4.2 “With Friends Like That”: When Solidarity Makes Things Worse

On a first, pragmatic, and instrumental level, solidarity might simply complicate the situation of those who are its intended beneficiaries. The Japanese case for refusing aid after Kobe, for example, was that many Western medicines sent to the country were dosed inadequately. Often well-meaning aid will face obstacles simply because it is redundant with the resources of the receiving country and requires significant administrative resources in times of crisis to simply manage. Evidently, solidarity should not make things worse, and states are justified in limiting its incidence when it does.

More problematically, solidarity may displace local leadership, crowding out home grown political movements by showering them with solicitude, or substituting to their own language of emancipation one elaborated elsewhere and for different circumstances. Hence, Lina Alsaafin points out how the West’s praising of non-violent tactics in Palestine also tends to displace Palestinian self-determination, including when it comes to means.Footnote ¹⁷ In that context, Richard Falk has even acknowledged occasionally himself “being unwittingly paternalistic, if not complicit with an unhealthy ‘tyranny of the stranger’.”Footnote ¹⁸ Similarly, Emi Koyama has expressed concern about US activist claims of being the “voice of the voiceless” when a loud community of LGBT activists exists in Uganda.Footnote ¹⁹

Even when solidarity is broadly felt to be going in the right direction, the particular means used may be denounced as ultimately not helping local constituencies. For example, it has been pointed out that sanctions against Iran in the wake of the 2022 wave of protests “have less in common with liberal solidarity and more in common with siege starvation tactics as old as war,” essentially asphyxiating the economy and harming local populations.Footnote ²⁰ Concern has also been expressed that calls for sanctions to punish Uganda’s LGBT policies “could lead to the collapse of social order in a country like Uganda, endangering many more lives of LGBT Ugandans than the legislation itself would.”Footnote ²¹ Perverse effects abound in this context, and cannot be redeemed merely by pointing to loose good intentions.

Moreover, even when transnational solidarity is genuine and otherwise potentially helpful, its very existence may make it easy for a regime to portray groups as foreign manipulated (along with the possibility that, of course, they occasionally are). This vulnerability to the accusation that one is a “foreign stooge” may then designate one for further repression. The US State Department, for example, has long supported pro-democracy groups in and outside Iran, notably by training them abroad. This “solidarity” with those fighting against the Iranian regime has frequently been denounced by Iranian authorities as part of an effort to cause “anarchy and domestic unrest” in ways that have caused “increased public anger and hatred against America,”Footnote ²² in ways that at least problematize its overall usefulness to the very actors it is supposed to support. Similarly, Yoweri Museveni of Uganda has accused civil society organizations of being “internal saboteurs, acting on behalf of foreign interests.”Footnote ²³ President Putin has long made the claim that “foreign hands” are involved in protests and opposition to the central pillar of his dictatorship,Footnote ²⁴ as has President Lukashenko of Byelorussia.Footnote ²⁵ Indeed, governments themselves may be vulnerable to the accusation that they are merely tools of foreign powers as a result of the conspicuous “solidarity” of allies. This was the case of the last Shah of Iran, who quite incautiously blamed the British and the Americans for decisions he had himself taken, leaving his own prestige and credibility seriously weakened.Footnote ²⁶ Such accusations have resurfaced frequently in the case of Afghanistan, Iraq, and others, where being seen as being on the receiving end of solidarity can in fact weaken rather than strengthen governments.

It matters little in this context whether claims about the nefarious dimensions of solidarity are true. The point is that foreign solidarity can be a mixed blessing for dissidents in particular, creating acute dilemmas and possibly the need to dissociate themselves from those in solidarity with them. One Russian law (itself inspired by an older, similar US law), for example, requires anyone who receives “support” from or is under “influence” from outside Russia to register and declare themselves as “foreign agents.” Effectively, NGOs are asked to “out” themselves as externally compromised merely as a result of being recipients of foreign solidarity. The law has been repeatedly expanded to cover not just organizations engaged in “political activity” but also those receiving any amount of foreign funding toward publication. Some, such as Russia’s Committee against Torture or Dynasty Foundation (a major science and education fund), have dissolved themselves rather than operate under the law. In other words, they have stood by the notion that their willingness to be the beneficiaries of Western solidarity should not lead to their being sanctioned at home, but at the cost of their very existence: the victims, in a sense, of solidarity with them.

