Polycrisis has made solidarity a central yet contested term in EU politics. During the early COVID-19 outbreak, China’s “mask diplomacy” and Europe’s internal disputes over exports and responsibility intensified narrative competition, pushing the EU to reassure Chinese audiences of cooperation while defending the credibility of EU unity. This paper asks how solidarity was articulated in the EU digital public diplomacy towards China, and how these articulations performed in negotiating legitimacy and power asymmetries.

The analysis combines post-structuralist discourse theory with Foucauldian analytics of governmentality. Solidarity is treated as a floating signifier whose meaning is partially fixed through articulation and nodal points that align identities, demands and policy claims. Governmentality helps to analyse embedded rationalities—biopolitical protection, moral obligation, technical coordination and citizen subjectivation. Empirically, the study analyses posts from the EU Delegation to China’s official Weibo account, from February to September 2020, using qualitative discourse analysis.

Four solidarity discourses are identified. (1) EU–China solidarity discourse anchors solidarity in shared vulnerability and mutual assistance, then rearticulates it as conditional on trust, reciprocity and adherence to neoliberal norms. (2) Global solidarity discourse frames COVID-19 as a universal human crisis and legitimises EU leadership via multilateral coordination, humanitarian aid and vaccine governance, while reproducing hierarchy by positioning the EU as a capable, scientific subject and others as objects of care. (3) EU domestic solidarity discourse frames coordination, expertise and resource pooling as both moral duty and technical governance, depoliticising internal conflict and reaffirming supranational authority. (4) EU citizen solidarity discourse forefronts individualism and “human stories”, constructing citizens as self-regulating moral subjects and rendering crisis response as participatory conduct.

Overall, solidarity in EU digital diplomacy toward China operates less as a stable value than as a strategic discursive technology for identity construction and legitimacy claims under crisis. By detailing how solidarity is performed through competing articulations and governing rationalities on Chinese social media, the paper contributes to research on EU external communication, digital diplomacy and the politics of solidarity in transnational crises.

Taken together, these discourses show how a single signifier can be shifted across moral, technical and affective registers to stabilise the EU’s self-presentation vis-à-vis China while re-ordering relations among member states, “global others” and citizens. The paper thereby operationalises solidarity as an empirical, mediated meaning-making process rather than a pre-given norm.

This study examines how Europe’s civilisational authority is reimagined from its political and civilisational margins at a time when global politics is increasingly shaped by authoritarianisation and securitisation. Focusing on Turkish academia’s engagement with the post–October 2023 crisis in Palestine–Israel, the study asks whether and to what extent recent developments have reshaped imaginaries of Europe among educated, professional, and intellectual elite groups in Türkiye, and whether Europe’s long-standing moral and normative authority continues to persist among these groups under conditions of crisis.

Rather than approaching Türkiye as a distant periphery, the paper situates it as a historically entangled margin of Europe—marked by a long trajectory of Westernisation, EU candidacy, and enduring pro-European orientations among intellectual and professional elites. From this position, Europe is imagined not only as a geopolitical actor, but also as a civilisational project associated with universalism, human rights, legal-rational governance, peace, and plural democracy.

Empirically, the study draws on ongoing in-depth interviews with academics in Türkiye, with the research design allowing for extension to bureaucratic and/or business elites. The paper investigates whether the post–October developments have unsettled extant civilisational imaginaries, particularly in light of perceived ambiguities in Europe’s responses to the unfolding humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza and broader Palestine, and the limited mobilisation of ‘universalist human rights’ claims traditionally associated with the European project.

The paper advances the analytical expectation that, rather than producing a uniform erosion of pro-European orientations, the current conjuncture may reveal differentiated and contested forms of engagement with Europe. These range from continued civilisational alignment and selective defence of European norms, to more sceptical reassessments that portray Europe as a weakened global actor in an increasingly securitised and militarised international order, and, in some cases, to the emergence of explicitly Euro-sceptic positions grounded in perceptions of normative inconsistency and moral hypocrisy—particularly where Europe’s self-proclaimed universal values appear selectively applied to non-European contexts. In doing so, the paper contributes to debates on Europe’s global role, the durability of its civilisational hegemony, and the epistemic consequences of international crises for Europe’s margins.

Guided by Ontological Security Theory (OST), this study examines how the Chinese Journal of European Studies (CJES, 欧洲研究)—China’s most authoritative journal on EU integration—conceptualizes EU strategic autonomy through a dialectical understanding of internal and external factors. Moving beyond realist readings that frame Chinese discourse as instrumental or as a rhetorical attempt to rebalance EU–US relations, this study reconstructs China’s internal value logic using Chinese high school compulsory Ideology and Politics textbooks (中国高中思想政治必修教材). Universally taught and institutionally mandated, these textbooks serve as the most widely disseminated carriers of China’s ontological values and value-security concerns, enabling a non-speculative understanding of Chinese perspectives on EU strategic autonomy.

CJES scholarship embeds independent autonomy (独立自主), non-interference (不干涉他国内政), sovereign integrity and territorial completeness (主权和领土完整), and strategic autonomy (战略自主) within a dialectical framework in which internal factors are decisive and external pressures operate only through internal vulnerabilities. Applied to EU integration—often illustrated through EU–US relations—this framework demonstrates that external pressure is effective only when internal cohesion is weak. CJES scholars therefore project independent autonomy onto the EU, emphasizing institutional integrity, unified decision-making, and internal consistency as prerequisites for genuine strategic autonomy.

From an OST perspective, strategic autonomy in Chinese discourse reflects an internally coherent ontological value rather than a tactical response to external power politics. By foregrounding internal coherence over geopolitical balancing, this study offers a contextually faithful account of Chinese perspectives on EU integration and provides EU scholars with a dialectical lens to reconsider strategic autonomy, resilience, and common misinterpretations in EU–China debates.

This paper introduces the concept of multiplex polarisation to describe the coexistence of deep norm polarisation and what Amitav Acharya terms a multiplex world order. On the one hand, multiplexity captures how geopolitical and normative divides—such as West/Rest, North/South, East/West, liberal/illiberal—are increasingly blurred, as illustrated by the challenge to the EU’s liberal democratic values from within its own Member States. On the other hand, norm polarisation accounts for the increasing hardening of frontiers around contested issues in global politics, including those related to gender, sexuality, climate change, sexual and reproductive rights, and questions of race and Europe’s colonial past. In short, global politics are marked by the simultaneous blurring and hardening of frontiers, with significant implications for the EU’s role as a promoter of contentious norms. Drawing on arguably one of the most contentious and controversial issues in global politics—LGBTIQ equality—the paper abductively develops multiplex polarisation as a concept that captures how resistance to and support for contested norms are increasingly decoupled from traditional geopolitical and normative alignments. First, multiplexity and norm polarisation are co-articulated to yield the notion of multiplex polarisation, characterised by entrenched lines of conflict that cut across established divides. Second, the paper illustrates multiplex polarisation through examples of anti-LGBTIQ contestation among EU actors in both internal and external relations, and discusses the implications for how the Union can and should navigate the simultaneous blurring and hardening of frontiers in its promotion of contested issues in global politics.