Cosmopolitan Solidarities of Difference in a broken World

Abstract

In my paper, I develop from Hannah Arendt’s views an understanding of cosmopolitan solidarity characterized by plurality and difference and how it can offer possibilities of acting politically through multiple, interlocking layers of critical solidarity across differences. When polities divide their citizens through geographical borders and identity frames, the role of the political is to transcend these frontiers to open up new avenues for acting politically. Solidarity has a distinctive political character, which sets it apart from legal and moral norms. It allows people to disengage from any form of naturalistic ties based on a shared gender, society, nation, or race and thereby, rebuild the public sphere that the totalitarian mechanism threatens to dismantle. It is an exercise in ‘enlarged mentality’ or the capacity for thinking one’s way into the viewpoint, the position and the experience of other people. It is a shared responsibility to act on behalf of others in a coexistence and not merely an empty claim of support.