Of course, in terms of principles, the case for solidarity being unwelcome merely because it upsets authoritarian states can be a relatively weak one. On some level, the direct responsibility for banning NGOs and marginalizing dissidents is clearly the home state’s, not that of their foreign funders; but at the very least states or constituencies who profess solidarity with others should be wary of how it might make those they claim to support appear. The question is nonetheless why certain forms of solidarity might be justifiably unwelcome above and beyond states’ more or less opportunistic motives for criticizing them. Indeed, the problem is made acute by the fact that, although the Kremlin’s paranoia about civil society with or without foreign links is well known for example, it is not as if some Western NGOs do not, indeed, participate in the projection of forms of soft power and possibly more. Solidarity must also be seen in light of a long tradition of practices of foreign interference that are no less real simply because they can also be opportunistically exaggerated.

4.3 “Yes, Just Not from You”: The Intuitu Personae of Solidarity

A second way in which solidarity might be understood to be unwelcome, then, is when emanating from the “wrong” source. This goes against the cosmopolitan idea that all solidarities are equal and that solidarity is all the more welcome that it comes from a position of abstract disinterestedness. Quite what that space of cosmopolitan impartiality would be and how it may be occupied is perennially unclear (there is always some pre-existing pattern of relations that directs solidarity in some direction rather than others, otherwise solidarity is both random and bland). More importantly, solidarity often seems to be justifiably based on a range of affinities that do not so much belie its universalist impulse as they ground it in the reality of ongoing social relations.Footnote ²⁷ But this means that, if there is to be a solidarity based on affinities, then there must also be forms of solidarity that miss the mark precisely because they are not based on such affinities. Here the problem is not so much that the solidarity might be de facto unhelpful but that the particular political relationality it suggests is problematic.

One can conceive of a number of such forms of unwelcome solidarity in the international realm. A typical case is provided by unwelcome offers in the context of humanitarian catastrophes. For example, Israel made offers of humanitarian assistance to Lebanon after the Beirut blast, or to Iraq and Iran after earthquakes there, as did China to Taiwan after an earthquake. The “receiving” states in these cases nonetheless expressed ambivalence or declined on the basis that this particular solidarity was suspicious, coming as it did from a perceived enemy.Footnote ²⁸ More recently, the citizens of Kherson are said to have refused humanitarian aid from occupying Russian troops.Footnote ²⁹ The problem is not that Israeli humanitarian aid in Iran or Russian aid in Ukraine is objectively problematic (as in Section 4.2), but that the recipient of solidarity objects to its source as such and the sort of political effect it is being put to.

The point here is merely that there is an element of intuitu personae involved in solidarity: that we do not value all solidarity equally and may indeed have reasons to reject some of its expressions based on who it comes from. Agents are not simply generally in want of abstract solidarity; they are, if anything, open to receiving solidarity from particular constituencies as opposed to others. Some manifestations of solidarity may seem as if they have merely as their goal a distraction from one’s own participation in oppression and a sort of free riding on the struggles of others.Footnote ³⁰ Solidarity with a people one has otherwise contributed to impoverish or alienate will sound hollow. Even in the context of diasporas, support from certain groups may appear inimical to struggles fought at home. For example, there has been criticism of nationalist and imperial Iranian groups showing up at protests to support the women’s movement in Iran as essentially substituting their own patriarchal and regressive policies to those of other groups.Footnote ³¹

More ontologically, solidarity aspires to express a kind of horizontal equality to the “other” which may be performatively problematic. It seems to say “we are in this together.” It is, on the one hand, the opposite of solicitousness, pity, paternalism, or of a merely humanitarian attitude. So, to accept solidarity – that is, to accept that one is the object of someone else’s solidarity – is to accept that one is indeed in some crucial respect in unison with those who profess their solidarity toward oneself. By contrast, solidarity may feel misplaced when it comes from an enemy, or a dominant party that cannot be expected to feel what one is going through or, worse, that displaces one’s own agency under the guise of expressing sympathy with one’s plight or seeks to affirm a form of superiority.

