Speaking of Solidarity: Toward a Politics Beyond the Friend/Foe Paradigm

The global polycrisis intensified in 2025. One indication of this: Military violence has reached levels not seen since World War II, while global military spending has climbed to an all-time high. Rather than offering a systemic analysis of this situation, the media is dominated by the views of private sector elites and their political allies. These elites praise armament programs and ‘war readiness’ as a solution to the downward spiral. One major obstacle to nuanced, critical debate is the friend/foe dichotomy, which legitimizes military actions and their preparation. How can we overcome this binary reductionism and initiate urgently needed public debate on armament, militarization, and the intensification of various types of warfare? The editors of BG | berlinergazette.de search for answers in the afterword to the “Pluriverse of Peace” series.

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February 24, 2022 marks the start of Russia’s full-scale aggression against Ukraine. While this date would seem to evoke clarity, the circumstances surrounding it are complex and difficult to grasp. Of particular interest to us are the largely ignored and distorted contexts of the struggle for Ukraine. According to Yuliya Yurchencko’s book “Ukraine and the Empire of Capital: From Marketization to Armed Conflict” (2017) this struggle over Ukraine’s means of production has been waged by economic elites in Russia, the West, and Ukraine since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1990-91. Various groups in Ukraine’s working and middle classes have also been involved. However, the economic elites – both inside and outside Ukraine – managed to reduce the complexity of their interests to a bipolar confrontation between (mostly middle class) pro-Western and (mostly working class) pro-Russian citizens.

Since the 2013-2014 Euromaidan uprising, the economic elites’ struggle for control of Ukraine has divided the country and gradually given rise to a war society. The post-Euromaidan battle for Donbass was accompanied by a neoliberal socialization of war, to paraphrase Yurchencko. This phase was marked by the mass mobilization of untrained, volunteer combatants willing to ‘fight for their country’ in the bipolar confrontation. Russia’s full-scale invasion temporarily lifted the polarization within Ukraine, as many who had previously supported Russia now began fighting against the Kremlin’s aggression. In her 2024 book “Travailleuses de la résistance,” Daria Saburova documents this phenomenon based on interviews conducted in Kryvyi Rih – Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s hometown, which was predominantly Russian-speaking before the invasion.

Since February 24, 2022, what impact has the war had on this society? And how can it become a society defined by peaceful engagement with its diversity and its possibilities for social transformation rather than determined by organized violence, imperial manipulation, and aggression? How can this society find its own path without submitting to the interests of oligarchs from various power blocs? Volodymyr Ishchenko raises this question eloquently and urgently in “Towards the Abyss: Ukraine from Maidan to War” (2024). As Ishchenko acknowledges and regrets, however, this question, like all other significant inquiries in this context, is repressed by war’s destructive upheavals. We are interested in one aspect of this repression: the ordering of these upheavals within a discourse structured by a friend/foe schema, also known in discourse analysis as binary reductionism.

In this context, referencing Carl Schmitt’s “The Concept of the Political” (1927) is insightful. In it, Schmitt develops a friend/foe theory as a “specific political distinction to which political actions and motives [of state actors and their private-sector partners] can be reduced.” What we find decisive is that Schmitt conceives of ‘the enemy’ as the product of multiple interests. “Emotionally the enemy is easily treated as being evil and ugly, because every distinction, most of all the political, as the strongest and most intense of the distinctions and categorizations, draws upon other distinctions for support.” However, Schmitt also states that “The political enemy need not […] appear as an economic competitor, and it may even be advantageous to engage with him in business transactions.”

Without paying tribute to the ‘crown jurist of the Nazi state,’ it should be noted that Schmitt’s ambivalent concept of ‘the enemy’ accurately reflects the political calculations of state actors and their private-sector partners. After all, this ambivalence is both an expression and a product of a situational and strategic need: In social and media discourse, ‘the enemy’ construct can fulfill at will the function of an undesirable opponent, while the same actor can be useful in economic matters and even become a cooperation partner. However, this political calculation and the related ambivalence of ‘the enemy’ is usually rejected in social and media discourse. Instead, an unambiguous friend/foe dichotomy prevails. What are the consequences of this binary reductionism for political diagnoses and politics of solidarity?
This is the article’s guiding question.

