ABSTRACT
This chapter contributes important insights into the potentials of transnational and global solidarity, and examines that the public sphere and the mass media are not exclusively bound to specific communities. The media are the motor of a political morality of solidarity in the form of public debates that allow for the confinement of forms of civic friendship in light of global commitment. The refugee crisis of 2015 and 2016 provides an emblematic case of analysis, because it allows people to focus on the contentiousness of solidarity and the ambivalent role of the mass media in mediating and patterning related debates. Domestic solidarity contestations were largely determined by the position of state-actors, in particular public authorities and parties in government. The call for solidarity articulated in the public debates under study included two demands, the support of refugees in need of protection and shelter, and the mutual support of Europeans to share the burden of welcoming and sheltering the incoming refugees.