Unwelcome solidarity of that kind, then, is a solidarity that, in its more or less wholesome embrace, seeks to artificially or arbitrarily dissolve the distinction between “us” and “them.” It is obnoxious because it hints at – it affirms, in fact – a commonality of fate that may not, in fact, exist, or only exists artificially through the gesture of solidarity that seeks to construct it (at least, it is precisely the question whether one wants to be the recipient of solidarity by this “other”). Rather than affirming a common reciprocal bond between equals, then, it may merely reinstate the bondage of a master–slave relationship. To refuse this kind of solidarity, then, is the truly emancipatory gesture because it calls the bluff on the equal value of all forms of solidarity and the wholesomeness of that particular embrace.

Paradoxically, this may particularly be the case of a certain type of bland universalist solidarity of the sort loosely associated with cosmopolitanism and international law, that is, a solidarity that is crushing in its hegemony because of its lack of any particular intuitu personae. Consider, for example, the recurrence of appeals to a radical commonality of fate expressed in the “Nous sommes tous américains” (after 9/11), “Je suis Charlie,” “We are all Palestinians,” or “We are all Ukrainians.” Such slogans “express empathy, outrage, and horror by subsuming ourselves in victims’ identities.”Footnote ³² They may, as such, be both appealing in their radicality but also invasive, effectively displacing the identity of the victim or claiming some kind of absolution from the harms suffered by others, sometimes in part through “our” fault. They may highlight the construction of a particular privilege – the privilege to even be in a position of solidarity – and the normative significance, on the other hand, of the ability to refuse solidarity as a form of amalgamation.

Consider, ad absurdum, what our reaction would be to “We are all black” for example or “We are all women” as a reaction to the BLM and MeToo movements, respectively, expressed by non-black persons and men. Even if well-intended, as responses to the legacies of slavery or misogyny, these would arguably not remotely pass as a form of (welcome) solidarity. They would immediately be taken down as a form of hegemonic appropriation by those who cannot possibly fully inhabit what it means to be a victim in this context. The problem is not with solidarity in itself, but a radically abstract solidarity that erases all sense of difference. In a sense, those claiming solidarity are implicitly claiming a symbolic “out” from what is, problematically, their lot. This is partly because their solidarity inter se has historically been the problem: one cannot easily undo that in-group solidarity by rhetorically manifesting an out-group one. Paradoxically, victim groups may need the dominant “in their place,” as expressing at least some kind of notional in-group solidary responsibility for what they stand for.

The point, then, is not so much that such statements are facile, but that they can provide an all-too-convenient escape hatch from what “we” actually are by violently erasing the distinction between giver and recipient of solidarity. To live out one’s solidarity with victims may be a way to not confront one’s complicity with their oppression, or at least the considerable differences in vulnerability to harm even in the process of “solidarizing.” Hence, it has been argued that, in the foreign Palestine activist community, the “equalization of American and Palestinian suffering” leads to a situation where “expressions of responsibility are trumped, effaced, and metamorphosed in such a way as to obstruct the very politics for which solidarity was offered in the first place,”Footnote ³³ leaving those engaged in solidarity strangely “off the hook.”Footnote ³⁴ As argued by Sophia Stamatopoulou-Robbins, “American citizens, whose government is the most vehemently and uncritically supportive of Israeli policies, are thus extracted from their own political contexts; that is, they are detached from the taxes, votes, and purchases that structure their complicity to the injustices they observe.”Footnote ³⁵ Similarly, prominent European women cutting their hair in solidarity with Iranian women has been decried as unhelpful to the extent that these same women have previously stayed mum when it comes to their own countries’ prohibition of the Islamic veil.Footnote ³⁶

On some level, the excess of solidarity might constitute a form of “passing,” a type of solidarity that usurps not only the agency but the very identity of those it professes to support. One extreme case is Rachel Dolezal, the white woman who infamously passed as black whilst being specifically involved in the politics of black resistance as president of the NAACP in Spokane, Washington.Footnote ³⁷ Hers was, therefore, an appropriation not only of blackness but specifically of black victimhood. Sally Munt, speaking of the omnipresence of the argumentum ad misericordiam in the media, hints that she “can well imagine how a shamed young personality yearning to connect might have had trouble with the entitlement of white privilege, and fly toward the phantasmic glow of black solidarity.”Footnote ³⁸ After all, “Vicarious observation of, or participation in, rituals of trauma or loss can give a frisson of excitement ….”Footnote ³⁹ Notwithstanding, Dolezal was widely excoriated for pushing notions of solidarity so far as to operate a kind of perverted substitution of victimhood.Footnote ⁴⁰

