How Should Republicans Conceive of Solidarity Beyond Borders?

Abstract

This article defends a set of three apparently mutually inconsistent claims and shows how they can and should be simultaneously held. First, that one of the most pressing normative problems we face is constituted by the wealth of opportunities for transnational domination—of states by other states, of states and individuals by supranational organizations and institutions as well as transnational corporations, of vulnerable individuals by powerful ones. Second, the most appropriate way to tackle this issue, far from being the implementation of a cosmopolitan agenda, is the strengthening of states and their problem-solving capacities. Third, this agenda toward the (re-)strengthening of states requires a demanding form of transnational solidarity, if one that significantly differs from more traditional liberal notions of cosmopolitan solidarity.

Contemporary republicanism is commonly understood to have a progressive aspiration, yet a bounded scope. Given the demanding institutional prerequisites and civic engagement required to sustain a genuine republic (see e.g., Pettit 1989), this can only succeed—so the argument goes—within a bounded polity which is contained in size, has a vigilant citizenry, and already displays a significant level of internal cohesion. A global republic is a contradiction in terms. Over the last 10 to 15 years, however, a small yet significant number of republican authors have taken a different route. The idea has been that domination enables us to pin down, much more accurately than liberal theories of distributive justice, both what exactly is wrong about the current global order and what can be made right through republican institutional solutions (e.g., Laborde 2010; Martí 2010). For some of these authors, addressing cross-border domination (whether trans- or international)¹ means breaking the republican taboo head on, and embracing the idea of a global republic—if deeply decentralized (Martí 2010).

I share this diagnostic enthusiasm (e.g., Laborde and Ronzoni 2016). I have doubts, however, as to whether such diagnosis should necessarily lead to a dismissal of republicanism's traditional allegiance to a polity-based focus (ibid.; Ronzoni 2017a, 2017b). The crucial point here is that emphasis on states need not be complacent to the status quo. On the contrary, it can enable us to denounce how the current system of global governance leads to the domination of polities in a way that undermines their capacity to be genuinely self-determining and thus causes the domination of their citizens and residents as well. If this is true, quite a lot needs to change, but not necessarily toward the creation of a global republic of sorts: our creativity must be focused, instead, on how to guarantee the joint, simultaneous free statehood of all polities in an interdependent world.

Good republican governance is usually deemed to require sufficient subsidiarity (political power must be close enough to the people so that it can be under their ultimate control), a manageable size of the demos, and a good level of civic engagement and cohesion. While such a kind of political entity need not necessarily coincide with states as we know them today, the latter remain, it seems, its best existing approximation, in spite of all their flaws. Although states make plenty of mistakes of their own, transnational and international domination can undermine their very capacity to be republics worth the name. Bluntly put, it transforms would-be republics in “post-democracies” of sorts (Crouch 2004)—hollowed-out polities that, in spite of formally having democratic institutions, are under pressure to come across as responsible actors to, for instance, global investors and financial capital, at the cost of failing to represent their own citizens to an adequate degree (Mair 2009, 2013). The issue is how to restore and maintain genuine free statehood within such a context—this is far from a defense of the status quo; on the contrary, it requires rethinking fundamental aspects of global governance, yet with a specific rationale.

The diagnosis that the current global order leads to the domination of polities seems more immediately plausible in some cases than in others. When the International Monetary Fund imposes prohibitive reform agendas on some countries as a condition for its support, the appropriateness of this model is straightforward; when we focus on transnational cases, where certain nonstate actors affect other nonstate actors across borders, maybe less so. Take, for instance, transnational supply chains, through which transnational corporations, according to global justice activists, exploit vulnerable workers in poor countries. While this is undoubtedly a pressing concern, what also often happens in these cases is an erosion of state capacity at multiple levels. The exploitative conditions to which workers in hosting countries are subjected are often the result of transnational corporations having the power to pressurize the governments of those countries into keeping local labor standards low, or to look the other way when regulations are violated. What is more, transnational corporations can use the threat to relocate as political leverage with jurisdictions that offer stronger labor protections, as well, by forcing them to dismantle them in order to prevent capital flight and keep jobs (even if worse jobs at that). Indeed, this can often happen in modalities that follow the republican rulebook: the dominator often does not even need to act, or explicitly threaten to act; the sheer possibility that they might is enough to lead the dominated to anticipate their moves and adjust their behavior. The same can occur, mutatis mutandis, for tax competition (see, e.g., Dietsch 2015; see also Ronzoni 2014).