The friend/foe schema

Olaf Scholz stated in an oft-cited speech that Russia’s invasion on February 24, 2022, marked a “Zeitenwende,” a turning point. Accordingly, the date stands for the establishment in Western discourse of clear international relationships in the form of an unambiguous friend/foe schema. In a statement on Ukraine’s EU accession application, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen summed up the situation succinctly: “We all know that Ukrainians are ready to die for the European perspective. We want them to live with us the European dream.” When von der Leyen made this statement on June 17, 2022, she stood at the microphone clad in the national colors of Ukraine (a yellow jacket and a blue blouse), and her appearance clearly marked a gesture of solidarity.

But what does solidarity mean here? Ukrainians appear as ‘friends’ who are willing to die for ‘our’ cause and whom ‘we’ want to enable to live ‘our’ dream. These are friends whom ‘we’ look down on benevolently: accession candidates whose support ‘we’ subject to a rigorous cost-benefit analysis. In short, solidarity with Ukrainians is declared because they appear to be representatives or agents of ‘our’ own interests. They serve as an instrument to strengthen the ‘European perspective’ against an ‘enemy’ constructed as diametrically opposed to it.

The EU’s interests range from seizing Ukraine’s means of production, including those in the agricultural sector, which have been privatized at an accelerated pace since February 24, 2022, to using the current geopolitical framework to launch growth-through-militarization programs such as ReArm Europe. The question of ‘solidarity with Ukraine’ must be raised again given this excess in self-interest. A deconstruction of the underlying friend/foe dichotomy would be a starting point to counter the ostensibly inevitable rearmament and militarization through differentiated debates, designing alternative forms of solidarity, and supporting those who resist the invasion and its consequences.

The friend/foe paradigm was also reflexively activated in the West on October 7, 2023, when Hamas committed a massacre of Israeli civilians. Here, too, complex circumstances disappear behind a date. This is true in terms of the historical development that led to these circumstances – the so-called Israel-Palestine conflict – and the military consequences that Israel drew from October 7. The latter included a genocidal and ecocidal war in Gaza and an attack on Iran, both of which violated international law. “That’s the dirty work Israel does for all of us,” said German Chancellor Friedrich Merz on June 17, 2025, referring to the attack on Iran. Anyone following the rhetoric of the German government (and other Western governments, with the exceptions of Spain and Ireland) could infer his meaning: he was also referring to the general ‘war on terror’ that Israel has waged with unprecedented brutality since October 7.

For Merz, too, ‘the friend’ appears as a representative of ‘our’ interests. ‘We’ look down on ‘the friend’ benevolently from above, speaking of “dirty work,” and subject ‘our’ support to a sober cost-benefit analysis. This calculation is reflected in a statement by Merz’s counterpart, Emmanuel Macron. On April 24, 2024, Macron indicated that the “appropriate time” to withdraw support from Israel and recognize Palestine as a state had not yet come. The “appropriate time”?!

Reversal of the friend/foe paradigm

While certainly not the most important factor in Macron’s considerations on timing, the mobilizations within the civilian populations of Western states were also significant in this context. Protesting left-wing progressives who took to the streets or occupied university campuses recognized the large-scale bombing of Gaza as an unacceptable campaign of revenge. For many activists, this led to a reversal of the friend/foe paradigm imposed by Western governments. Accordingly, they were pro-Palestine and anti-Israel.