This connects to debates that have emerged in South Africa over the legacy of Steve Biko and his understanding of blackness as a category of political conscience rather than a biological reality. Expounding on some of the ambiguities of Biko’s categorizations, Xolela Mangcu has argued that, just as blacks can “pass” as whites, the converse was true in South Africa where “black” came to encompass at least non-whites participating in the black struggle.Footnote ⁴¹ Responding to that piece, Keolebogile Mbebe has countered that “because white people cannot experience the alienation that non-white people do, they cannot attain Black Consciousness and, thus, cannot be Politically Black.”Footnote ⁴² In particular, whites in solidarity with blacks cannot experience either the material or mental components of discrimination: their solidarity is useful, but it cannot fundamentally erase differences of experience. This suggests limits to a sort of solidarity that does not know its place and which, in its exuberance, almost displaces the very possibility of solidarity.

Thus, in the terms of Steve Biko, “no white person can escape being part of the oppressor camp,”Footnote ⁴³ and “total identification with an oppressed group in a system that forces one group to enjoy privilege and to live on the sweat of another, is impossible.”Footnote ⁴⁴ That ontology simply cannot be renounced, and solidarity that ignores it is mere kitsch. For Howarth, white allyship that identifies as black deprives the black consciousness movement of “a clear racial frontier around which oppositional identity could be forged.”Footnote ⁴⁵

In turn, this connects to a significant literature on the promise and pitfalls of “allyship” in social movements. The old labor workers’ idea that “an injury to one is an injury to all,” has been reappraised in light of particularly US social and racial struggles and the anxiety that white solidarity will result in white centering, thus problematically reinscribing racial domination.Footnote ⁴⁶ In one extreme scenario, as outlined by Scott Morgensen, the contrite settler subject becomes the inheritor of indigeneity.Footnote ⁴⁷ Amidst criticism of the “ally industrial complex,” one indigenous activist deplores the inability or unwillingness to follow through with the ultimate consequences of one’s allyship:

Returning to international relations and law, then, “solidarity” may be unwelcome because it comes from a constituency that one does not wish to receive solidarity from, either because of its perceived hostility (solidarity is hypocritical) or because of its sheer impossibility (solidarity is in bad faith) or because it destroys a meaningful distinction between recipient and giver (solidarity dissolves its conditions of possibility).

On a first level, one may perceive expressions of solidarity as claiming an equality that is simply not there, whose implicit assertion does violence to the actual inequality that undergirds it and that is used, in fact, to cynically raise the profile of the provider of solidarity at the expense of the receiver. Hence, the Israeli government reportedly jumped to the conclusion that Iran and Iraq had refused its offer of humanitarian assistance after the earthquake that shook both countries. As such, those countries were said to have shown “their true face” (even though a subsequent Haaretz investigation suggested the offer had, in fact, never been received).Footnote ⁴⁹ Consider the following statement by Netanyahu as an example of a kind of “solidarity” that thrives on cosmopolitan abstractions to, effectively, make a political point about national superiority:

What one witnesses here is, then, in all likelihood an effort to disparage the Iranian and Iraqi regimes under the guise of bringing assistance to their populations – a sort of cosmopolitan anti-politics that feigns to not understand why, given conditions of enmity between parties, grandiose but vacuous professions of solidarity might be unwelcome. The offer may even have been made in the sure knowledge that it would be rejected. Of course, it remains possible that offers of aid (as in South Korea’s offers of humanitarian aid to North Korea or Israel’s more successful offer to Turkey) are also a first salvo in a policy of détente, but the point is that the offeror of solidarity in such a scenario “wins” either way by getting to frame the relationship: either solidarity is accepted and the generosity of the donor is recognized; or solidarity is somehow imposed and the distinctness of the recipient is denied; or solidarity is rejected and the receiver can be blamed.

