Risk and the cosmopolitanization of solidarities

For classical sociologists, national solidarity was a response to the risks and uncertainties of modernity. National solidarity was said to provide the foundations for social order and justice (Durkheim), serve as the basis for political legitimacy (Weber), and address issues of (in)equality (Marx). Throughout the twentieth century, national solidarity seemed to perform these functions adequately, if often at the expense of those not belonging to the national community. However, with the demise of progress as a cultural prophylaxis to contain the future, it is often said that newly emergent world risks spell the end of solidarity. On this view, risk, individualization, and the cosmopolitanization of life worlds are contributing to the fragmentation of societies and pushing solidarity toward expiration. Yet, this jeremiad is based on an anachronistic notion of solidarity, which does not account for the recent adaptations of nationhood. In contrast, I argue that new global risks are not detrimental to the notion of solidarity but rather serve as a precondition for the emergence of cosmopolitanized solidarities. Global culture and political norms from human rights to environmentalism have catalyzed a reimagining of nationhood itself. In order to grasp new forms of solidarity which buttress this reimagined nationhood, I draw on Ulrich Beck’s distinction between three historically specific iterations of the concept of risk, as something that: can be calculated; is malign and incalculable; has the potential to generate goods.