Shame, Solidarity, and Moral Citizenship: What Solidarity-Driven Moral Emotions Can Do?

Inspired by Sarah Ahmed’s (2014) question (‘What do emotions do?’), this paper raises the question of ‘What solidarity-driven moral emotions can do?’ by exploring the interplay between civic solidarity, moral emotions, and counter-politics. Offering immediate aid, housing, and support for refugees from mainly Syria and Afghanistan in 2015 and Ukraine in 2022 in an increasingly xenophobic environment was considered by many civic actors in the focus of this study as counter-state collective action. Our investigation revealed that solidarity actions were largely driven by emotions and primordially by shame as a master emotion that, according to others, leads to ‘counter-state communities of feeling’ (Berezin, 2002).

By analyzing more than 70 interviews conducted in 2015 and 2022 with civic activists involved in refugee reception in Hungary, in the current paper, we will (1) systematically identify the moral emotions that served as engines for solidarity mobilization; (2) examine the role of emotions in giving political sense to solidarity practices, which we call the politicization of solidarity; (3) explore the political and moral values and visions that appear in narratives of solidarity, (4) and finally how possible realizations of moral citizenship (Muehlebach, 2012) or cosmopolitanism from below (Augustin, 2019) can be understood as alternative to the exclusionist nationalism used to legitimize Hungarian populist autocracy.

With a background in the study of politics of solidarity and nationalist populism, the authors of this paper wish to engage with the sociology of emotions and connect this to the emerging literature on resistance to autocratic and illiberal regimes.