Solidarity, Charity, and Reciprocity. The Case of Helping Refugees in Rural Germany. Greta Wagner FIRST DRAFT PLEASE DO NOT QUOTE OR DISSEMINATE

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1 Solidarity, Charity, and Reciprocity. The Case of Helping Refugees in Rural Germany Greta Wagner FIRST DRAFT PLEASE DO NOT QUOTE OR DISSEMINATE Solidarity, not Charity! is the slogan emblazoned on placards, t-shirts, and canvas bags sported by actors involved in social movements for the benefit of marginalized groups. The message this slogan aims to convey is that the help and support offered should not be given in a top-down manner, that it should not exacerbate relations of dependency, but instead signal mutual recognition as equals and a joint commitment to fighting for better conditions. Solidarity presupposes reciprocity, whereas charity entails only the act of giving. But how can reciprocity and solidarity be imagined when one party is in need, in a state of crisis, and the other is rich in resources? Can there be anything but charity in such a situation? And if not, can reciprocity emerge between those giving help and that help s recipients? I am going to outline solidarity and charity as two distinct modes of helping and then present a case study of volunteers helping refugees in rural Germany. In the years 2014 to 2016, a part of the refugees arriving in Germany where settled in small villages of the provinces, which in many parts of the country are ethnically and culturally fairly homogeneous. In these small villages volunteers engaged in support of refugees usually were not driven by activist motives but rather by humanitarian ones. I will argue that, since these volunteers do not aim for reciprocity and in many cases do not share a common goal with refugees either, their help for refugees must be understood as charitable and not as solidaristic. However, volunteers do not only engage in order to help refugees, but also in order to help their villages to integrate newcomers. With their fellow German villagers, they indeed share a common goal the normative integration of their communities and reciprocal relations. In this respect, volunteer helping is charitable and solidaristic at the same time: volunteers provide charitable help to refugees in order to preserve the social cohesion of their villages because they have solidaristic bonds with other villagers. The case illustrates that even though social movements prioritize 1

2 solidarity as a mode of helping, solidarity displays an exclusivity because it only takes place between actors with whom one shares a common goal and who are able to contribute to that common goal. In a last step I discuss generalized forms of reciprocity in which volunteers reciprocate gifts that they received from others in another time. These forms of reciprocity might open the path for a mode of helping which, though it may not be solidaristic, reduces the symbolic inequality of charity among individuals with unequal resources. 1 Charitable and Solidaristic Gift-Giving Solidarity and charity are two modes of helping that differ in their sociological implications. As for helping in the mode of charity, reciprocity is not constitutive in its ideal-typical form. The charitable gift, as Alvin Gouldner (1973) writes, is given as something for nothing. Helping in the charitable mode is controversial in its normative content. From the perspective of the theory of reciprocity, a gift that comes without the expectation or indeed possibility of being returned is problematic in that it can damage the recipient s social standing (Mauss 1990, 92). Both modes of helping, charity and solidarity, initiate specific kinds of gift relationships. Whereas charity encompasses only the acts of giving and receiving, solidarity is based on the principle of reciprocity in pursuit of a shared purpose. According to Mauss, who described the importance of exchanging gifts for social cohesion, this exchange consists of three constitutive elements namely, giving, taking, and reciprocating which Mauss identified in all the societies he studied (Mauss 1990, 36f.). To Mauss, the gift entails both freedom and an obligation, meaning that Mauss is wary of the idea of a pure gift, for receiving a gift always entails the obligation to reciprocate. To Mauss, the gift is a total social phenomenon (ibid., 17) as well as an instrument of power which defines the social position of the giver. The gift s destructive side lies in the loss of standing or persona incurred as a result of failing to reciprocate a gift (ibid., 92). A theoretical perspective taking its bearings from Mauss would abandon the dichotomy between self-interest and morality in explaining gifts. Gifts and reciprocity form a principle of social action in their own right, occupying a place between benevolent and self-interested action and expressing both voluntariness and obligation (Adloff/Mau 2006). Gift relations are a central source of social integration and symbolically constitute relationships of mutual recognition (Hénaff 2010; Honneth 2010). They can both 2

