The Untaken Turn: Transnationalism in Political Theory - Inés Valdez: Transnational Cosmopolitanism: Kant, Du Bois, and Justice as a Political Craft. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019. Pp. 210.)

For thirty years, three paradigms have ruled global political theory in the North Atlantic world: statism-nationalism, globalism, and empires-colonialism.¹ We have learned much from each of them. But cast your eye over developments in global history. Or in global sociology, anthropology, and all the humanities, save philosophy. Since the millennium, those disciplines have worked in our three paradigms. But they have been reshaped by a fourth: transnationalism. Indeed, the latter now burgeons in economics, law, and political science. Transnationalism studies exchanges, networks, flows, and entanglements; it sees these as crossing the borders of nations, identities, and regions; it probes how those connections shape their endpoints and their in-betweens; it uncovers how the Global South—and the Global South within the North—transforms the Global North (8); it reveals how seeming isolates and particulars actually connect and parallel each other; it examines South-South interactions; and it listens to how less acknowledged voices train their established counterparts. Throughout, it adopts the viewpoints of those making these exchanges.

By devoting labor and resources to these tasks, you take “the transnational turn.” And, twenty years ago, the disciplines mentioned above did just that. Global political theorists, though, have only occasionally put such questions. And when they have, they receive little uptake. This book seeks to change all that. It offers a transnational paradigm, cut to political theory's peculiar measurements. It rejects statism-nationalism's and globalism's focus on what a globally superprivileged “we” should do about a globally unprivileged “them.” For that neglects the ideas and solidary organizings of people on the margins of powerful states. Think of how Du Bois and his partners created “parallel Versailles Conferences”: the many Pan-African Congresses (22). Those efforts are ignored by statism-nationalism and globalism. This book, however, urges their examination. It thereby summons us to take up the viewpoints of the various “thems” (10, 181). Hence it joins with works that highlight the ideas and agency of those outside the privileged center.²

Yet the book parts company with those in breaking entirely with all three of our ruling paradigms. Against globalism, it argues that we should not think of global patterns when diagnosing and remedying injustices. Instead, we should ponder transnational exchanges and movements. These, in their workings and authority claims, have a fundamentally horizontal character. By contrast, their counterparts in global systems and models are fundamentally vertical (5, 7, 181). We should, the book holds, prefer the horizontal connections and models. For cosmopolitan justice hinges upon them (113–14, 120–23, 145–47, 153–62, 171–74).

Against statism-nationalism, the book objects that its diagnoses and remedies are just as vertical as globalism's (66–69, 179–81). Also, it assumes that each nation-state contains a fundamentally homogeneous group, isolated and different from all the others. For transnationalism, however, all nations entangle each other and interpenetrate. So, indeed, do all states (145–46).

Like Catherine Lu's book, Transnational Cosmopolitanism contests the total-control account of empires and colonialism. That view suggests that the colonized cannot truly innovate or be agents. Instead, they are doomed either to crib the colonizer's products, or to cleave to their precolonial world, pictured as the reverse of the metropole. This book, like Lu's (and Adom Getachew's), rejects such inverse Eurocentrisms.³ For they portray the non-European as either a helpless innocent or a corrupt sellout to European power/knowledge. But unlike Lu's, this book breaks with the entire empires/colonialist paradigm. That thinks in terms of how the empires govern their subjects. Or it probes how the latter grapple with their empire and its ideas, in either the provinces or the capital. Instead, this book studies transnational organizing among the victims of distinct injustices. It highlights how this occurs through migration, travel, and a “transfigured hospitality” whereby different victim groups welcome each other's members (101–2). These tactics expose how discrete injustices unfold at diverse sites (145–46). That then creates transnational counterpublics. The latter diagnose those wrongs and their cross-national origins. They link their victims across those sites, in new ties of solidarity, fellow feeling, and recognition of a shared fate. They build fora and strategies that publicly challenge the injustices and offer alternative visions of social life. And they avow a new, transnational political authority for these coalitions. This contests the nation-state's sovereignty, by blaming it for many injustices done by Euromodernity (161–71).⁴

Hence this book challenges global political theorists to take the transnational turn. It has reoriented so many other disciplines. Why not ours? Why have our own uses of transnational models been so neglected? Especially since Kwame Anthony Appiah's Cosmopolitanism, a touchstone for so many of us, inspects each of transnationalism's facets?⁵ We have, of course, done plenty of work on migrant/refugee admissions and dismissions. We have also done some on trade, and boatloads on the state's incorporation of so-called “immigrant” groups. But this work rarely adopts the viewpoints of the migrant or the trader.⁶ Until now, it has largely thought like those privileged by the state or the global order. For it mostly crafts solutions to problems facing such orders.⁷ Even work that calls itself “transnational” tends this way. It centers on how the state or superstate organizations should manage transnational issues.⁸ By contrast, we have mostly ignored how these elites are reshaped or displaced by transnational connections. And when we have explored it, that work receives less uptake than what we lavish on globalist, empire/colonialist, or statist/nationalist contributions.⁹ The same holds true when we study transnational authority and organization. Those eschew the vertical character of nation-states, of global institutions, or, for that matter, of empires.¹⁰ Thus far, such studies have drawn smaller audiences. True, comparative political theory flourishes. And it has recently been charting multidirectional circulations of political ideas.¹¹ But this book's transnationalism is still difficult and rare. For it studies how the Global North will and should be molded by connections among the ideas and actions of Global Southerners.¹² Will the Dam of the Three Paradigms finally break? We shall see, but I believe that it has been overtopped by Transnational Cosmopolitanism.

My questions concern its approach to injustices. Take first the criteria we should use to diagnose them. How do we know when some social pattern counts as a systematic injustice? What are their major features? Their major types? Their origins and evolution? These questions have been answered generally, for all injustices.¹³ They have also been addressed particularly, for different types of oppression.¹⁴ This book adds to those answers by revealing the cross-national roots and growth of major injustices. I therefore ask: What are the causes and the courses of different injustices like these? How do we know when we face one rather than another? I appreciate that this book wants to let such criteria and diagnoses unfold through the craft of transnational counterpublics. But can more be said? Do those publics’ strategies and discourses offer us any particular criteria? Do they rule out others?

Next, what reasons do its victims have for challenging an injustice? And what of the privileged's reasons? The answer to the first might seem obvious: the harms done them by their victimization. But then what should we think of those victims who decide that the costs of challenging the injustice outweigh the benefits? To decide that, we need to know more about the harms’ moral nature. Either that, or find other reasons for calling the victims to the struggle. As for privileged, well-meaning folks, I appreciate this book's desire to ignore their reasons and duties. Too long have those dominated cosmopolitan thought! But I wonder whether the book's framework lays special duties on such people. Should they cease any complicity in injustice, shut up, and stand aside? Learn about the injustice? Try to experience what the victims undergo? Reject allyship and instead act as deferential surrogates for the victims?¹⁵ Or should we just ignore these questions? So that we may center on the victims’ long-neglected agency?

Finally, what should we think of the slogan of the global Left, “No one is free while others are oppressed”? Is it a fiction? Useful for building coalitions among the privileged and the victims, but contrary to the facts? Or does it trade on an impossibly stringent notion of freedom? One holding that none are free unless everyone has a lot of very good things? Or maybe it hinges on the idea that, if oppressions go unchecked, they will eventually consume everyone? Aimé Césaire said just that about European colonial barbarities. He argued that they recoiled upon Europe itself, through fascist tyranny and the Holocaust. Or perhaps this question, too, centers the privileged. And so should be passed over in silence. What will not be, I suspect, is this book's transnational paradigm.