Their motto was: ‘The enemy of my friend is also my enemy.’ Accordingly, when left-wing activists take a stand against Western imperialism, they believe they are on the right side of history. But can the pitfalls of the friend/foe paradigm be easily resolved by simply turning it on its head? In the pro-Palestinian movement, which has spread far beyond the West, rendering it anything but homogeneous, the regressive and reactionary effects of merely reversing the friend/foe paradigm were evident in the following variation: ‘The enemy of my enemy is my friend.’ This was expressed through the glorification of Hamas and culminated in celebrating the massacre as an act of anti-colonial resistance. European intellectuals, such as the influential anthropologist Andreas Malm, participated in this celebration. In a December 7, 2023, lecture at Stockholm University, Malm said: “Behind the 7th of October operation was the Palestinian resistance […] I think that what happened on the 7th of October, with Tufan Al-Aqsa, was fundamentally an act of liberation […] The armed resistance happening in Gaza is heroic. I don’t know if you’ve seen those videos with a viral red triangle pointing to the targets before the explosions. I consume these videos as a drug. I inject them into my veins. I share them with my closest comrades”.

In this context, a statement by the internationally renowned philosopher Judith Butler also went viral. “Hamas is part of the global left.” This ennobled the radical Islamist group as forward-thinking fighters for global justice. However, the sentence was an abbreviated version of a statement Butler made in 2006 at the University of California, Berkeley. Her statement back then was more nuanced, yet not without problems: “Understanding Hamas/Hezbollah as social movements that are progressive, that are on the left, that are part of a global left, is extremely important. That does not stop us from being critical of certain dimensions of both movements.” These “certain dimensions” include supporting the mullah regime in Tehran, whose fossil fuel-driven imperialism is glorified as the ‘axis of resistance.’ Another dimension is the explicit anti-Semitism of Hamas, which is unconsciously or consciously reproduced in uncritical romanticizations of Hamas within the pro-Palestinian movement. For governments that adhere to a friend/foe paradigm, this is an opportunity to label the entire pro-Palestinian movement anti-Semitic and repress it.

Similarly, negative manifestations of a simple reversal of the friend/foe paradigm can be observed in the context of Russia’s war against Ukraine. Many leftists in the West harbor one-sided anti-imperialist sentiments against the US, ‘the West’ or NATO, including scholars and political figures as different and as differently motivated as David Harvey, Walter Mignolo, and Sarah Wagenknecht. From this one-sided anti-imperialist perspective, Russia’s military aggression appears to be legitimate ‘self-defense’ – indeed, an anti-imperialist and anti-colonial act. At least, that is how a dominant faction within the Kremlin, including Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, sees it. This faction claims to act in the interests of the “world majority” (Sergei Karaganov) by curbing Western influence in Ukraine with its ‘special operation.’ As Saltanat Shoshanova and Marina Solntseva argue, opposing this “hostile takeover” of decolonial struggles is crucial, as we would otherwise be supporting the legitimization of Russia’s war of aggression and obscuring the true interests of the “political capitalists” (Volodymyr Ishchenko, following Max Weber) in the Kremlin.

Rejecting the friend/foe paradigm

Progressive approaches that undermine the friend/foe paradigm rather than simply reversing it should not go unmentioned. For instance, some have attempted to express solidarity with both Ukraine and Palestine. One such attempt is the statement of solidarity with Palestine published on August 31, 2025, on ukraine-solidarity.eu by the socialist organization Sotsialnyi Rukh. Active in Kyiv, Kryvyi Rih, Lviv, Odessa, Dnipropetrovsk, and Kharkiv, Sotsialnyi Rukh vehemently opposes Russia’s war of aggression. In such moments, the West’s friend/foe paradigm implodes. Solidarity is shown not to the ‘friend’ who represents Western interests, but to those who are subjected to aggression that they cannot cope with alone.

Sometimes, the friend/foe paradigm is categorically rejected in media discourse. In its place, an approach emerges that counters the binary order of ‘friends’ and ‘foes’ with a neither-nor stance. In the context of the war in Ukraine, this approach can be derived from the question Volodymyr Ishchenko raises in “Towards the Abyss”: Can social transformation in Ukraine be initiated independently of the economic elites’ interests in the various power blocs? For a war-torn society, the timing is unfavorable to grapple with this question. The outlook for transnational class struggles against oligarchs from Russia, the West, Ukraine, and beyond is equally bleak. So, in this context should the neither-nor approach be abandoned? Or should it remain part of the conversation to keep the avenues necessary for long-term transformation and liberation open?