3 foster solidarity and produce its opposite by giving rise to dependency (Godelier 1999, 22; Hillebrand 2009, 135). Two principal meanings of solidarity may be distinguished: In the study of social movements, solidarity denotes an attitude and a mode of action in which a circumscribed group commits to mutual support in pursuit of political transformation. Classical sociological theory, on the other hand, uses the term to describe the social and normative integration of a society as a whole. It was the religious socialist Pierre Leroux who, in 1840, introduced the concept of solidarity in contradistinction to charity and almsgiving (Bayertz 1998, 38; Fiegle 2003). Its paradigmatic application in the study of social movements tends to be the labor movement, in which the solidarity of the group, organized in the form of a trade union, compensates for earnings lost during a strike. In contemporary social and political movements, migration and border struggles (Stierl 2018; Della Porta 2018) are among the instances where solidaristic groups are being formed. There is a normative dimension to solidaristic groups which, according to Kurt Bayertz, largely depends on three conditions: First, members find a group s reciprocal cohesion to be of subjective importance; they identify as a community and share emotional bonds. This entails second the expectation of mutual aid in times of need, and third, such aid is rendered in full awareness of shared legitimate goals and interests (Bayertz 1998, 12). The term has been and continues to be applied in contexts marked by a greater measure of inequality within the group: In the course of the movement for solidarity with Nicaragua in the 1980s, European volunteers travelled to the country, collected donations, and built community centers. Yet they also came with the intention of learning something themselves: how a revolution might succeed. Socialism was the purpose they shared with their Nicaraguan counterparts. Many contemporary No Border activists not only support refugees in their attempt to cross borders, they share the transformative goal of a society without borders and therefore try to form solidaristic bonds. However, the concept of solidarity is also applied when what is at stake is not the transformation of a social order, but rather its preservation. By solidarity, Axel Honneth understands a relationship of interaction, one in which subjects participate reciprocally in their various life paths, because the value they accord to one another is symmetrical (Honneth 1994, 208). The source of this affect-charged attitude of solidarity is the experience that those with whom solidarity is felt contribute to the realization of a shared goal (ibid., 59). Though the concept of solidarity may be transferred from its application to circumscribed groups to society as a whole, a complement was then needed for the contribution made by each individual within the group 3

4 in Durkheim, this is the division of labor (ibid., 55). Solidarity here emphasizes not the common transformational project of a delimited community, but the cohesion of an entire society. It will be remembered that Durkheim distinguishes between a form of solidarity founded on the similarity of a group s members and their shared collective consciousness and which, by analogy with the cohesion that links together the elements of mineral bodies (Durkheim 2013, 102), he calls mechanical solidarity, and organic solidarity, based on the division of labor. He sets the latter apart as follows: Whereas the other solidarity implies that individuals resemble one another, the latter assumes that they are different from one another. (Ibid.) Here, in a society based on the division of labor, the individual fields of activities of society s members are the very foundation of social cohesion. The parallel with the use of the concept of solidarity in social movements now consists in that, to Durkheim, society s members pursue the shared goal of social reproduction, that is, the preservation of the social organism (Honneth 2008, 56). Whether a group s members offer each other help or a society s members are mutually dependent it is a feature of solidarity that it is based on reciprocity and committed to a shared goal. But what connects people to each other that makes them form solidaristic bonds when they are not mutually dependent on each other? Rahel Jaeggi (2001) points out that the forms of reciprocity of solidaristic relations do not equal a simple exchange relation: The reason for solidarity is the belief that the success and wellbeing of others is important to ensure the flourishing of projects with which I identify. (ibid., 292) Jaeggi suggests that we understand the connection within solidaristic groups as shared forms of life. That conception, however, leads to the problem of particularity, because only those would be included in a solidaristic group who share this form of life. She points out that with Durkheim s concept of organic solidarity as well as with Honneth s concept of solidarity as mutual recognition with respect to the individual s contribution to a common praxis, the problem remains that a background of shared values or a shared project is needed in order to form solidaristic bonds (ibid., 296). A crucial question then is, how to include others into the we solidaristic groups? Especially in cases with highly unequal resources the question of reciprocity becomes difficult to deal with when actors aim to help others in a solidaristic way. The empirical case of volunteer support for refugees provides an opportunity to study the normative pitfalls of helping in these two modes. A revealing contrasting case to volunteers in rural Germany are activists supporting refugees in Greece. Katerina Rozakou (2016) has studied 4

