Just who belongs together with whom,
and for what purposes, and on what authority?
Where and why do the claims
of descent, religion, nationality, economic
position, ideology, gender, and
‘civilization’ trump one another in the
competition for the loyalties of individuals
in an epoch of increased global integration?
How much do we owe to ‘our
own kind’–whatever that may mean–
and how much to ‘strangers,’ to the rest
of humankind? Our most discerning social
observers often conclude that “the
boundaries of responsibility are increasingly
contested.” [1]
The problem of solidarity is shaping
up as the problem of the twenty-frst
century. Yet the centrality of this problem
to our time, and to our apparent future,
is often obscured by the popularity
of the term identity. [2] This word sounds
like a reference to a stable, if not static,
condition, largely cultural and psychological,
but the word as commonly used
in the United States during the past several
decades has actually functioned to
assign political and social roles to individuals
and to flag expectations about
just who will make common cause with
whom. To share an identity with other
people is to feel in solidarity with them:
we owe them something special, and we
believe we can count on them in ways
that we cannot count on the rest of the
population. To come to grips with one’s
true identity is to ground, on a presump-
tively primordial basis, vital connections
to other people beyond the family.
What exactly do I mean by ‘solidarity,’
and why do I characterize it as a problem?
How does this problem relate to
“the problem of the color line,” which
W. E. B. Du Bois a century ago called
“the problem of the twentieth century”?
How has the notion of identity delayed
a fuller recognition of the urgency and
scope of the problem of solidarity? This
essay addresses those questions. [3]
Solidarity is an experience of willed
affliation. Some might prefer to speak
of ‘community,’ but this usage blurs
more than it clarifes. This word often
serves simply to classify people, to denote
a group defned by one or more
characteristics shared by its members–
whether or not those members are disposed
to act together. Hence we speak
of ‘the real-estate community,’ ‘the gay
community,’ ‘the Asian American community,’
‘the scientifc community,’ ‘the
national community,’ ‘the Upper West
Side community,’ ‘the manufacturing
community,’ ‘the golfng community,’
and so on, to indicate what may be an
organized interest group or nothing
more than a collectivity of individuals
who share a distinguishing trait, practice,
or place of residence. [4]
‘Solidarity’ best serves us if we use
it to denote a state of social existence
more specifc than what ‘community’
has come to mean. Solidarity entails
a greater degree of conscious commitment,
achieved only when parties to
an affliation exercise at least some measure
of agency, if only in consciously
affrming an affliation into which they
were born. The experience of solidarity
is more active than mere membership
in a community. When the word ‘solidarity’
entered the English language in
the middle of the nineteenth century,
it was understood to refer to a property
that some communities possessed and
others did not. The English word ‘community,’
denoting a body of individuals,
dates back many more centuries. [5]
Solidarity is more performative than is
community. Solidarity implies a special
claim, even if modest in dimensions,
that individuals have on each other’s
energies, compassion, and resources.
What is at semantic issue can be illuminated
when we consider the popular
notion of a ‘community of fate.’ This
term commonly refers to a collectivity
whose members have been subject to a
single set of historical constraints. Jews
are often described as a community of
fate. Many Jews also affliate with one
another, affrm Jewish identity, and help
to constitute a vigorous and sustaining
solidarity. But not all members of the
Jewish community of fate demonstrate
signifcant solidarity with other Jews.
The same distinction can apply to black
people in the United States, to other descent-
defned groups, to women, and to
any population group whose members
have been treated in some special fashion
by persons who have exercised power
over them. A community of fate will
often sustain a solidarity, but the problem
of solidarity arises only when the
role of ‘fate’ is supplemented by the action
of forces other than those that created
a given ‘community of fate’ to begin with.
Feminism is a solidarity, but womanhood
is not. Judaism is a solidarity, but
having a Jewish ancestor–even a Jewish
mother, to allude to one of the classic
criteria for being counted as a Jew–is
not. The Chinese American community
is a solidarity for many Americans of
Chinese ancestry, but not every American
of Chinese ancestry is equally invested
in it and some may be altogether indifferent
to it. We will miss the character
and scope of the problem of solidarity if
we conflate solidarity with the mere possession
of a set of traits or antecedents
or confnements. On the other hand, the
problem of solidarity is real when there
is at least some opportunity for choice,
when people can exercise some influence
over just what ‘we’ they help to
constitute.