Shortly after October 7, Subcomandante Marcos offered a similar formula regarding the war in the Middle East: “Neither Hamas nor Netanyahu.” This slogan echoes the unofficial motto of the large international anti-war mobilization at the beginning of the 21st century: ‘Neither Al-Qaeda nor Bush Jr.’ Peaking in 2002/03, the movement used this neither-nor approach to resist the George W. Bush administration’s threat, “You are either with us or against us.” Then, as now, the issue is rejecting both terror and the war on terror. The negative and counterproductive consequences of such a war are obvious. The destruction of human and other-than-human life causes trauma that continues to impact individuals and communities generations later. This creates a breeding ground for future terrorism. The disastrous legacy of the imperial missions in Afghanistan and Iraq has not been forgotten. But is remembering enough to inspire a new global movement?

One thing is certain: The neither-nor approach undermines the friend/foe paradigm and thus removes the basis for two things. First, it prevents actors from being identified as either ‘friends’ or ‘enemies,’ which eliminates a crucial basis for dehumanizing the latter. Second, it bypasses the binary ordering of conflicts, thus dismantling the basis for obscuring complex situations. Thus, the neither-nor approach provides a crucial foundation for what is needed in today’s world more than ever: being in solidarity with victims of militarily organized violence, regardless of which competing ruling class assigns them as ‘national subjects.’ In short, a coarticulation of solidarity.

However, it is also certain that the powerful influence of binary reductionism is one of many obstacles preventing applying the neither-nor approach and coarticulating solidarity. As we have described, the friend/foe paradigm is not only imposed ‘from above’ but also reproduced ‘from below’ – even in emancipatory and progressive movements. Therefore, in discursive space military conflict fronts are being strengthened by the friend/foe schema. This not only promotes bellicose attitudes and legitimizes escalation, but also contributes directly or indirectly to pitting victims of organized violence against each other. This is one of the key factors that enables genocide politics and accelerates what we referred to as the “war on Earth” in the introduction to the “Pluriverse of Peace” series.

Behind the illusion of the friend/foe scheme

The power of the friend/foe paradigm creates, last but not least, a false clarity about the conditions of imperialism as the “highest stage of capitalism” (Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, 1917). Contrary to PR images of the ruling class, its members do not meet as friends (or enemies), but as competitors trying to assert their interests (and those of their clients) or conclude business deals.

To get to the bottom of this discursive distortion, we must first describe the state of material reality. Military conflicts between states reached a record level in 2025, surpassing those since the Second World War. Depending on how one defines military conflict and participation, between 30 and 50 states were involved in 60 to 370 armed conflicts worldwide (see ak, August 2025, and LMD, October 2025). At US$2.7 trillion, global military spending is at an all-time high. Once again, the arms industry is a key driver of growth. The resulting damage to the planet and the world’s population is beyond the scope of this article. But what are the causes of these devastating trends?

In his 1999 essay, “The Modern World-System as a Capitalist World-Economy,” Immanuel Wallerstein introduced the concept of the “endless accumulation of capital.” Twenty-five years after its publication and over 150 years since Friedrich Engels and Karl Marx first introduced this idea, it is clear that endless capital accumulation in the form of market-oriented mass production, financialization, and privatization has depleted resources, causing widespread environmental destruction and pollution. These upheavals have made ecosystems more vulnerable and unstable, which also affects markets and economies. Competition for resources and control over supply chains leads to territorial conflicts. War has become an increasingly common means of defending ‘national interests.’ We have been witnessing the resource- and energy-intensive emergence of a “permanent state of war” since the official end of the Cold War, as described by Dario Azzellini “The Business of War” (2003). This “permanent state of war” has since spread to larger and larger parts of the globe and, as Raúl Sánchez Cedillo states in “This War Will Not End in Ukraine” (2023), twenty years later has grown into a “global war regime.” This global war regime leaves a catastrophic ecological footprint and further exacerbates the collapse of planetary ecosystems. Various forms of environmental warfare are emerging in this situation, in which extreme weather events, pollution, or terraforming are used as weapons – during phases of both destruction and reconstruction, as Svitlana Matviyenko points out.