5 a group engaged in refugee support on Lesvos in the 2000s and returned to Lesvos to meet the groups members in In the 2000s, the group refused any gift-giving to refugees as it was considered a threat to the formation of relationships of equals. Their aim was to form egalitarian bonds with refugees and they continuously debated how to achieve those for example by not offering help to refugees. This gift taboo had collapsed when Rozakou returned to Lesvos in 2015 and one of the volunteers from the group was arrested for driving a pregnant woman and her family to a nearby town. Rozakou describes how volunteers managed an abundance of donations and constantly violated their gift taboo that they had established in order to achieve egalitarian prospects of sociality with refugees. They did so, however, at a time when the Greek middle classes underwent deep transformations of identity: The middle classes resort to charitable donations themselves, and middle-age people face unemployment and resort to their elderly parents in order to survive. The gift is hence largely re-signified in austerity-ridden Greece. One-way offers are no longer considered merely the malevolent carriers of ypohréosi (obligation), since the burden of hréor (debt) affects Greek society to an unprecedented extent. (Rozakou 2016, 197) One could say that when the middle classes in Greek society were themselves forced to become aid recipients, the gift taboo collapsed because gift-giving to refugees was considered within the larger context of generalized reciprocity. As scarcity became a widely shared experience, non-reciprocal gift-giving to refugees was not considered a threat to solidaristic bonds anymore. 2 Volunteer Help to Refugees in Rural Germany The case of refugee support in rural Germany is different from the one on Lesvos in many aspects. The villages I studied are close to the economically strong Rhine-Main region in Western Germany and have not experienced scarcity in recent decades. The volunteers that are engaged in refugee support within the last years do not consider non-reciprocal gift-giving a normative problem. The impetus to their engagement came from the so-called summer of welcoming. To give was the core of their involvement from the very beginning. When, in 2014 and 2015, a large number of refugees arrived in Germany, many of them were housed in mass shelters for a time, yet several local authorities (Verbandsgemeinden) decided instead in 5

6 favor of decentral accommodation and rented dwellings for refugees in small villages. 1 In many cases, it was the new arrivals neighbors who began to visit the refugees, offer them assistance, and join together to form helpers initiatives. Their goal was to provide refugees with basic necessities, help them to settle in, drive them to appointments with local authorities or doctors, and help them register their children in preschools and schools. Those who rendered this form of assistance were in large part members of milieus which had previously not been engaged at all, or only in their villages clubs or churches, which served to strengthen community ties within the village. These new volunteers, who started to get involved in 2014 and 2015, moved the profile of volunteers closer to the national average, which means that proportionally fewer students were involved as against rising participation by active members of the workforce and by pensioners. The proportion of those engaged in helping refugees in municipalities with a population of less than 5000 rose from approximately 4 per cent in 2015 to 16 per cent in the following year (Karakayali/Kleist 2016). What makes refugee support in Germany within the last years especially different from volunteer engagement in other places is that helping refugees in Germany since 2014 was not in itself already a form of resistance (as it had in many cases been in former decades). Unlike in Italy (Zamponi 2018), in Aceh, Indonesia (McNevin/Missbach 2018), or in Australia (Gosden 2006) helping refugees was explicitly asked for by the state. Chancellor Angela Merkel herself had called citizens to contribute to the successful integration of the new arrivals. Her dictum wir schaffen das ( we can make it ) asked everyone to take part in that nationwide project of integrating refugees. This is the reason why even conservative voters, who in the decades before had called for closed-doors policies, suddenly started to engage in support for refugees. Or to be precise started to engage in support for refugees who now lived in their communities. The study is based on in-depth interviews with volunteers in villages in Rhineland-Palatinate and ethnographic observations at village festivities, regular meetings for refugees and volunteers, and lifts to the local food bank. This way normative orientations of the interviewees as well as real-life interactions are both part of the data being analyzed. 2 Moreover, in 2018 I 1 Due to the deal with Erdogan s turkey, the number of refugees arriving in Germany declined significantly since summer For the shortcomings of either interviews or ethnographic observations see Jerolmack & Khan 2014 and Lamont & Swidler

