Research project SO/02/063 (Research action SO)
This project was aimed at examining concepts and practices of solidarity; it started from the assumption that solidarity is a pluriform and dynamic object that occurs at different scales and with different scope. The project, therefore, was executed by an interdisciplinary team of linguistic anthropologists, social geographers and criminologists; it involved the analysis of policy documents, socio-economic and institutional data, as well as ethnographic fieldwork in a number of neighbourhoods in Brussels. It addressed solidarity in three domains of political and social action: immigration (especially recent, clandestine immigration), housing (especially homelessness and social housing) and security (especially so-called ‘nuisance’ – social ‘unadaptedness’); and it addressed solidarity on three different scale-levels.
1. The durée. The first scale-level is that of slow developments at the level of the deep structure of society. Two such developments proved to be of consequence:
(i) The transformation from a Fordist social system, characterized by the inclusive welfare-state based on collective rights, to a post-Fordist system characterized by an individualized system of welfare allocation, an increased selectiveness, a shrinking impact of the state and an increase of public-private partnerships in allocation systems. This transformation is a globalization phenomenon with a range far surpassing the national level.
(ii) The rise of the extreme right in Flemish Belgium since the early 1990s. The extreme right introduced an exclusivist rhetoric, concentrated on ‘rights and obligations’ and often targeted at the Francophone Belgians as well as the immigrants. It focused on collective categorical identities.
Together, both developments changed the general conceptualization of solidarity, from an inclusive, rights-based concept towards an exclusive, selective and eligibility-based concept.
2. The development of the political consensus. This meso-level is that of developments in the general political views on solidarity, responsive to higher-level and lower-level developments. An analysis of policy documents since 1973 demonstrated that the three domains selected for analysis are, in their present shape, all of recent origin. The electoral breakthrough of the extreme right in 1991 proved to be a crucial developmental moment in all three domains, making them into political top priorities. The development towards post-Fordism as well proved to be influential: the developments since 1973 displayed the ‘typical’ post-Fordist tendencies. Furthermore, we saw that as soon as the three domains emerged as political topics, they became segmented and specialized topics of reflection and action. This caused, in all three domains, the development of complex terminologies, procedures and forms of training. At the same time, the three segmented domains could be shown to co-occur in reality.
3. Solidarity in practice. The lowest scale-level is that of actual situated activity. Our fieldwork in the Brussels neighbourhood demonstrated that the higher-level developments were clearly felt in actual practice. The increasing specialization and segmentation of the domains led to impressions of tremendous complexity among clients as well as providers; among the latter, acute feelings of inefficiency in addressing the clients’ problems were noted, sometimes leaning to providers engaging in clandestine problem-solving (illegal labour or housing). The tendency towards individualization, increased selectivity and exclusion, furthermore, appeared to be at odds with the increasing dualization of society. More and more people are in need of support just at a time when the systems of support are shrinking. Particularly vulnerable are the new immigrants. Their clandestine status excludes them from formal systems of solidarity, and they have to seek support in the booming informal economy – a clandestine labour and housing market. If they fail to find support there, they often become objects of ‘nuisance’, and find themselves facing the security services. Housing, in particular, proved to be a critical trigger in this process. When vulnerable people fail to find affordable or adequate housing, they either fall into extremely exploitative niches in the housing market, or else (and because of the shortage of shelter space for the homeless) on the streets, where they become a security issue. Thus, the dualization of society – in itself an effect of post-Fordism – produces the ‘penalization of the social’.