This is, of course, a very blunt oversimplification; it is useful, however, to point out two crucial things. First, individuals and specific social groups are often at the mercy of transnational forces because the latter have managed to hollow out domestic institutional protections.² Second, if the case of transnational supply chains is representative at all, a way “back” to free statehood is not a journey back to Westphalian sovereignty. Dani Rodrick famously argues that democracy, national independence, and fully globalized markets cannot mutually co-exist (2011); yet, in suggesting that, if we want to preserve the first two, we have to slow down globalization, he does not advocate the elimination of global governance altogether. He makes, instead, the case for a new “Bretton Woods compromise,” adjusted to the twenty-first century—that is, a rich system of global governance, yet one that puts healthy domestic democratic life and prosperity at the core of its agenda. This might entail the active limitation of some forms of barrier-free global market activity (say, via capital controls), but it does so in a commonly concerted, reliable, and robust manner.

As already stated, I have defended this insight elsewhere. This article provides a brief restatement of this view, but its main aim is a different, and further, one: provided one finds such an account persuasive, can there be a feasible and plausible account of cross-border political solidarity that can sustain the kind of political action and institution-building required to realize such a vision? Norms and institutions aimed at giving power back to polities will be very different from a global republic, however conceived; for instance, they may require some proactive undoing—such as some scaling back from deep economic and financial integration. However, this approach will nevertheless involve demanding and ambitious reforms. This is a very delicate balancing act; we want institutions that are strong enough to secure the non-domination of polities, yet such institutions must carefully fall short of taking over the sovereign powers normally attributed to states. How can the motivational resources for a political agenda of this kind be garnered? Many, after all, understandably doubt that the solidarity required to build and maintain a global polity can be sustainable; the kind of solidarity required by this model seems, at face value, even harder to achieve. It embraces the idea that we should locate our main source of political engagement and identity within our own polity, yet embark on a demanding agenda of global political transformation at the same time. It asks us to link arms and not to link arms with our fellow humans beyond borders at the same time; we must act transnationally in order to create the conditions that will sustain our domestic republican political life, which is what ultimately matters most. In other words, it seems to add schizophrenia to over-demandingness.

In this article, I try to suggest that we might be cautiously optimistic about this kind of solidarity after all. It is, I argue, a two-level solidarity, with your own citizens and with the citizens of other polities in similar plights—but without merging the two into one. It is a solidarity among demoi, among peoples facing similar challenges, without the aim to create a new supranational demos. I suggest that this kind of solidarity might have some purchase in spite of its complexity—because it involves, at closer look, the kind of enlightened self-interest which underpins other paradigmatic kinds of solidarity. What is more, it has been appealed to before in the history of republican thought and activism (especially in the fight against the Ancien Régime in nineteenth-century Europe); indeed, mutatis mutandis, it is the kind of sentiment that is already being mobilized, quite successfully, by right-wing and sovereigntist populists. What we need is a framing narrative, and a key set of unifying political goals, to mobilize a similar kind of two-level solidarity toward more progressive aims.

The remainder of the article unfolds as follows. The second section briefly sketches the republican outlook which I endorse. The third section defines the concept of solidarity. The fourth section offers a rough but hopefully promising account of what republican solidarity beyond borders might look like.

The Republican Ideal

What is republicanism? Different things to different people, of course. I am primarily concerned with what republicanism might entail as a theory of justice, rather as a conception of freedom only (see also Laborde 2010; Lovett 2010; Pala forthcoming). In other words, given that non-domination is the best interpretation of freedom, what does that entail for demands of justice? To put it simply, it entails holding the view that claims of justice are mainly structured around the fundamental entitlement to enjoy the status of non-domination. Other classical claims championed by liberal theories—such as those to specific distributive benefits—may then derive from such a status, as a way of expressing or protecting it. The entitlement to non-domination is, thus, the organizing principle around which different demands are structured. Disagreement can of course arise, within the republican family, about the latter are to be understood. What form of democracy is to be preferred (see e.g., Bellamy 2007 vs Pettit 2012)? For people to escape the economic vulnerability that will expose them to domination, is it enough for them to be free from poverty, or do inequalities have to be positively reduced as well? Yet, the gist should be clear: we do not have a rigid separation between, say, social justice and democracy, but a complex claim to non-domination that generates a plurality of interconnected demands.