7 started to interview refugees who live in the villages I study. It became clear in these conversations that by most of them I was entirely identified with the group of the volunteers. My interviewees constantly thanked me and when I replied that I was not a volunteer, one young man even thanked me as a German in general. Being at first disappointed by the outcome of these interviews, the misunderstandings and my role in the field, I now see them as very striking in revealing the recipients perceptions of the implicit rules involved. The volunteers are constantly witnessing the refugees gratitude, which in turn becomes part of their expectations for reciprocity. This article focuses on the normative orientations of volunteers, and their interpretation of their help to refugees. 2.1 Giving and Receiving Forms of Symbolic Reciprocity The volunteers want to help and they explicitly say that they want nothing in return. One might say that they want their help to be charitable and not reciprocal. That does not mean, however, that they expect nothing at all from the refugees in return. Volunteers expect symbolic forms of reciprocity, they want refugees to be engaged, to make an effort to achieve goals and to be thankful. The case of Margot illustrates this. Margot is in her mid-seventies and has been active in the Caritas association of her local Catholic parish for decades. She has been involved in helping refugees in her village since 2015 and has turned her garage into a collection point for donations. Margot lives alone in her house, which her adult children long ago left. She is proud that she was able to ensure that all refugee children in the village were well provided for: Indeed, we ve already had several babies born here. And of course, it s quite an effort each time [ ] They re all well taken care of, the babies. That Margot should say, we ve had babies born here, testifies to her pride in and identification with the group of volunteers and all it has accomplished. She says she has invested so much time in helping refugees that she barely finds time to tend to her large garden. As talk moves to the behavior of the young men during the New Year s celebrations in Cologne 3 and she is asked if she had ever had trouble with young men, she replies: On the contrary, they d sweep the pavement and dig up the garden if I asked 3 On New Year s Eve of 2015 hundreds of women were sexually assaulted and robbed around Cologne s train station by a large group of men of which one part were asylum seekers. The event marked a significant change in the public debate on asylum seekers in Germany. The term Kölner Sylvesternacht became a symbol for the fear of large groups of non-integrated male refugees. 7

8 them to. [laughs] But I m not going to go there. It might be helpful sometimes, but Asked if she would not accept such help, she replies: I think I might, but really only in an emergency. I don t want any well, we agreed on that, that we wouldn t want any dependency to come up somehow. It remains unclear with whom such an agreement was made, but what is clear is that Margot refuses to accept favors in return from refugees. She mentions her reluctance to let relations of dependency develop but one might also read this as a reluctance to admit reciprocity. In only very few of the other interviews does direct help on the part of refugees for the benefit of volunteers seem to exist. One (female) volunteer at a regular coffee round for refugees and volunteers said: I m happy to help, but what should they give us in return? We ve got all we need! We want for nothing! Many of the volunteers explicitly seek to limit contact with refugees beyond the help they give. They do not give out their private telephone numbers or addresses, and stress the importance of drawing boundaries. Though return gifts from refugees may not be explicitly desired, this does not mean that volunteers get nothing from their activities on the contrary. They became biographically more active once they had more time at their disposal: All male participants in this study are retirees in search of new tasks. Some of them previously worked in education and now volunteer to give refugees German lessons, assist them in filling in forms, or give them lifts to the local food bank. In this group of volunteers, positive results are expressed particularly in terms of successes. Volunteers are pleased when their students learn German quickly or a problem with a landlord can be cleared up. The larger group of volunteers are women working part-time, whose children are teenagers or have already left home and thus spend less time on parenting and domestic activities. Their assistance to refugee families tends to focus on the women and children. The activities they take on are less well defined than weekly runs to a food bank or a German class, but rather express a more general responsibility for the family concerned. These volunteers find clothing and school supplies for the children, arrange medical appointments, and give advice about tending to infants. One volunteer, Bärbel, refers to her visits as home calls, a term usually associated with medical professionals doing their rounds. Volunteers lay claim to expertise in matters of family life in Germany, giving new value to their biographically acquired knowledge. As moments when they feel they are getting something back, they mention being in contact with babies and children, as well as the gratitude and cordiality with which they are received. Many female interviewees speak of how closely they participate in the refugees family life and how much influence they have on life in refugee 8