The problem of solidarity is thus at
hand whenever people are capable of
actually asking, who are ‘we’? This ‘we’
question is not new, but it now arises
with some urgency in an imposing range
of settings. The ‘we’ question does not
press itself upon individuals who are
supremely confdent about the groups
to which they belong, and to which they
are the most deeply committed. Such
people know their basic ‘identity,’ even
if only because they have been told repeatedly
what it is. They may never have
had cause to question it, and may never
have been allowed any choice in the
matter. Uncontested ascription has always
been a powerful adhesive, and still
is. But for millions in many parts of the
globe today, a multitude of events, some
world-historical in scope, has challenged
this confdence.
Prominent among the events that enable
us to recognize the problem of solidarity
is the accelerating integration of
the global capitalist economy and its accompanying
communications systems.
New affliations are created, while old
ones are dissolved. “All that is solid
melts into air,” Karl Marx and Friedrich
Engels observed even of the capitalism
of their era. Capitalism has its own
sources of stability, but capitalism has
little respect for any affliations that it
cannot turn to its own purposes. Demographic
migration, often attendant upon
the dynamics of the world capitalist
economy, is another major phenomenon
threatening inherited associations.
The movement of masses of people is
nothing new, but now we see it in huge
proportions, creating diasporas in the
older industrial centers of Europe and
North America, and creating sprawling
megacities like Lagos and São Paolo,
which our demographers tell us will be
the chief social settings of population
growth in the next half century. This
physical mobility affects both migrants
and the peoples into whose company
they move: the migrants and their offspring
may be divided between diasporic
consciousness and new national or
regional identities, while groups with a
proprietary relation to a land and its institutions–
such as the British and the
Dutch and many other classically European
peoples now coming to grips with
the reality of immigration–wonder if
the newcomers alter the character of
their ‘we.’
As the example of Europeans uncertain
about immigration illustrates, staying
at home is not necessarily an escape
from the problem of solidarity. Other
disruptive events can come to you, even
if you do not stir. Regime changes and
the decline of empires, as well as immigration,
can prompt the ‘we’ question
for people who stay put. A host of post-Soviet states in Central Asia and Eastern
Europe affrm their own peoplehood
against the Soviet identity of the recent
past. Ethnic Russians in the Baltic states
and elsewhere in once-Soviet lands fnd
themselves outsiders. In Africa and Asia
an even larger number of postimperial
nations negotiate their state authority
with a diversity of descent communities
whose relations to one another were
heavily structured by the European conquerors
who drew the boundaries of
the states now trying to maintain themselves.
Meanwhile, in the uniquely conspicuous
space ofWestern Europe, affliation as ‘European’ now rivals Dutch,
German, Italian, and other national
identities to an extent unprecedented
since the rise of the nation-state as the
basic unit of political organization.
In the realm of learned discourse
countless intellectuals explain ever and
ever more earnestly that all population
groups, even those once called ‘races,’
are historically contingent constructions.
This truth is especially hard to
evade in the United States, where marriage,
cohabitation, and reproduction
across ‘racial’ lines have increased rapidly.
Of course, the invidious process of
racializing the varieties of nonwhite
Americans continues, yet never in the
history of the Republic has this process
been more energetically contested and
never has the very concept of race been
more persistently attacked. But well beyond
the United States the fact of physical
as well as cultural mixing confounds
ascribed identities. This mixing prompts
the ‘we’ question and leads many individuals,
especially in democratic countries,
to think–no doubt naively in
many cases–that they can answer this
question for themselves.
The point of alluding to these recent
events is not to insist that the challenge
these events generate is altogether unprecedented.
Historians more confdent
than I of their own knowledge of the entire
past of our species can quarrel about
the uniqueness of our time if they wish.
My point here is more modest: these recent
events make it plausible to suppose
that among the greatest issues of the
twenty-frst century is the problem of
solidarity, the problem of willed affliation.
I suggest this without doubting for an
instant the enduring value for the twenty-
frst century of Du Bois’s classic formulation:
“The problem of the Twentieth
Century,” said Du Bois in 1903, “is
the problem of the color-line.” But the
lines between colors are not as sharp today
as they were a century ago, or even
ffty years ago. When Du Bois died in
Africa in 1963, marriage across the color
line was still prohibited by law in most
of the states with large black populations,
and black Americans were still
without the protections of the Civil
Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act.
