler and Wolff 2014).