5 - Cosmopolitanism from below: on solidarity

Summary

For solidarity, because it partakes of reason, and hence of generality, is able to comprehend a multitude conceptually, not only the multitude of a class or a nation or a people, but eventually all mankind.

(Arendt 1963: 88)

Introduction

The final mode of practice of global justice to be considered in this book is solidarity, for, as the previous chapters suggest, it constitutes the ground into which progressive global civil society actors are anchoring other forms of struggle for universal civil-political and socio-economic rights. Apart from the fact that the weaving of ties of mutuality across borders is required for the labour of bearing witness, forgiveness, foresight and aid to be viable, cosmopolitan solidarity stands as the culmination of the work of global justice; beyond the commonplace calls for a planetary consciousness lies a more robust and radical sense of cosmopolitan responsibility for the substantive realization of human rights and opposition to structural injustices in all parts of the world. Indeed, the unprecedented coupling of transnational economic integration and cultural diversity – a coupling for which the term ‘globalization’ often comes to stand as shorthand – has prompted many prominent figures to call for a new cosmopolitanism or internationalism among the world's peoples. However, the advent of an extreme form of neoliberalism that exacerbates already glaring domestic and global disparities in wealth distribution as well as of a ‘clash of fundamentalisms’ pitting co-constitutive and Manichean brands of religious extremism to one another (Ali 2002) clearly indicate that a progressive cosmopolitan world order is far from being a necessary outcome of globalizing tendencies.