The signifcance of color itself, moreover,
is today more vigorously contested
than at any time in memory, thanks in
large part to twentieth-century men and
women whose actions vindicated Du
Bois’s prophecy.
The more we come to see the colorcoded
‘races’ as artifacts, as contingent
results of human action rather than primordial
causes of it, the more the color
line takes its place among other social
distinctions that may or may not be the
basis for the assigning or choosing of
affliations. To be sure, poetic license is
implicit in any assertion that any single
problem defnes a century. I invoke and
emulate Du Bois’s prescient hyperbole
only to convey what I take to be the
range and depth of the problem of solidarity.
If Du Bois were with us today, he
would probably be among the frst to
warn that it is easy to exaggerate the
degree of choice opened up by the
world-historical transformations to
which I have alluded. The problem of
solidarity is inevitably located within
one or another set of historical constraints,
including the way in which
power is distributed in any particular
social setting. Some people have much
more authority over their own affliations
than others do, and color continues
to play a major role in these determinations.
The scholars who have reminded
us of the decidedly artifactual
status of even the population groups
long considered primordial have also
understood, for the most part, that artifacts
can be deeply entrenched. Contingency
does not imply easy rearrangement.
Yet only when the sources of social
cohesion are not absolutely fxed is
solidarity worth talking about as a ‘problem’
rather than simply as a condition.
And in the absence of fixity, a tension
develops that gives the problem of solidarity
its social-psychological structure.
The tension is between the needs for
1) a deep feeling of social belonging, enabling
intimacy and promoting effective
exchange, and 2) a broad alliance,
enabling mutual defense and facilitating
a greater range of social and cultural experience.
This tension between the impulse
for concentration (hold onto your
familiar ground; stick with your own
kind; consolidate the richness of your
heritage) and the impulse for incorporation
(expand your horizons; take on as
much of the world as you can; try to locate
the source of your dilemmas, however
remote) is heightened as economic
and communications systems allow ostensibly
distant forces to impinge on
one’s ‘home.’
Global warming is a convenient example
of a threat to everyone that is diff-
cult to engage from the point of view of
any solidarity smaller than the species.
But any solidarity capacious enough to
act effectively on problems located in
a large arena is poorly suited to satisfy
the human need for belonging. And any
solidarity tight enough to serve the need
for belonging cannot be expected to respond
effectively to challenges common
to a larger and more heterogeneous population.
To be sure, one can have multiple
affliations, many ‘we’s,’ some more
capacious than others. That we all have
multiple identities (national, ethnoracial,
religious, sexual, geographical, ideological,
professional, generational, etc.)
and are capable of several solidarities is
widely understood. But the energies and
resources and affections of individuals
are not infnite in supply. There are priorities
to be set.
Hence the problem of solidarity has a
political-economic structure as well as a
social-psychological one. We can speak
of a ‘political economy of solidarity’ because
solidarity is a scarce commodity
distributed by authority. Whether identity
is understood as monolithic or multiple,
enduring or contingent, it has a
political economy that is all too often
neglected by theorists who distinguish
sharply between ‘the politics of recognition’
and ‘the politics of distribution.’
The former, which owes its popularity
to Charles Taylor, is commonly thought
to entail recognizing the psychocultural
claims of personhood and its sustaining
intimacies, especially as entangled with
an inheritance of neglect and mistreatment.
[6] In contrast to this variety of politics
is the more conventional kind, understood
to be about the distribution of
a society’s commodities. But identity,
when understood as performative, is also
a commodity of sorts. On just whose
affections, resources, and energies can
one make a special claim, and who has a
special claim on one’s own supply? Central
to the history of nationalism, after
all, has been the use of state power to establish
national ‘identities,’ understood
as performative, and thus creating social
cohesion on certain terms rather than
others.
