Will sovereignism trump solidarity? How raising walls might undermine redistributive policies in times of crisis

This article focuses on how increasingly pervasive sovereignist claims to restore greater national control are likely to undermine support for solidarity measures both within and across European countries. The key argument, in fact, is that solidarity inevitably implies constraints to national sovereignty (Hayward and Wurzel 2012); consequently, they come to grips with claims for the defence of the primacy of national politics. This research question becomes particularly salient since, nowadays, the contrast between defenders of national sovereignty and proponents of an integrated, supranational system is becoming one of the main sources of polarisation in the current political debate (Habermas 2015). Accordingly, it is crucial to investigate how the diffusion of these attitudes is likely to influence public support for key policies to be adopted in times of crisis. Centred on the appeal to the re-appropriation of national sovereignty, the political phenomenon of sovereignism is often equated to nationalism. However, the glue of the nationalist attitude is the belief in the existence of a collective identity, which unites those who feel to belong to a specific territory. In this respect, nationalism is about who we are. Rather, when we speak of contemporary sovereignism, the real glue seems to be represented by who we are not. It is in fact a defensive claim about the re-appropriation of some forms of sovereignty, illegitimately detained by a hostile, threatening “other”. However, such oppositional framing seems to be the only shared feature of sovereignist actors and supporters. Besides this common perspective, the peculiarity of the “take back control” claim is that, while sharing the same oppositional framing, it has not the same meaning for all its advocates. The “take back control” claim might thus be referred, for instance, to the re-appropriation of economic sovereignty, or to the reassertion of cultural sovereignty, which is threatened by those pushing at the borders. But how can these different conceptions of redeemed sovereignty be linked to the core value of European solidarity among member states, as enshrined in the EU Treaties? The core hypothesis is that people supporting sovereignist claims are likely to show lower support for measures burden-sharing. However, not all sovereignist claims exert the same exclusionary effect. Accordingly, we expect that support for exclusionary, identitarian sovereignist claims would lead to a more radical rejection of solidarity than identification with inclusive, economically-driven, sovereignist claims.