How can we break this vicious cycle of ecological and economic crises and war? Because it is clearly a major concern for those working at the intersection of research and activism, this question was the focus of the “Pluriverse of Peace” conference. Needless to say, hardly anyone is naive enough to expect the private sector elites (and their political allies) to provide forward-looking answers. After all, their primary goal is to profit from this dire predicament – whether despite or because of it. These actors have no genuine interest in addressing the causes of the polycrisis, as doing so would be contrary to their interests. They perceive war and crisis more naturally as business opportunities. Even when they propose solutions, they operate within the framework of the polycrisis, exacerbating it further. Elon Musk is a prime example of this. His business operations should not be seen as a deviation from the norm (“He’s special!” or “He’s crazy!”), but rather as pars pro toto. It’s not about saving the world, as Musk likes to proclaim, but rather about saving his own world by accumulating power and capital – at the expense of the environment and the climate. Critical analyses of other self-proclaimed ‘world-saving’ solutions, such as the European Green Deal and its successor program, ReArm Europe, point to the same contradiction.

Thus, from a systemic perspective, the question of whether global armament and militarization are welcome drivers of growth and problem solvers in centers of capital can only be answered with a resounding ‘no.’ Does this ignore the desire for resilience among vulnerable groups, independence movements, and ‘underdeveloped’ regions? They should also resist the temptation of armament and militarization. Why? In a world where armed violence is always a part of industrialized profit-seeking and is covered by international law as the “right of the stronger” (Perry Anderson), those who want to free themselves from powerlessness will be denied the weapons they need for self-defense. Or, if they are given the weapons they ask for, these weapons will inevitably be part of a deal making them even more dependent on the structures they intend to free themselves from.

The politics of compartmentalization

To further deconstruct the friend/foe paradigm and explore how its discursive distortions obscure transnational capital relationships shaped by governments, it is helpful to briefly examine two imperial actors: Russia and Turkey. “Friends or enemies?” was the title of an article in the December 2020 issue of the English-language Le Monde diplomatique. Reading the article, it quickly becomes clear that the question is merely rhetorical, as Russia and Turkey are neither ‘friends’ nor ‘enemies.’ The author, Igor Delanoë, explains: “Since Putin and Erdoğan came to power in the early 2000s, Moscow and Ankara have pursued a policy of ‘compartmentalization,’ treating conflicts separately. This approach prevented fundamental differences of opinion over Ukraine, for example, from poisoning the entire relationship. Only during the Syrian crisis did a period of tension ensue after two Turkish F-16 jets shot down a Russian Su-24 at the end of November 2015. After Erdoğan issued a written apology, the situation eased.”

Meanwhile, Russia and Turkey have indirectly waged war against each other in Nagorno-Karabakh and Libya without “poisoning” their relations. Instead, they were able to further boost their arms industries and reorganize their spheres of influence, particularly with regard to the design of logistical infrastructures. In short, they conducted business while waging war. Once again, the friend/foe dichotomy distracts from systemic issues. First, the problem is not the imperialism of a particular ‘enemy’ – even if that enemy is currently acting in an unacceptable manner (Russia) or continuing to dominate the world (the US) – but rather imperialism in general, as the highest stage of capitalism. Second, in an era of multipolarity – which, as Sandro Mezzadra and Brett Neilson emphasize in “The Rest and the West” (2025), is also an era of multiple imperialisms – rigorous compartmentalization is supposed to resolve the contradictions and incompatibilities of these competing imperialisms, yet in reality it only exacerbates them.