What is, however, the scope of republican justice so conceived? There is a very basic, yet important, sense in which republicans cannot but be cosmopolitans at the most fundamental moral level³: everybody has a right not to be dominated by anybody else, period. For those who see justice as a matter of distributive entitlements, it makes perfect sense to ask whether obligations of justice apply among all moral agents per se, or only arise out of salient relations, such as shared citizenship or participation in a scheme of social cooperation. It is, instead, much less plausible to deny that the entitlement to non-domination is held by everybody against everybody else—it is, one would think, never acceptable for someone to be exposed to domination. Thus, we must set up the world in such a way that everybody be protected as best as possible against domination, whatever that way is.

Beyond this very basic point, however, things become more complex. In particular, such fundamental moral cosmopolitanism need not translate into the project of a global polity. On the contrary, the majority of republicans still believe that, on balance, the best way approximate non-domination for all is to ensure that everybody lives in bounded, not excessively large, and reasonably cohesive republics, whose fate they steer themselves. Reliably preserving non-domination over time requires healthy democratic institutions; a sufficient level of subsidiarity; a reasonable degree of simplicity and transparency about how decisions are taken and how they can be democratically determined; and a vigilant citizenry. All of this seems incompatible with a distant world government or with an overly complicated and dispersive multilevel system of transnational governance (Ronzoni 2017b). Thus, a world divided in sub-global polities such as states seems overall preferable for everybody's sake—as long as we have reasonably open procedures in place for the reshaping of boundaries when this is democratically requested. The claim not to be dominated is held against everybody else; yet, if non-domination requires a world divided in democratic polities genuinely capable of making different political choices, this will inevitably lead to different duties for those who are members of different political communities. Such a justification for differentiated duties is, however, very different from those encountered in the liberal egalitarian literature (e.g., Blake 2001; Sangiovanni 2007).

Yet, there is one more twist in the plot. The republican account sketched so far must be unavoidably concerned with the complex ramifications of global interdependence. We all have a claim to live in a republic worth the name, and this also means that polities must themselves not be dominated—be it by other states, international organizations, or transnational actors. In a globally interdependent world, this requires taking a number of proactive steps. Formal sovereignty and lack of overt, active interference are not enough: a post-democratic polity, which has regular elections and is formally independent, but whose most important decisions are de facto taken far away from democratic scrutiny, is not a republic worth the name—especially if the reasons for such post-democratic structure are due to external pressures. Hence, protecting the free statehood of all will involve a fair amount of supranational institutional scaffolding.

A good way of capturing this insight is to say that it leads to a demoi-cratic project of sorts. In the literature on the European Union, the demoi-cratic ideal is put forward to describe a model which goes beyond sheer intergovernmental cooperation of the kind that leaves sovereignty intact, yet falls short of creating a full-blown supranational demos—a demoicracy is a ‘Union of peoples [not a people] who govern together, but not as one’ (Nicolaïdis 2013: 351). This occurs when different, yet interdependent, democratic polities acknowledge that they unavoidably affect one another's democratic health in problematic ways, and that this generates reciprocal obligations to do whatever is necessary to secure the joint and reciprocal⁴ freedom of all. This is a form of joint rule of sorts; yet, since its aim is to protect the joint freedom of all demoi, it falls short of creating a new demos. You might say that a demoicracy is a democracy of demoi, that is, one whose citizens are not individuals but different democratic peoples who govern together on matters of protection of their joint freedom and equality qua demoi. Whether, at the institutional level, this is a genuine new model, alternative to both intergovernmentalism and federalism (ibidem) or a very thin form of federalism with a distinctive agenda (Ronzoni 2017a) is a question for another day.⁵ What matters here is that the aim is not to create a new global demos but to secure the joint freedom of all demoi, yet the project must be serious about how much institutional scaffolding this requires. Just like Rodrik's idea of a new Bretton Woods, domestic democracy is the aim but with a clear recognition that international laissez-faire is not to way to achieve it.

As acknowledged in the first section, the aim of the present section is not to defend this view comprehensively, for that would be impossible within the scope of this contribution—what I have sought to offer is a “good enough,” yet inevitably oversimplified, sketch. My main aim here is a different one. Even for those who might find this view initially attractive, the question spontaneously arises: can people gather the sufficient motivational resources to pursue and maintain a project of this kind? Can different demoi and their citizens sustain sufficient solidarity with one another, especially when the starting point is presumably characterized by at least some mutual distrust, given that current transnational dynamics are weaponized by some countries at the expenses of others (as is the case, for instance, with tax competition)? After all, one of the reasons why republicans think that polities must be reasonably limited in size and sufficiently cohesive in quality is their skepticism about the capacity of an excessively large, diverse, and artificially united demos to display the level of civic engagement and vigilance needed to sustain a republic worth the name. Have we not ended up in a situation where we are asking roughly the same kind of large-scale engagement of people, yet in an even more complex way, and with an even more complex aim?