9 families. Bärbel, for instance, who has three teenage children and is now supporting an Afghan family who recently had their second child, convinced the family s father to stay with his wife while in labor and to help to care for the baby after it was born. She is pleased to exert some influence on gender norms in the family and it gives her a sense of satisfaction as she says, to notice that her help is welcome and to always be received with such warmth when she visits. Other women working part-time and with older children describe what they receive back from the families they support in similar terms. Daniela, for instance, recalls: Yes, I did enjoy working mainly with kids, right? [ ] And like the gratitude, too, you get from the families. Brigitte, who also works part-time and has grown-up children, says you do get a lot back, and I do quite enjoy that. Lieselotte, who looks after several families, particularly appreciates the refugees hospitality: The friendliness and the hospitality they have, which we, well, I really got to know that again and again, that s a kind of hospitality we don t have here anymore, right? This group of volunteers appreciates little gestures that show them that the gift character of their engagement is appreciated. They relish spending time with children and take pleasure in finding that their experience, their acquired knowledge, is still of value now that their children are older. A gendered pattern of engagement is discernible, in which both sexes act according to patterns formed in their previous lives, into which frame of orientation their expectations of reciprocity can likewise be organized. Whereas many of the male volunteers who get involved in their retirement take pleasure in success and achievement, the women now helping in refugee families, acting as caregivers, tend rather to feel rewarded by emotional experiences of connectedness and gratitude. 2.2 Returning help - Forms of Generalized Reciprocity Many volunteers situate their help within their biographical context in which they themselves were once recipient of help. The older interviewees draw parallels to their own childhoods at the end of the war and the first years after the war, when they witnessed displacement and poverty. They tell in the interviews how they, as children, benefited from the help of others and now wish to offer help themselves as a result. Werner, born in 1947 and a retired IT specialist, explains his motivation for driving refugees from his village to the food bank weekly: 9

10 There s no way you can understand the things they went through at home, the experience of war or being on the run. You have to experience that for yourself. I only know it from the stories told by my mother and grandmother, who were bombed out in Hamburg, twice. It must have been terrible. And then, well, you begin to draw certain parallels. Both Werner s parents had had to leave their hometowns and met in rural northern Germany. They had gone hungry till 1953, when at last they had been able to move into a house with a vegetable garden where they could feed themselves. Werner cannot understand why so many Germans were opposed to admitting refugees when the experience of war was comparatively recent to them: The people from Mainz [the nearest city], they also had a hard time of it during the war, they came out here to the countryside, to, well, just to beg, right? Or they d trade a rug for some eggs, there was a lot of that kind of thing going on. Heinz, too, situates his own efforts as a volunteer in the context of help he received as a child. He, too, is retired and looks after refugees in the small town where he lives. At the time of this interview, he is taking care of three young men from Eritrea, my lads, as he calls them. Y know, I m from, well, if you will, perhaps that s where my feeling, empathy, call it what you will, for poorer people or people who aren t in such a great place comes from [laughs], well, I m, from a place that was well, things weren t exactly looking too bright after the war. His parents house, he says, had been destroyed in an air raid, and they had had to move to Bavaria, where his mother had relations. She has been a very pious woman, and Heinz had many siblings, another little blighter every year, that kind of thing. He had been sick as a child, and the family had moved four times. He had found it hard to keep changing schools, and had been mocked for his Bavarian accent. And yet there s something I really did experience too, that there d always be people who d help me in some way. [ ] That really does you good, and I think it makes you who you are, too, right? Beside his work as a volunteer, Heinz says he donates a largish sum of money each month because he interprets the help he received as a child as so crucial to him life-saving, no less that he would now like to help others in difficult straits. Otto, a retired teacher, arrived with his mother in Germany when he was five. His mother was of German descent and they were allowed to leave Yugoslavia. He remembers that they were 10