Paradoxically, the more abstract and universalist the solidarity, the more it incurs the suspicion of artificiality, whereas a solidarity grounded in the idiosyncratic affinities of amity and kinship may at least lay a better claim to genuineness. For example, the “universalist” solidarity with the Venezuelan victims of Maduro supposedly at stake in the inter-state (Argentina, Canada, Colombia, Chile, Paraguay, and Peru) referral of Venezuela to the ICC is suspicious because it is difficult to disentangle from the anti-Bolivarian politics of the Lima group. The dominant narrative of solidarity in international law is often too committed to this particular universalist narrative – erga omnes obligations somehow pushing states to intervene on behalf of others for seemingly no other reason than protecting the core values of the system – to provide a compelling account of what solidarity actually stands for. Having failed to provide a convincing case of why solidarity would not be welcome, it will fail to provide an understanding of circumstances where it would.

The critique of “allyship” in the activist realm may, moreover, provide a powerful prism to criticize international solidarity posturing that is simultaneously wholly complicit in what it denounces. Consider, for example, development aid or climate mitigation understood as forms of Western “solidarity” with the Global South. What this solidarity framing eludes is the extent to which the West is merely remedying manifestations of its own ongoing privilege as well as continuing age-old patterns of domination.Footnote ⁵¹ This suspicion touches even states, such as the Nordic countries, that have a more distant historical relationship to colonization but whose claim to “exceptionalism” rooted in solidarity with the third World and “well-meaning whiteness” is belied by their complicity in post-colonial continuities.Footnote ⁵² It has led calls for challenging the “anti-politics of humanitarianism” in the Palestinian context, as a solidarity that casts Israeli occupation as a mere externality under the guise of supporting Palestinian development.Footnote ⁵³ In the worst case, solidarity becomes a sort of gaslighting, all the more likely to be voiced that it is, at heart, an empty promise.

4.4 “Thanks, But No Thanks”: On Burdens of Gratitude

The argument for unwelcome solidarity taken from the fact that it contradicts an underlying intuitu personae in at least some cases still leaves a large field of possibilities for welcome solidarity. Why might solidarity, even when it does not emanate from the “wrong” party, still be, in some sense, unwelcome? Or, relatedly, how one might further understand and even justify a refusal of solidarity that might objectively benefit one’s people merely on the grounds that it comes from the wrong party? One lead is here that the problem of solidarity is not (or not just) its source, but its fundamental mode of operation, specifically the fact that solidarity is not as generous or, strictly speaking, “free” as it seems.

Marcel Mauss’s theory of the potlatch has long underscored the centrality of an economy of giving to social solidarity. In particular, Mauss emphasized that the gift is never entirely free (even though it is disinterested), but that it conditions a series of reciprocal exchanges. The gift engages the honor of the receiver, obliging him to reciprocate, sooner or later (the mechanisms of the don/contre-don). The logic of the gift, then, is said to structure relations in between the models of the interest-driven market and what might be forms of pure altruism. The “essence of the gift,” it has been said, “[is] that it [is] not a gift.”Footnote ⁵⁴ To the extent that the gift is interested, it is in creating and sustaining a relation between donor and receiver in the form of a social bond.

In Maussian anthropology, the solidarity of the gift is primarily understood as a positive function, something that unites societies over time beyond interest calculation. But, lurking beneath the theory, is also a hint of solidarity’s dark side. Solidarity, as a form of gift that obliges those who receive it, may be socially awkward, especially when the gift cannot be reciprocated. One is effectively made into the donor’s debtor, obliged by their “noblesse oblige.” The non-reciprocated or non-reciprocable gift, then, may be a way of exercising power over the receiver in a context where “the impoverishment of the ability to reciprocate impinges on the nature of receiving and impedes the relationship of mutuality that The Gift seeks to foster.”Footnote ⁵⁵ Indeed, “Charity is still wounding for him who has accepted it, and the whole tendency of our morality is to strive to do away with the unconscious and injurious patronage of the rich almsgiver. The invitation must be returned, just as ‘courtesies’ must.”Footnote ⁵⁶