Incidentally, it is telling that the term compartmentalization rarely appears in mass media discussions of geopolitics, the global economy, and related topics. The reason for this is certainly not because the unwieldy term originates from the unrelated field of cell biology (where it refers to subdivision into separate, enclosed compartments in which molecular reactions can take place undisturbed). Rather, the distorted sense of reality in popular political discussions, based on a binary friend/foe scheme, is incompatible with the day-to-day management of transnational capital’s entangled and conflict-ridden relationships. If not compartmentalization, then what explains the fact that the US has declared China its number one enemy in recent years when the two largest economies in the world are so closely intertwined that if one of them were to go down overnight, the global economy would collapse? How is it possible that Germany is at war with Russia economically, including through sanctions, while also supporting Ukraine’s defensive war against Russia, even though hundreds of companies from Germany remain active in Russia, including in reconstructing Mariupol, and, as Oxana Timofeeva reminds us, oil and gas continue to flow from Russia to Germany? In short, how is it possible that Germany’s economy is filling Russia’s war chest?

There are many more examples of compartmentalization, especially regarding the governmental and political dimensions of capital operations. Accusing practitioners of compartmentalization of double standards is not enough. We cannot simply accuse Europe of financing autocracies, such as Turkey, to accomplish things that ‘we’ cannot align with ‘our’ values. One example is the EU-Turkey agreement of March 18, 2016, in which Recep Tayyip Erdoğan was recruited as “gatekeeper for Europe.” Rather, it is important to conduct careful analyses of the political economy of compartmentalization. Such analyses can lay the groundwork for a comprehensive and differentiated critique of a process that multiplies military conflicts and enables new, more diverse forms of imperialism. To paraphrase the biological meaning of compartmentalization: The method allows military operations to ‘proceed undisturbed in closed areas,’ achieving ‘contained destruction’ while maximizing profits. As if that weren’t perfidious enough, there’s also the danger that military escalations will spread beyond the ‘closed areas’ and cause ‘wildfires’ or even nuclear war.

Applying the friend/foe scheme from the outside in

To raise financial resources for war and secure support among the population, regimes manage fragmented international relations by compartmentalizing and concealing them behind the friend/foe paradigm. Creating enemy stereotypes that stir up resentment and fear serves as a means of enforcing uncomfortable measures, such as prioritizing military infrastructure over civilian infrastructure. Austerity is presented as the only way to stand up to the West’s ‘enemies’ (Russia, China, Iran, etc.), but it ultimately serves to kick-start and sustain the arms industry, which is hailed as a new engine of growth.

Austerity also serves as an instrument of repression. In her 2022 book “The Capital Order. How Economists Invented Austerity and Paved the Way to Fascism,” economist Clara Mattei, a specialist in the history of capitalism, writes: “Where austerity policies ‘succeeded,’ relatively speaking, was in their enrichment of certain parties, including employers and foreign trade interests, who accumulated power and capital at the expense of labor.” According to Mattei, austerity’s true value lies in securing established privileges and eliminating alternatives to capitalism. One could argue that the consequences of austerity policies, particularly in the social sector, exacerbate the vulnerability of marginalized populations and make armed conflict an appealing last resort for empowerment, as Enikő Vincze explained in the discussion after her “Pluriverse of Peace” lecture, based on her text “ReArm Europe: Saving Capitalism, Abandoning Life.”

Austerity-driven repression leads to the suppression of existential social problems and the division of interconnected social concerns and groups. For example, as militarism and war dominate the political, economic, and public agendas in the West and beyond, the climate crisis (which is, in part, a crisis of social reproduction) and efforts to combat it are pushed into the background. This is not least an expression of psychopolitical repression within the attention economy and in how individuals and collectives perceive problems. Concurrently, it is also an expression of the repression of initiatives and movements that aim to stop militarization and mitigate the social consequences of the climate crisis. These are forms of oppression that divide and polarize people, pitting them against each other even though they have, at a deeper level, common material interests. Austerity policies enable this as a catalyst by forcing two things: a crisis of social reproduction and an accompanying rise in resentment toward potential allies.