11 brought to a village on the back of a truck and the owner of the house they were supposed to live in refused to let them enter. He was standing in front of the house with a rifle. Otto and his mother ended up living in a village close by where they remain to this day. He still recalls the neighbors derogatory remarks about refugees, die Flichting, as they were called in the local dialect. Nevertheless, there were some neighbors who were friendly, helped them, for example by giving them firewood. Those volunteers who as children experienced hardship after the war situate their own engagement in the context of these narrations. They tell of the help they received and of the existential dependency on help in times of crisis. A further form of generalized reciprocity applies when the context of reciprocity may not extend over a longer period of time, but when the own social group is interpreted in a global context of a reciprocity deficit. In this form of generalized reciprocity, helpers see their engagement as giving back for the wealth they themselves enjoy. In this version, the wealth that enables one to help is interpreted as the result of illegitimate gain by means of an unjust global economy. This is the reasoning of Manfred, a retired grammar school teacher who looks after two school-age Syrian youths, helping them deal with officialdom and with their homework: Well, I do believe that we live in a globalized world. There are no borders to traffic in goods, yet when it comes to the movement of people, well, we try to seal ourselves off, because we want to keep our high standard of living for ourselves. Manfred is the only interviewee to situate his own involvement directly in a political context. He understands his engagement in the context of a worldwide unjust distribution of wealth following colonialism. When gifts are given in contexts of generalized reciprocity, return gifts are at the most expected implicitly and vaguely. Time and the equivalent value of the return gift depend on the situation of the giver (Sahlins 1999, 154). The volunteers who are pensioners, who live in their own houses and have no financial worries, now see themselves able to return what they had received either as children in times of need or simply as members of a German middle class in a world marked by great inequalities. To understand their engagement in a context of generalized reciprocity means to interpret their help to refugees not as gifts but as return gifts, which means that refugees are not indebted to them but might potentially reciprocate towards others in a distant future. Obviously, such questions of reciprocity remain tacit but it is my impression that the interactions between volunteers who consider their help as generalized return gifts and refugees display more symbolic equality than those between refugees and volunteers who 11

12 consider their engagement as first gifts. In the latter case there seem to be greater expectations for refugees to display gratitude than in the former. 2.3 Gifts to the Community Helping and Normative Integration Regardless of whether volunteers conceptualize their engagement as gifts or as return gifts, many volunteers consider their help as a gift not only to refugees, but to their own community. For them their engagement is an act in support of German society faced with the task of integrating a large number of new migrants. They help refugees to register their children in schools and find jobs, and they do this not only for the refugees, but also for their fellow villagers or German society at large. Some of them struggle with the degree of influence they try to have on the refugees normative orientations and personal decisions. In the interviews they reflect on the necessity of tolerating everybody s way of life and at the same time they see their own engagement as a means of introducing refugees to their customs and manners. Many of the volunteers have experienced situations in which they had to defend their engagement towards neighbors who made racist remarks and want refugees to leave their village. One volunteer told me: But I do it not just for the refugees, I do it for ourselves as well. And another one said All these people who criticize us for helping refugees and not fellow Germans, they should actually thank us. The refugees would not get along here without our support and who knows what path they d choose if we didn t help them find their way. Many stress how complicated life in Germany is and how easy it is unwittingly to violate one of the bureaucratic rules and end up being fined. From demonstrating the system of waste separation to insisting on only riding a bicycle with a light after dark volunteers explain life in Germany and they often also control compliance with the rules and norms they consider crucial. Brigitte for example is Catholic, and the idea of caritas plays a central part in her involvement. Yet this is not her sole motive: She is convinced that social cohesion is based on helping the needy and that coming to the aid of the less well-off is also a service rendered to the community: I don t believe it s possible to take care of all that with public money, no matter where, with poorer families, too. So I think there ll always have to be somebody who holds out a helping hand to another, whether it s old people or refugee families, so that well, that s what I think makes for living together as a society, too. 12

