Risk and the cosmopolitanization of solidarities

Abstract

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.

Keywords:

• Ulrich Beck
• cosmopolitanism
• solidarity
• risk communities
• neo-nationalism

Acknowledgments

The author would like to thank the anonymous reviewers and the editors for comments on earlier drafts.

Notes

1. There are notable exceptions conceptualizing solidarity in the global context. Most of them are written by political theorists, some escaping the normative proclivities of their field and tuned in to sociological processes (Bayertz 1999; Pensky 2008). Presenting the long history of solidarity and its malleability, Brunkhorst (2005) offers a synthesis of the works of Habermass and Luhman, where the idea of an integrated global legal community and a shared discursive universe are the pivots of world society.

2. The English translation followed in 1992 as Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity (Beck 1992).

3. Beck spent considerable intellectual energy in the last 10 years of pushing for a path-dependent approach (Beck and Sznaider 2006) yielding empirical efforts to examine the trajectories of risk societies in Asia and elsewhere (Beck and Grande 2010). In 2012, Beck was awarded a multi-year Advanced Investigator Grant from the European Research Commision. The project entitled ‘Methodological Cosmopolitanism – In the Laboratory of Climate Change’ was cut short by his untimely death. First results, spanning a wide array of case studies, were published in a special issue of the journal Current Sociology (Beck 2015).

4. The term ‘Regime’ carries technical meaning here and refers to an international set of explicit or implicit ‘principles, norms, rules, and decision-making procedures around which actor expectations converge in a given issue-area’ (Krasner 1983: 1).

5. Beck himself sees World Cities as the privileged site and catalyst for cosmopolitan communities of risk. In World Cities, the clashes of global risks become matters of everyday experience and politics. When we speak of world cities as forming a cosmopolitan “community” of global risks, then, this terms does not stand in opposition to, but instead includes, such clashes and conflicts. (Beck 2016, 180)

6. This fragmentation should not be confused with any kind of pluralism as we are also witnessing the oligopolization of global media mergers and their dominance (Herrmann and McChesney 2001).

7. Despite Beck’s recognition that the social construction and symbolic representation of risks is crucial, the link of media, risk, and cosmopolitanism remains undertheorized in his earlier work. For a constructive critique of Beck’s often contradictory approach to the media, producing lay-reflexivity, on the one, and reproducing a limited understanding of risk, on the other, see Mythen (2004).

8. Unlike the original formulation of ‘Media Events’ by Dayan and Katz (1992), global media events do not imply consensual and integrative functions.

9. The list of scholars who have addressed the cosmopolitanizing potential of media coverage, especially with regards to Beck’s trinity of climate, financial and security related risks, is by now extensive, ranging from theoretical concerns (Hannerz 1990; Holton 2009), conceptual forays (Ong 2009), to media specific observations (Chouliaraki and Blaagaard 2014; Christensen and Jansson 2015) and numerous case studies (Christensen 2012; Mao 2014).