Feminists all over Europe embrace solidarity as a form of political dissent – and face systematic repression as a result. Yet, Marta Rawłuszko argues, they continue to resist and offer deeply political and practical alternatives to capitalist and nation-state logics 

Solidarity as a feminist response to overlapping crises 

Solidarity is a powerful instrument of political opposition. And over the past decade, it is one that has moved to the frontline of feminist politics. As European right-wing forces radicalise, and liberal democracies turn weaker and hollow, more and more people face direct state hostility or institutional abandonment. Both exacerbate the precarity of everyday life under neoliberal capitalism. 

Working women seeking abortions, unemployed transgender youth, non-European migrants and refugees, Black citizens and undocumented residents, strikers for Palestine, students without affordable housing, and 'last generations' justifiably scared about the planet’s future… The list of those under attack and in continuous resistance seems only to be growing. At the same time, these groups are easy to demonise for political profit. They are stigmatised as selfish, sick, needy, dependent, dangerous, alien, perverted or socially unfit. 

As the results of the CCINDLE project show, against this backdrop, many feminist communities across Europe share deep disillusionment with formal politics and public institutions. Increasingly, they are embracing solidarity to support those under attack and under threat. This is not merely a skin-deep change in vocabulary. They haven't simply moved from talking about 'gender equality' and 'equal rights' towards 'solidarity' and 'justice'. Rather, it is a conscious political move – an agile riposte to chronic and overlapping crises. These dynamics are reconfiguring relationships between liberal democracies and feminist movements.

In response to overlapping crises, feminists across Europe are embracing solidarity to support communities under attack

The idea of solidarity draws heavily on Black feminist thought and the practice of intersectionality. The latter demands fiercely that feminists admit deep interconnections of gendered, racial, and class oppressions, and that they acknowledge their combined impact on power inequalities among women and within emancipatory movements. The proper recognition of social multiplicity and political interconnectedness of different liberatory struggles promotes solidarity as a strategy of cooperation and political affinity, despite identity differences. 

Everyday practices of feminist solidarity 

Solidarity involves emancipatory cooperation with strangers and political Others. It is about caring for people we do not know, without requiring emotional identification or sound commonalities. It is a direct, emergency response to injustice and threat, intrinsically linked to action. Often, it emerges as an immediate response to injustice: practical, direct, and focused on urgent human needs. It addresses them immediately and in a very tangible way. All of this makes solidarity practices – like feminist activism! – rather unglamorous, down-to-earth, messy, improvised and often uneasy. 

Politicians may, cynically, choose to target different minorities or ignore their continuous resistance and legitimate demands. Feminist movements, meanwhile, practice solidarity through smaller and bigger acts of care and disobedience. CCINDLE research on feminist activism across the EU indicates that in restrictive legal contexts such as Poland and Italy, feminist activists facilitate access to abortion as a basic healthcare and human right.

Solidarity is a direct, emergency response to injustice and threat, intrinsically linked to action

In Belgium, transgender feminists and queer communities have established alternative infrastructures of financial and material support for the most impoverished and vulnerable communities.  

In Spain, migrant communities self-organise to assist their members in navigating complex and unfriendly bureaucracies to regulate their legal status and, as they put it, contribute to their 'everyday survival'.  

At the EU's external borders, pro-migrant feminists and queer activists help non-EU refugees in peril. They work continuously to safeguard their rights and safe arrival to Europe. 

Repression — and the persistence of feminist resistance 

Over the past decade, voluntary acts of resistance have faced increasing political opposition. Hostility comes not only from right-wing parties and civil society, but from dozens of liberal governments. Feminist and pro-migrant activists encounter growing pushback, involving smear campaigns, harassment in many forms, and the criminalisation of activism. 

Europe therefore remains in a paradoxical position. It was in Europe that the modern idea of solidarity was coined. Yet across the continent, solidarity practices are increasingly treated as forms of political dissent. Recently, they have been systematically repressed.

Across the continent, solidarity practices are increasingly treated as forms of political dissent

Despite this clearly unfavourable context, feminist communities do not stop. As trust in institutions declines and risks increase, many feminist initiatives increasingly operate under the state radar. Movements accommodate by going informal, purposefully low-profile, and anonymous. Their solidarity takes very targeted, but dispersed and temporary forms, with no long-term ambitions, social media promotion or formalisation plans. People who undertake these actions may not pass as activists or even self-identify as such. 

Still, their political message is important and clearly oppositional. Solidarity with Black and racialised people, transgender individuals, migrants and refugees and those in precarious positions refuses to accept exclusionary visions of the political community. It represents material struggle against ingrained convictions that only white and economically entitled subjects deserve to live, while other lives are unimportant and wasted. 

Feminist solidarities refuse to comply with the logics of global capital or nation-state logics, which subordinate human lives to economic and political profit. Feminist solidarities challenge modern convictions that care can only be given and received within families, when contracted between the state and citizen, or on the market. In times of overlapping crises, feminist solidarity activism represents not only resistance but a clear-cut, practical alternative to continuous disaster and political decline.

No.39 in a Loop series on 🌈 Gendering Democracy