As Mauss put it, then, “To give is to show one’s superiority, to be more, or to be higher in rank, magister. To accept without giving in return, or without giving more back, is to become client and servant, to become small, to fall lower (minister).”Footnote ⁵⁷

Moreover, we have no reason to think that the donor does not know this and that the gift does not come with the more or less deliberate “strings attached” of faux-solidarity, a solidarity proffered only to symbolically humiliate the receiver and enhance the prestige of the donor. But the point is that, even if the donor does not know this, the donor’s “gift” of solidarity obliges: the theory is not a theory of the agency of giving but of the socially structuring role of the gift. Thus, it is that the political economy of the gift can be understood, among other things, as central to the constitution of colonization and the creation of bonds of loyalty between ruler and subject.Footnote ⁵⁸

Amidst a resurgence of interest in Mauss’s ideas when it comes to international relationsFootnote ⁵⁹ arguably paved by Mauss’s own interest in internationalism,Footnote ⁶⁰ the idea of the inter-temporal rough reciprocity of the gift as a basis of international social life aligns neatly with ideas about international law that have sought to shun both the narrow instrumentalism of interest-driven theories and the normativism of the natural law tradition. As if, perhaps, habitual compliance with international law had less to do with the legally binding character of norms than the way in which they structure, over time, processes of giving and counter-giving.

Certainly, ideas about giving and solidarity raise questions about the nature of international society and the extent to which it can sustain conditions of “generalized reciprocity” over time; that is, paradoxically, conditions under which the underlying demand for reciprocity can be temporarily suspended or diffused (i.e. in that one is not constantly asking for an immediate quid pro quo to any donation). In that respect, Maussian thinking invites us to move beyond the contractual framework of international law to emphasize the role of solidarity in the constitution of international society, not just as bilateral exchange but as sustaining a veritable global economy of multilateralism.Footnote ⁶¹

Moreover, Mauss’s ideas can also help explain the sort of gift-giving “above and beyond” the mere solidarity of international law, a formal solidarity of obligation often relying on moribund expressions of will rather than the actualization of empathy that is at the heart of the French sociologist’s theory. There is no doubt that gift giving above and beyond legal obligations can provide a sometimes-tenuous basis for ongoing social bonds, even in conditions of adversariousness. For example, it has been contended that the humanitarian aid given by Israel to Syrians in the Al-Qunaytirah region between 2012 and 2018 had created openings for “friendly” relationships.Footnote ⁶² Similarly, Volker Heins and Christine Unrau have brought attention to the importance of the kind of transnational solidarity expressed by ordinary Germans making “gifts” to refugees.Footnote ⁶³ In such cases, fragile bridges can be built between communities.

Having said that, the question for our purposes is how unilateral offers of gift might be specifically unwelcome on Maussian grounds. Even though Maussian theory can provide keys to understand the sustenance of international order despite the profoundly agonistic nature of the system,Footnote ⁶⁴ it can also occasionally shed light on how the politics of solidarity might also turn out to be a politics of subjugation. It is particularly in the context of international aid assistance that the idea of the gift has been put to work, including to show some of the gift’s ambiguities.Footnote ⁶⁵ Indeed, the fraught, tense operation of the international system suggests a situation in which obligations of reciprocating cannot be put off for very long, notwithstanding the seeming gratuity of solidarity.

Unrequited giving, in particular, has long been identified as a potential key to deeply asymmetric relationships despite or even because of its very liberality. Georges Bataille, for example, argued that the Marshall Plan was a form of gigantic potlatch in which the United States sacrificed national resources in order to increase their prestige in Europe and humiliate the Soviet Union.Footnote ⁶⁶ This left the receiver, Europe, strangely out of the picture, something that Wilton Dillon, an American anthropologist, sought to correct by highlighting the consequences of “downward giving” on Europe, notably in terms of expectations of very real “gratitude, affection, anti-Communist votes, and permission to build military installations and station troops.”Footnote ⁶⁷ Dillon accounted for the fact that the Marshall Plan resulted in “hostility toward their protector-benefactors” and anti-Americanism rather than gratefulness based on the inability of the French to pay back the gifts and thus assert their standing as equals.Footnote ⁶⁸