What Is Solidarity?

Before we can provide an answer to this question, let us try and zoom in on how the idea of solidarity is best understood. The concept of solidarity is notoriously evasive; yet, even if some speak about it as a mere feeling, solidarity is different from sheer empathy with the plight of others. You do not merely display some feeling toward others when solidarity is at stake—solidarity as a concept would be redundant otherwise: you stand in solidarity with them. The origin of the term might provide a clue here: in Roman Law, being in solidum with someone meant incurring “a joint contractual obligation in which each signatory declared himself liable for the debts of all together” (Sangiovanni and Viehoff 2023). Thus, whatever solidarity is exactly, it must be something more than a feeling to be a distinctive concept: it is not just compassion for someone else's fate but also willingness to share that fate.

Within this broad understanding, several different kinds of “solidarity” are often spoken about:

1. Solidarity can be seen as a stand one takes toward those who are suffering an injustice or another form of adversity, regardless of whether one is implicated in it. I can, for instance, run to offer help in the aftermath of a natural disaster.

2. Alternatively, solidarity can be seen as an attitude one has toward those who are suffering an injustice similar to something one has oneself suffered—for instance, New Yorkers in 2005 standing in solidarity with Londoners after the London Tube terrorist attack. Understood in this way, standing in solidarity with you is rendered possible by knowing what you are going through because I have been there myself.

3. Finally, one can see solidarity as a form of joint action arising from a common fate—which is often (but not always) negatively connotated as a shared adversity, oppression, or injustice—whereby solidaristic action is aimed at overcoming it. Understood in this way, solidarity is importantly connected to some form of enlightened self-interest: acting together is necessary to end an injustice/oppression which we jointly suffer. Worker solidarity in a strike is a clear example here.

A crucial distinction to appreciate the difference between these three accounts is that between solidarity among and solidarity with (Sangiovanni and Viehoff 2023). The former describes a relation among members of the same salient social group. Solidarity among entails some level of symmetry in the attitudes, dispositions, and indeed objective social position of those who stand in solidarity with one another. The idea, in a nutshell, is to stand together vis-à-vis a common fate—(3) is clearly a form of solidarity among. Solidarity with describes, instead, a one-directional relation: it is about attitudes and actions which some agents have or perform toward some others. Number (1) is clearly a form of solidarity with; (2) can possibly be both depending on circumstances; yet type 3 remains the paradigmatic example of solidarity among. I follow Sangiovanni (2023) in restricting solidarity to solidarity among. Solidarity with is virtually undistinguishable from concepts such as charity or support for a good cause, and thus make the concept of solidarity redundant (ibid.). The key defining feature of solidarity is a feeling of commonality stemming from a shared fate, and which generates a motivation for collective action.

Understood in this way, there should be enough solidarity among those who must act together in order, say, to resolve a common adversity. It is what we have in mind when we ask questions such as: will workers be able to have enough solidarity with one another to continue striking until they win their industrial dispute? The view I have sketched in the second section entails that citizens of different polities must have type 3 solidarity with one another in order to solve the problem of state domination in the current world order. Yet, their main source of political identity should carry on residing within their own different polities. Is this even possible? It seems that, even if the view were correct about everything else, its reliance on an unrealistic kind of type 3 solidarity might be a crucial flaw. If what is required is solidarity among actors from whom it is unreasonable to expect it, then the overall project seems doomed. Motivational skeptics about institutional cosmopolitanism doubt that the solidarity required for such types of projects is possible. The kind of solidarity required here might seem even more chimerical; it appears not only over-demanding but also schizophrenic and erratic. It asks us to act in solidarity with other polities, yet it also encourages us to remain anchored to our own polity when it comes to our fundamental political identity. How can this tension be addressed?

Republican Solidarity beyond Borders

So, can we have solidarity between the citizens of different polities, and indeed even between specific groups in different polities (e.g., workers at different junctures of a transnational supply chain), when the aim is to animate them not toward a global institutional project but toward a future where they can each go back and take care of their own different political homes? In this final section, I suggest that we have reason to be cautiously hopeful.

