Conclusion

What should be the nature of bonds between ethnically diverse citizens, and what kinds of interventions serve to bind divided populations are pressing questions that will always produce open answers rather than complete theoretical closure. Pinning down an ironclad formula for the expansion of solidarity is next to impossible, given the empirical variability in conditions that give rise to conflict and call for contextual variability in institutional responses. Moreover, to the extent that solidarity’s core demands of answerability and autonomy sit together in tension, normative definitions of the phenomenon can only ever court controversy. Different individuals will pass different value judgements on the extent to which one constituent element of solidarity can legitimately encroach on the other, ensuring solidarity remains a topic of lively debate within academic and policy circles....

Non-essentialist Solidarity

Chapter 1 develops a pluralist account of solidarity against monist assertions tying the phenomenon to national essences. The notion that diverse citizens become obligated towards one another only through sharing national commonalities is a deeply influential one. However, it is argued such monist insights need to be rejected, as they are founded on mistaken assumptions about the nature of collective identity and imply a programme of national socialisation that is both normatively unsustainable and lacks practicality in contexts of deep diversity. In the place of this essentialist thinking, the chapter advances a concept of solidarity that avoids dependence on shared cultural attributes. Solidarity, it proposes, is what differently situated actors experience when they are prepared to respect each other’s stated desires for self-determination, recognition and distribution.

Introduction

Consider the following items of news: Mark Boyd, an 18-year-old Protestant youth, is knocked down by a hit-and-run driver on ‘the Shankill’, the notorious stretch of road running through West Belfast’s Loyalist heartland. Laying in agony with a broken leg, two men approach him to offer assistance. But before doing so, they summon him to sing the Sash, the sectarian song popular among Northern Ireland’s Protestant population. Unfortunately, Mark does not know its words. In spite of all his assertions that he is Protestant and not Catholic, he is set upon by the would-be good Samaritans, only escaping a potentially worse fate at their hands by fleeing to a nearby take-away store....

Transnational Advocacy Networks and Conditionality

Chapter 4 explores the mechanisms through which political actors in positions of power can be influenced to dismantle unjust decision-making and legal structures from which they benefit. It is argued that when such actors are hostile towards principled reform and have the ability to withstand democratic challenges to their privileged position, a combination of civil disobedience and intervention by actors external to the society is required to compel them out of their intransigence. The chapter presents conditionality and transnational networking as practical expressions of this mode of structural change and considers how these practices can inform future efforts at principled reform.

Three Models of Coexistence

Chapter 2 examines some prominent models of multicultural coexistence, and defends deliberative models as most consistent with the demands of solidarity. Through their emphasis on reason-giving and empathetic imagining, deliberative models offer a basis for the practical and democratic realisation of solidarity’s core tenet of responsibility across difference. Nevertheless, it is also conceded that a deliberative approach brings with it its own set of problems that impede the expansion of solidarity. Specifically, where deliberation ensues from a starting point of marginalisation and disrespect, we can expect it to replicate, rather than overcome, these non-ideal conditions. The final section brings this problem to light in preparation for the subsequent chapters, which focus on how it can be overcome.

Consensus Across Deep Difference

Chapter 6 reflects on and defends the book’s central claim that the deliberative approach offers the most appealing framework for the democratic expression of solidarity. It does so against agonistic assertions that deliberative democracy’s focus on the attainment of consensus takes away from the egalitarian expression of diversity. It is argued that a complete rejection of consensus is both unsustainable and undesirable from the very pluralist perspective agonists seek to uphold. In the place of agonists’ wholesale rejection of consensus, the chapter puts forward a conceptualisation of consensus that conceives it as a matter of degree. This conceptualisation not only better captures the complexity of human relations. It also allows us to distinguish the potential accomplishments of aspiring towards consensus from the potential hazards.

Group Entitlements and Deliberation

Chapter 3 analyses institutional designs that are supportive of solidarity. It challenges the view put forward by defenders of institutional homogeneity that group entitlements corrode solidarity by supposedly encouraging parochial behaviour over other-regarding behaviour. It is argued that this view is too one-sided, as it overlooks how group entitlements can compel majorities to orient themselves towards the concerns of marginalised minorities they otherwise have little incentive to respond to under majoritarian decision-making structures.

In-group Deliberation and Integration

Chapter 5 takes up the question of social transformation from the perspective of attitudes, social norms, and patterned behaviours at the everyday level. It examines how these can be altered to reflect a situation in which groups are encountering each other from the moral point of view when, previously, misconceptions, disparaging stereotypes or a history of violence left them harbouring dehumanising images of one another. The chapter presents in-group deliberation as a promising, yet underappreciated, vehicle for the achievement of such actor transformations. This claim is supported with reference to case studies showing that public sphere deliberations among like members are just as, if not more, consequential in fostering acceptance of outsiders than deliberations among unlike members, especially when antipathy defines group relations. What characterises such deliberations is the presence of ‘integrative leaders’, that is, individuals who take a leading role in persuading their group to develop a more enlarged and considered understanding of its relationship with another.