As Nancy Fraser and Rahel Jaeggi remind us in “Capitalism: A Conversation in Critical Theory” (2018), various capitalist regimes throughout history have relied on divisions, such as those between productive and reproductive labor, and between ‘domestic’ and migrant workers. If divisions are now an integral part of armament and militarization policies, then it should come as no surprise that these policies not only reinforce racialized Othering through border regimes, but also turn the friend/foe schema inward. In Russia, left-wing activists are persecuted as ‘foreign agents’; in the West, where fascism is on the rise, they are criminalized as ‘terrorists,’ as seen in the United States and Hungary, where Antifa has been classified as a terrorist organization, and in Ukraine and Israel, where opponents of war are criminalized as ‘enemies of the people.’

Unconditional solidarity

Those who reject the global war regime’s imposition of a survival struggle on everyone and instead strive for a good life for all must rethink the question of solidarity. As we have demonstrated, adopting or reversing the friend/foe paradigm provides a misleading basis for solidarity. Neither approach manages to escape the pitfalls of binary reductionism. Those who strive for solidarity as more than a feel-good gesture, namely as a political practice, should start by questioning the friend/foe dichotomy. Only then can one grasp how capitalism, as a “semiotic operator” (Félix Guattari), exploits the friend/foe dichotomy to generate the kind of subjectivity it requires for its functioning in the current phase, e.g., to justify and perpetuate armament, militarization, and warfare. We, the many of so-called civil society, must resolutely reject the supposed inevitability of this subjectivity.

Emancipatory approaches are evident in the rejection or undermining of the friend/foe paradigm, particularly in the neither-nor approach. The complexity of applying this approach today is evident in a statement by the student movement in Serbia posted on Instagram in early June 2025. It represents a moment of true clarity. Here is an excerpt:

“🔥 THIS IS A FIGHT FOR ALL OF US! 🔥 🇪🇺 Europe wants to turn us into a mining pit 🇺🇸 The US wants to submerge us in other people’s lives 🇨🇳 China wants to dig our guts out 🇷🇺 Russia wants to defend their armchairs – not our lives ✝️ The church is silent – and when it speaks, it slanders its own children. 📺 The media don’t report – they spit and poison instead. 💰 The authorities? They are selling us: head by head 🛒 Soul by soul 🛒Per meter square 🛒As defective goods.”

The statement bears traces of the non-aligned strategy developed in socialist Yugoslavia. At the time, the bipolarity of the Cold War was countered with a transnational non-alignment movement. The compulsion to join one of the two power blocs was met with a ‘Neither the US nor Soviet Union.’ Today, many centers of power are emerging: a multipolar world, but also a world of multiple imperialisms. Embarking on an independent path in this world – a path of emancipation and liberation – means resisting the many forms of imperialism and freeing oneself from their constraints and violence. In this sense, the student movement’s neither-nor approach expresses the demand for multipolar nonalignment: ‘Neither the EU nor the US; neither China nor Russia; …’. This clearly distances the movement from opportunistic approaches such as multivectorality and neutrality. But what does this mean for solidarity politics?

Declarations of multipolar nonalignment and discursive interventions in dominant friend/foe schemas can be the starting point for a politics of solidarity. Those who want to go beyond this must question their own complicity in multiple imperialisms and their warlike manifestations. This requires analytical work, unlearning privileges, and building relationships across divisions and boundaries. These efforts could give rise to a form of “unconditional solidarity” that, as Jens Kastner and Lea Susemichel put it, can “succeed without shared experiences and possibly even without common interests.” As Kastner and Susemichel explain, following feminist theorist Diane Elam, this type of solidarity has “no predetermined ‘we,’ no [identitarian] community as a prerequisite.”

However, in a world marked by right-wing populism and warmongering, sociality and solidarity beyond a “predetermined we” and an “identitarian community” are anything but self-evident. This prerequisite must be actively established by rejecting the friend/foe dichotomy and the nationalism associated with it, whether relating to ‘a people’ or ‘Europe.’ International solidarity, often invoked, could actually become a reality in this way. Nothing less is needed to break free from the vicious cycle of ecological and economic crises and war.