Transnational Solidarity in Times of Sovereigntist Populism?

With far-right, sovereigntist and largely anti-immigration populism being so steeply on the rise that one would be justified in calling it the defining feature of western politics in the last decade, the multi-lateralist, supra-nationalist, and often properly cosmopolitan global justice literature of the early 2000s appears jarringly outdated. What is the point in proposing blueprints for a cosmopolitan or anyway largely multilateral world order – aimed at redistributing wealth, globalising democracy, and more often than not opening borders – when western politics has so sharply gone the opposite way? Global justice discourse within normative liberal theory appears today to be very much a child of its time – naively optimistic and short-lived. We should just revert back to defending liberal democracy, even in its minimalist and purely domestic form, against illiberal politics. Yet, I want to suggest, there is a different reading available to us. If part of the appeal of several forms of contemporary populism is – as much (if not all) empirical literature argues – a sense of democratic disenfranchisement, then maybe that disenfranchisement can be addressed, and mobilised, in a different direction. We should indeed listen to democratic publics when tell us that their main aim is to re-democratise their *national* democracies, regain control, and acquire some more prosperity – but build a political agenda around the idea that, pace what populists contend, a great deal of *transnational solidarity* is required to do just that. If the hollowing out of democratic politics is largely due to the increased grip of global capital over it, then the main issue to tackle is how to re-embed global capital – not, maybe, to fully destroy capitalism, but to submit its agency to genuinely public and democratic interests. This need not, however, be a cosmopolitan agenda. We can claim that, if we want our national democracies back, we need to tackle some of the common root causes behind their simultaneous hollowing out in different parts of the world - and such root causes cut across national borders. But we must do that to get our national democratic publics *back.* This requires transnational solidarity and political action, but not with cosmopolitan aims. I seek to make a case for this position by drawing both of 19th century European patriotic movements and on contemporary neo-republicanism.