It also resulted in a quixotic quest for counter-gifts and a pursuit of restored French grandeur, as visible in the Suez adventure or the search for nuclear weapons as a form of “psychological release” from the tyranny of giving back.Footnote ⁶⁹ Indeed, the sting of the gift is felt with all the more intensity that it coincides in some cases with brusque reversals in fortune. This was the case of Western Europe after the Second World War. It was also evident in “the sudden status of [post-Soviet] societies in the 1990s as recipients of Western aid [and] thus a profound reversal of their self-image as aid givers.”Footnote ⁷⁰ To be a “provider” and to become a “receiver” of solidarity crystallizes the adaptability of the fluxes of solidarity, but it also highlights the risk of brusque déclassement (loss of status).

This suggests that, even in international relations there is always more at stake in solidarity than merely “giving aid.” There is, in fact, no such thing as a free lunch. Solidarity also potentially obliges and those who cannot repay their debt are thereby easily if discreetly subjugated: giving is/as a form of power. This idea is visible, then, in a variety of facets of international life. After the Cold War, the United States had certain expectations that it would get a share of the pie of reconstruction in Eastern Europe, just as both the United States and the Soviet Union had earlier had huge expectations about the gratitude they were owed for liberating Europe. Similarly, President George W. Bush is said to have been obsessed by the need for Iraqi leaders to strongly express their gratitude to the United States for “liberating” the country.Footnote ⁷¹ This has surfaced most dramatically and recently in diplomatic outbursts urging Ukraine to more demonstratively – if nothing else, at this still early stage – express its gratitude to the West for aiding it in its fight against Russia.Footnote ⁷² No doubt the powers that be will come knocking in due course and demand their symbolic due: liberation from Russia will not come at zero cost in terms of independence and ongoing burdens of gratitude, a fact that Ukrainian leaders may belatedly become aware of,Footnote ⁷³ even as some argue that it is the West that increasingly has a huge debt of gratitude to Ukraine.Footnote ⁷⁴

Development assistance has also been analyzed as a classic form of unreciprocated giving. The crucial insight for Tomohisa Hattori, for example, emphasizing the primarily “symbolic” power of the gift, is that “the wide ranging policy objectives attached to foreign aid are secondary to a more basic role of affirming the social relation in which they are extended (which, in this case, describes an underlying condition of inequality).”Footnote ⁷⁵ But that relationship is not one between equals, since it constructs, in the words of Didier Fassin, “those for whom the gift cannot imply a counter-gift, since it is assumed that they can only receive” as “the indebted of the world.”Footnote ⁷⁶

Drawing on Bourdieu, Hattori further conceptualizes foreign aid as “symbolic domination, or a practice that signals and euphemizes social hierarchies.”Footnote ⁷⁷ Specifically, “giving” transforms the donor’s “status in the relationship from the dominant to the generous.” Therefore:

One can detect traces of this, for example, in the context of China’s COVID vaccine diplomacy and the kind of burdens that this liberality has (was meant to?) engendered.Footnote ⁷⁹

The logic of the gift, then, helps understand why states may be ambivalent vis-à-vis ostentatious displays of solidarity, even when these might otherwise be useful or not emanate from the presumptively wrong party. It is not just that receivers are not interested in the kind of ongoing relationship that the gift signifies, it is also that they fear being put in a relationship of subjugation by a solidarity that cannot be reciprocated, except with gratefulness and subservience. Of course, giving back is always a possibility and may sometimes involve merely notional giving, but the obligation is always there and ends up sustaining a relationship of domination and subservience.Footnote ⁸⁰

4.5 Conclusion: Solidarity and the Challenge of Reciprocity

This chapter has sought to stress the salience of the politics of being on the receiving end of solidarity. Where international lawyers have been mostly interested in solidarity as a cohesive agglutinant for the international community at large, it has sought to transcend such abstractions to highlight the praxis of solidarity, drawing on a range of illustrations extending beyond international law. In the process, the chapter has sought to shed light on one particular dimension of the praxis of solidarity, namely the extent to which it may well be unwelcome. Against a perspective focused traditionally on the “supply side” of solidarity, it has insisted on taking seriously the actual “demand” for solidarity. And, contra traditional realism’s suspicion that solidarity is just make-believe, it has foregrounded a wariness with solidarity’s all-too-real actual operation against the background of problematic post-colonial and racialized assumptions.Footnote ⁸¹

