Transnational Solidarities

This article attempts to revise solidarity from its primary historical meaning as a relationship binding all the members of a single cohesive group or society toward a conception more suitable for the new forms of transnational interrelationships that mark contemporary globalization. It considers the supportive relations we can come to develop with people at a distance, given the interconnections that are being established through work or other economic ties, through participation in Internet forums and other new media, or indirectly through environmental impacts. Solidarity relations will be reconceptualized here as potentially contributing to the emergence of more democratic forms of transnational interaction within regional or more fully global frameworks of human rights, for which I have argued previously. Beyond this, I will also argue that affective relations of solidarity are in fact an essential complement to the recognition of these human rights themselves. This new notion of solidarity is understood here as one of overlapping solidarity networks. It will be seen that this conception also engages the idea of justice, and indeed perhaps of global justice, in an important way. This analysis builds on previous attempts by feminist theorists to articulate a notion of care suitable for politics, such as the work of Fiona Robinson, who develops a conception of global care; Joan Tronto, who theorizes public care in a national context; and Virginia Held, who has recently investigated the impact of care ethics for the consideration of moral relations among nations. I propose that solidarity is in fact a more helpful notion than care for these contexts because it is more suitable for describing the relations of social and political groups and associations to each other, whereas care is most fully applicable to interpersonal relationships. Further, while care has sometimes been seen as a replacement for rights talk, I see both care and solidarity as supplementing and motivating a commitment to equal rights (especially as human rights). Feminist theorists have also articulated a role for empathy in order to illuminate certain features of moral reflection in international affairs, where this signifies an imaginative understanding of the perspective, situation, and needs of others, as a basis for moral action in response to them, and I have also given an argument along these lines. Such accounts have sought in different ways to introduce elements of sentiment or emotional understanding in order to explain the ties that bind people to distant others in this period of greater global integration and that