13 Helping, to Brigitte, is thus not just an individual gift to the needy, but also an integral part of a society s normative integration. She is worried that the many new arrivals might retreat into self-imposed segregation and stresses the role of volunteers as examples and guardians of the social order: If I, as a refugee helper, lead by example and show them how our system works, then there s no mistaking how the cookie crumbles here. And that, I think, is important, for them to know that. Her engagement, in which she looks after an Afghan family with four children, is also an engagement on behalf of her village s normative order and its preservation. When trying to have an impact on the normative orientations of refugee families, one of the topics that many of the volunteers deal with, especially the female ones, are gender roles. Yet the difference in gender norms between Germans in rural areas who mostly form part of traditional milieus, and refugees, many of whom come from traditional milieus as well, may not be so great after all. There seems to be much more agreement here than volunteers in urban activist contexts might have with many of the refugees normative convictions. At one of the regularly occurring meetings between refugees and volunteers over coffee and cake a volunteer told me that it was crucial that the men who arrived here a year ago obtained their working permits as soon as possible: Because the Afghans deal with it just like us. Men go to work and women stay at home and look after the children. Even though this familial division of labor is not the rule in most urban milieus anymore, in many villages it still is a normative reference. Hence there often exist shared convictions about the duties of men and women, and also the more widespread religiosity of inhabitants of rural areas creates understanding and nearness with often religious refugee families across differences in way of life. When I asked Margot if for her as a Catholic it was a problem that in one of the families from Afghanistan she supports, a man lives with two wives, she answered: That is completely okay. The first one was unable to have children. What else should he have done? Just divorce her? It was similar with Abraham and Sarah. Despite those forms of understanding, many volunteers worry that the refugees might not adapt sufficiently. Therefore, their volunteer engagement is not only intended for the benefit of refugees, but also with benefit their own community in mind. In defense of its normative order volunteers exert their power to define the rules of their community and tell them how the cookie crumbles here. In doing so the norms that structure their community are homogenized, the plurality, the contestedness and the contestability of these norms are denied. Volunteers talk little about the question how refugees could help transform this normative order and they 13

14 repeatedly use metaphors that portray refugees as minors that need help with the first steps before they can walk alone. Helping in many cases is entangled with attempts to influence and to control the recipients of help. 3 Solidarity with Whom? Though the distinction between help rendered in a spirit of solidarity on the one hand and charity on the other may represent ideal types, and though the actual contexts of reciprocity within which aid takes place in small villages are much more complex than that distinction would suggest, it is nonetheless illuminating. For it casts light on the normative dimensions of help that go beyond descriptions of the helpers normative orientations. Though volunteers do receive something for their efforts, this does not take the form of gifts in return, which might release refugees from the status of recipients. Though the volunteers who are glad to help, enjoy spending time with children, and feel enriched by contact with a foreign culture may draw value from their engagement, this does not lead to genuine reciprocity. For many refugees, it is unclear whether they will be able to remain in Germany in the long term. This makes it more unlikely that they do become firm members of village communities. Their contact with volunteers is largely limited to activities that fall under the rubric of help. Individual exceptions aside, the help offered to refugees must be considered charitable. Although there are forms of generalized reciprocity, which at first glance might make the volunteers help look solidaristic, to speak of solidarity would require the two other conditions stipulated by Bayertz (1998) to be fulfilled. Yet neither do the volunteers form a community with the refugees with which they identify, nor do common interests exist between the two groups. There are two normative pitfalls to charitable help that the case of refugee support in rural Germany illustrates: First, it easily lapses into paternalism and accords the recipient of gifts an inferior social status. Second, help given as charity is less self-reflexive than when it is offered in solidarity because it dispenses with the need to discuss common aims. It might also be said of help in the mode of charity that it forms fewer long-term bonds than solidarity, because the social ties that result from it are weaker. Nonetheless, the engagement of volunteers in small villages displays a remarkable degree of persistence. Even after two years of fieldwork, nearly all participants in this study remain active. In cities, volunteers effectively terminate their involvement by no longer turning to meetings of the volunteer group. In villages instead, people 14