In short, the chapter suggests we should be mindful of how invocations of and appeals to solidarity construct both the provider and the recipient of solidarity as part of ongoing social ties. Solidarity does not as much emerge from unproblematic bonds as it seeks to construct them, raising questions about who decides on the perimeters of communities of solidarity. This is particularly the case of international solidarity as something that emerges well beyond the confines of polities understood as the “normal” locus of social solidarity. One should be wary of international lawyers’ tendency to posit solidarity as “already there” and inherent to the international system rather than something that is constantly being constructed and deconstructed (solidarity and un-solidarity). Instead, the chapter has brought attention to “imaginaries of solidarity” or “non-solidarity” activated by social actors themselves.

One thing that the chapter might be seen as underscoring is the importance of willingness to have other parties be in solidarity with oneself. To be invited “into” solidarity may be an important dimension of what makes solidarity worthwhile. For example, Ukrainians have left no doubt that they very much expect international solidarity against Russia. The International Solidarity Movement was founded at the insistence of Palestinian activists themselves who sought foreigners to bear witness to what was happening under occupation. There may also be certain obligations of gracefulness in being the recipient of solidarity, to the extent that this solidarity is not ill-meaning or problematic in some of the ways illustrated in the chapter. For example, the “courage [of some Syrians] to accept Israeli gifts”Footnote ⁸² has been praised as permitting a thin bond to emerge between Israelis and Syrians, in otherwise highly fraught geopolitical circumstances.

By the same token, the chapter suggests caution about legislating duties of solidarity under international law or human rights. This is not merely because an obligation of solidarity trivializes what the performance of solidarity entails; it is also because one should be wary, on the receiving end, of international actors feeling as if they ought to be recipients of solidarity in all cases. To have no choice but to accept whatever solidarity is coming and at what price is an extreme form of dispossession of self. An obligation to be the passive recipient of solidarity would be, paradoxically, the exact opposite of what solidarity entails: the ability to be mutually in solidarity with the other as a recognition of a commonality of fate and a willingness to assume the obligations (including of reciprocal giving) that come with it.

Moreover, positing the absolute value of solidarity could detract from the obligation of those “giving” to critically examine their own giving élan, and how it might be a source of awkwardness in social relations (including through solidarity that is much less of an ostentatious performance and that makes space for reciprocity). In that respect, the chapter was also a contribution to how a politics of allyship might become more of a politics of comradeship, instead of one focusing on one’s own “downward” duty to the less well off.Footnote ⁸³ It raises the question of how “we ‘in solidarity’ might extract ourselves from that cozy, comfortable feeling of solidarity with the ‘victims’” by “rearticulating our relationship to the ‘perpetrators’ while at the same time avoiding self-sainthood.”Footnote ⁸⁴

The emphasis on “unwelcome solidarity,” then, sheds light indirectly on what might be welcome forms of solidarity. Against the relative heavy-handedness of state-to-state solidarity and its sometimes-problematic politics, one way of viewing welcome solidarity might be as that solidarity that transcends borders and expresses radical forms of brother/sister-hood with others facing similar plights. The intimate domain of the inter-personal may be one in which solidarities express themselves in the rawest fashion, without the corrupting leverage of international relations or the reductionist language of international law.Footnote ⁸⁵ However, neither civil society nor public opinions can be expected to be free of the dilemmas that structure all solidarity, including the challenge of remedying obvious asymmetries.Footnote ⁸⁶

Finally, the chapter has brought attention to the need to think of ways in which solidarity might or might not be made to be reciprocal. The value of the gift as an anthropological conceit that might be extended to international relations at large is its flexibility and adaptability. Counter-giving is never about a strict quid-pro-quo, the sort of formal symmetry that only a rather sterile modernist mindset can envisage under international law. It allows for creativity, even cheekiness and irony in the act of subversive counter-giving, as when President Chavez of Venezuela sent oil to poor Americans to heat themselves in the Winter.Footnote ⁸⁷ But it is counter-giving nonetheless, a way of providing opportunities in a relationship that do not excessively burden one party with the curse of always being on the receiving end of the other’s liberality.