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Over the past few years, legal scholarship has showed a renewed interest in the principle of solidarity. While this notion is entrenched in many legal texts, it is neither easy to conceptualize nor to defi ne its precise legal meaning. Solidarity is commonly understood as a principle sparking positive values such as cooperation, equality, loyalty, mutual help, compassion or assistance, yet it remains an elusive concept that can be explored from many perspectives. In this regard, solidarity fi nds its most interesting nuances in the specifi c ambit of federalism. Th is paper explores the scope of the principle of (federal) solidarity and illustrates its interconnectedness with other doctrines such as Bundestreue, federal loyalty and cooperative federalism. It argues that federal solidarity goes beyond the idea of altruism or philanthropy as it implies duties of reciprocity between the parties involved. It also contends that, while federal solidarity is implicit in (the mostly German concept of) Bundestreue, these concepts are not identical. Th e paper concludes that federal solidarity encompasses not only a vertical but also a horizontal aspect, in a way that generates interesting applications for federal or otherwise decentralized systems.
