Europe's Crisis: Reconsidering Solidarity with Leela Gandhi and Judith Butler

Giovanna Covi’s essay examines the new forms of solidarity paving a way out of a political standstill. For Covi, solidarity is effective when it is rooted in acts of relationality that fight against gender, racial, ethnic and religious divisions proliferated by the growing unevenness in Europe across its borders. Europe’s incapacity to respond to the humanitarian crisis met at its borders represents the limit of its humanitarian and humanistic heritage formed as a kind of solidarity against war and totalitarianism in Europe but not necessarily as a politics of solidarity for the human and her collectivity, wherever this arises or from wherever it arrives. This limit accounts for Europe’s capacity to close its borders and shut its gates in the name of security and the humanism it has secured for itself. A humanism of closed doors to humanity and a hospitality that becomes a politics of hostility by way of safeguarding its gifts have become the tokens of European politics in the present; rather than saving Europe, though, such practices contribute to the rise of anti-European sentiment and politics. The essay argues that theories articulated by Leela Gandhi and by Judith Butler provide a way out of the paralysis in which the present European conundrum clearly reveals the roots of its own fragility —the incapacity to conjugate culture and politics with economics. On the contrary, feminist thinking such as that variously proposed by Gandhi and Butler allow us to envision the possibilitty to redefine solidarity and overcome the present political and cultural empasse.