An important 2017 survey asked EU citizens to choose which metaphor they saw as more apt for the European Union: a common home, an apartment building, a courtyard, or a sinking ship. The winning metaphor, by a decent margin, was that of an apartment building (Ferrera and Burelli 2019). Interviewees thus rejected the metaphor of a common home, but what they went for is still demanding, and surprisingly sophisticated. The apartment building metaphor is surprisingly congenial with the picture I have tried to sketch so far: we all have our own homes within it but also common structural issues (and common enemies, e.g., greedy developers and gentrifiers) to solve so that our homes can work properly. We owe it to others in the building to stand in solidarity with them, yet doing so is also in our own long-term interest. Yet, the metaphor also acknowledges that we must go through a loop in order to get back to an enhanced version of the place we took off from: our individual homes, but better—more robustly protected and more secure. Translated into the specific argument I have sketched thus far, we have reasons to stand in solidarity to tackle those international and transnational dynamics that, if left unchecked, would sink all our individual homes and ships.

This is neither simply an issue of expanding the circle of solidarity, nor one of multiplying types of solidarity into a messy plurality of interlocking kinds. In successful apartment buildings, this is clearly possible. If the survey is indicative, it might suggest that something similar is possible for the different peoples of Europe.⁶ Can this kind of solidarity take off even beyond Europe? Well, of course the proof is in the pudding, and we'll never know unless we try; yet, if we frame the issue in this way, it is possible to see that historical examples of this kind not only exist but also have a clear republican pedigree. What I have in mind in particular are the original “nationalists:” not contemporary liberal nationalists, but nineteenth-century European republican patriots. These intellectuals and activists had a common enemy (the Ancien Régime) and a clear awareness that they had to stand in solidarity with one another in order to fight it. This is what grounded networks among patriot leaders and activists of different countries in exile: similar strategies being tried out in different local insurrections and revolutions across Europe, and the development of common intellectual tools (Nabulsi 2006; White 2003). Yet—with some important exceptions—the idea was not to create a new common home: what European patriots wanted was to establish republics in their own respective countries, and they had different plans for each of them. This was a complex solidarity, but of a complexity that ordinary citizens can perhaps be trusted to handle—its slogan could be framed more or less like this: if you want to get rid of your nasty (and in many cases foreign) monarch, you have to fight the whole system that sustains the Ancien Régime. With the right framing narrative, it is a kind of solidarity whose necessity can be effectively communicated to people, and which can take off—indeed, it has already happened. Solidarity strikes in different countries along the same transnational supply chain, or in support of anti-colonial struggles, are relevant historical examples.

Mutatis mutandis, this is nothing but what republican demoi-cracy is about. Do you want a republic and a democracy still worth the name—not a hollow one, where all decisions have basically been taken elsewhere? Then you must act together with different polities in similar positions. Like for nineteenth-century European republican patriots, this need not involve the creation of entirely new and artificial structures for political action. Traditional national parties can, for instance, be the driving forces of this shift, by construing framing narratives capable of delivering the message that certain domestic fights can only be won with cross-border coordination. This kind of coordination can, for instance, take place among ideologically congenial parties in different polities, with the aim of putting similar items on domestic agendas on a concerted and thus much strengthened way (“if you elect us, we will fight for capital controls [or a global minimum tax rate?] with our ideological allies all over the world”). Coordinated industrial actions by unions in different countries are another great example. Indeed, this is not only sufficiently close to what we already know but also can even reinvigorate domestic democratic life by giving people hope that, if we act together, change will actually be possible in a way that no longer seems fathomable in our post-democratic slumber. What is particularly striking is that right-wing sovereigntist populists are, paradoxically, the ones who are already and most successfully playing this game: they are already coordinating their agendas in a concerted, transnational way—within the European Union in particular but also in their foreign policy more generally. If Marine Le Pen can persuasively claim that she is against globalization out of reasons of solidarity rather than selfish nationalism, because “globalisation consists in selling goods made by slaves to the unemployed” (2012, Interview to ‘Servizio Pubblico,’ on Italy National Broadcasting Channel RAI 1, May 3, 2012), there is no reason why more progressively minded republicans cannot mobilize similar insights for more demoi-cratic aims.

Finally, like nineteenth-century republican and striking workers, this is clearly solidarity among. It is solidarity among the citizens of polities with similar challenges, which must act together in order to address them. As already acknowledged, the proof is in the pudding—yet it is worth trying.