From Domestic to Global Solidarity: The Dialectic of the Particular and Universal in the Building of Social Solidarity

Abstract

Contemporary moral and political philosophers who analyze the concept of solidarity tend to be divided between (philosophical) pragmatic communitarians and neo-Kantian universalists. The pragmatic communitarians contend that the bonds of mutual care that characterize a solidaristic community are constituted within particular societies where members share a strong common identity. 1 To construct a “we,” these theorists argue, particular groups define themselves against an “other.” In contrast, those writing in the Rawlsian or neo-Kantian tradition claim that human cooperative endeavors can only be sustained over time if carried out under just conditions of mutual respect. Thus, Charles Beitz and Thomas Pogge contend that today’s interdependent global society morally necessitates us to extend Rawls’s “difference principle” across borders. 2 The communitarian position emphasizes the exclusionary side of democratic sovereignty. The demos is self-defined, and, in the absence of a global state, must exclude others. But an overly pragmatic defense of particularism denies the universal impulse of democracy’s commitment to the equal moral worth of persons. A conception of community membership as static and given negates the historical reality that social movements of the excluded resort to universalist arguments when demanding to be included in the democratic polity. The egalitarian logic of democratic solidarity involves the equitable sharing of the risks, burdens, and opportunities of an interdependent society across lines of race, gender, and class. Thus, particular movements for democratic inclusion inevitably press their potential fellow citizens toward a more capacious and universal conception of equality. But, thus far, the sharing of social risk has only been achieved at the level of the state (with some social and human rights being institutionalized on a regional level within the European Union [EU]). Transnational movements for environmental, labor, and human rights have had modest successes and, upon occasion, the international community responds generously to natural disasters (but more unevenly to massive violations of human rights, as in Rwanda, the former Zaire, or Darfur). The neo-Kantian position underestimates the difficulty of transforming a transnational “ought” into a regional, let alone international “is” of effective human, labor, and environmental rights. The road to greater international solidar