Until recently, European solidarity was in high demand but low supply: while the increasingly interconnected nature of European crises could make the case for a supranational safety-net, public recalcitrance hindered political commitment towards more cross-border solidarity, for instance during the Great Recession and the Mediterranean basin refugee influx in 2015. Since then, Europe underwent two pivotal moments with major implications to European solidarity: COVID-19 and the Ukraine invasion. These saw a boost in diffuse political support to the EU; simultaneously, the EU sought to harbour the European community from these ‘common’ crises via a quick and unprecedented expansion of EU-led crisis-management instruments, particularly concerning fiscal solidarity, refugee integration and energy resilience. Using original survey data on European solidarity, collected in 16 EU countries from 2018 to 2023, we explore how these crises have shaped Europeans’ relation with the EU as the enabler of a Europe-wide solidaristic safety-net. Our argument is that exogenous shocks, such as pandemics and war, change the nature of public support for European policymaking as citizens look to the supranational level for insurance against common threats and redress against adversity. Secondly, we contend that the willingness to pool resources in order to harbour the European community from adversity reflects an engagement with the European polity; as such, the ‘bonding’ dimension of the European polity was, we argue, fundamentally affected by new common public needs stemming from these exogenous challenges.