15 regularly encounter each other as neighbors on the street, making a retreat from engagement possible only as the result of an explicit decision and usually as a result of conflicts or disappointments. Furthermore, the likelihood of the refugee families concerned simply disappearing from everyday life is rather small. Even when help for refugees is charitable, it is simultaneously part of a relationship of reciprocal solidarity, for help to refugees is often given as a contribution to group solidarity with respect to the village community. The object of help is thus not just the refugees, but one s own community, which receives help integrating new arrivals. Emotional ties exist with this community, from which help is in turn expected if needed. A volunteer I interviewed for the second time two years after our first conversation, when asked about why she remains active as a volunteer, responded: If I quit, it just means that Bärbel and Daniela have to do more and that doesn t seem right to me. Relationships of solidarity among inhabitants of small villages are evident in mutual assistance in building houses, doing repairs, or lending each other tools. It includes unremunerated work in the kitchen of the village hall during festivities and supporting the local volunteer fire brigade. The solidarity evident in these relationships refers not to a joint social or political struggle, but must be considered in a strictly sociological sense: Reciprocal relationships exist within a community with which its members identify emotionally. The purpose of these relationships is the preservation of the social and normative order. Such communities are not particularly permeable or diverse, and refugees at least, that is my impression have very little access to them. Conclusions Many volunteers who are engaged in refugee support and understand themselves as activists aim for solidaristic relations with the refugees. Solidarity creates egalitarian bonds among members of a group who share a common goal. Volunteers who support refugees in rural Germany usually do not think of themselves in that sense. Their help to refugees is charitable, being neither based on reciprocity nor a means to a shared transformative goal. Yet their engagement can be understood as solidaristic with the community, as by helping refugees volunteers not least aim to help their village preserve its normative integration. They feel solidaristic to their fellow villagers and especially to their fellow volunteers. Communitization 15

16 occurs among the group of volunteers who coordinate their help, and meet and support each other. Such a use of the word solidarity reveals a limitation of helping others. If helping does not discriminate and is given to anyone in need, it forms charitable relations that are unequal by nature. If help is given in a solidaristic way instead, only those will benefit from it who share a common goal and who have the symbolic and material resources to contribute to that common goal themselves. Generalized forms of reciprocity can weaken the symbolic inequality that comes with helping in a charitable mode. When volunteers understand themselves as potentially vulnerable, when they draw from own experiences of receiving help and when they perceive their help as ending a gift cycle rather than starting one, they impose fewer normative expectations on help receivers. References Adloff, Frank and Steffen Mau (2006): Giving Social Ties, Reciprocity in Modern Society, in: European Journal of Sociology 47 (1), pp Bayertz, Kurt (1998): Begriff und Problem der Solidarität, in: id. (ed.): Solidarität. Begriff und Problem, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Della Porta, Donnatella (2018) (ed): Solidarity Mobilizations in the Refugee Crisis, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Durkheim, Emile (1992 [1893]): Über soziale Arbeitsteilung. Studie über die Organisation höherer Gesellschaften, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Fiegle, Thomas (2003): Von der Solidarité zur Solidarität. Ein französisch-deutscher Begriffstransfer, Münster/Hamburg/London: LIT. Godelier, Maurice (1999): Das Rätsel der Gabe. Geld, Geschenke, heilige Objekte, München: C. H. Beck. Gosden, Diane (2006): What if no one had spoken out against this policy? The Rise of Asylum Seeker and Refugee Advocacy in Australia, in: Portal: Journal of Multidisciplinary International Studies 3 (1), pp Gouldner, Alvin (1973): The Importance of Something for Nothing, in: For Sociology: Renewal and Critique in Sociology Today, London: Allen Lane, p

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