The example of nationalism can remind
us of the role of state power in the
political economy of solidarity. States
commonly exercise great authority in
persuading people that their chief ‘identity’
is with the nation, ostensibly represented
by the state. But a state can also
exercise great authority over subgroup
affliations through the systems of classi
fcation it adopts, often in the form of
a census. The debates over the categories
of the federal census of the United States
offer a revealing window on the political
economy of solidarity. Although religious
affliations are of great importance
to many Americans, especially in
the years since 9/11 heightened awareness
of the signifcance of Muslim identity,
the census does not count people
by religion. Efforts to put religion in the
census have been repeatedly rejected,
most recently at the time of the 1960
census. [7] The primary categories for subgroup
affliation in the United States
have always been, and remain, those of
physically marked descent. Although the
state’s purpose in collecting information
by race and ethnicity has changed over
the decades, and is now keyed by antidiscrimination
remedies, the census categories
are popularly considered natural
kinds rather than political artifacts, and
thus powerfully affect the dynamics of
affliation. The most important ‘identity
groups,’ then, are ethnoracial, and
the authority by which individuals are
assigned to these groups is supposedly
their own when in fact it is not.
Individual respondents to the census
are expected to identify themselves
according to color-coded population
groups. The de facto authority in the
political economy of solidarity is thus
physical characteristics, especially skin
pigmentation and facial shape, even
though the de jure authority is the will
of the individual being classifed. Off-
cials in the United States are no longer
comfortable with the formal and legal
assigning of individuals to groups
according to an offcial’s assessment of
an individual’s physical characteristics.
That would smack too much of the practices
of the governments of Nazi Germany
and pre-Mandela South Africa. So the
United States allows individuals to identify
themselves. But virtually every governmental
and private agency that cares
at all about ethnoracial classifcations
fully expects the individual to voluntarily
choose the same identity that an off-
cial would ascribe to them on the basis
of their physical appearance. The census
asks the individual to register a decision
someone else has already made about
who they are.
The census is only one major flashpoint
for the ‘identity debates’ of the
United States of recent decades.[8] These
debates have been largely driven by a
concern to distribute the energies that make
solidarities. Nationalists of various persuasions
press the value of national solidarity,
arguing that ‘we Americans’ are
all in it together, and should invest more
of our energies in the nation rather than
in economically, religiously, or ethnoracially
defned interests. Advocates of this
or that ‘identity group’ hope, with good
reason, that positive identifcation with
one’s community of descent is to transform
that community into a solidarity
capable of advancing the interests attributed
to the community. The movement
to create a single ‘Latino’ or ‘Hispanic’
identity/solidarity out of populations
derived from migration sources as different
as Mexico, Cuba, Puerto Rico,
Argentina, and Spain is perhaps the
most visible example at the present
time. But the dynamic is also apparent
in relation to groups defned by gender,
sexual orientation, religion, locality, and
other social circumstances. And in the
white supremacist past of the United
States, to identify as white was of course
to be part of a solidarity of white people
ready to join together to exercise power
over nonwhites.
The masking of mere solidarity by the
quasi-mystical notion of identity can
promote the violence Amartya Sen laments
in his recent, important book,
Identity and Violence: The Illusion of Destiny. [9]
To understand that identity is primarily
about the down-to-earth process
of affliation is to demystify identity and
to diminish the presumption that the dynamics
of affliation are programmed by
descent as registered by physical characteristics.
The more we recognize the historical
contingency of the process of
identity/solidarity formation, the more
civic value we might attribute to open
debates about it, and the more respect
we might develop for individual volition
in deciding what one’s ‘identity’ is,
which is to say, in deciding just where
one ‘belongs.’ Today’s most persistent
defenders of ‘identity politics’ continue
to argue that identities are largely unchosen–
more discovered than manufactured.
Identities “are visibly marked
on the body itself,” insists Linda Martin
Alcoff, “guiding if not determining the
way we perceive and judge others and
are perceived and judged by them.” In
this view, the process of experiencing
what Alcoff calls “identity as an epistemologically
salient and ontologically
real entity”–however complex that
process may be–is still controlled by
physical characteristics and the traditional
responses, often prejudicial, that
these characteristics have generated. [10]
Alcoff and others who have tried to ‘reclaim
identity’ from critics like Sen are
no less eager than he for allegiances that
will promote a more just and peaceful
world, but for them ‘identity’ implicitly
directs solidarity formation along decidedly
predetermined lines, and resists the
search for, and scrupulous assessment
of, bases for belonging less rooted in
blood and history. [11]
But the turn from identity to solidarity
is manifest in a flurry of recent treatises.
A formidable cohort of philosophers, sociologists,
historians, and political scientists
appreciate descent-defned affliations
not as natural consequences of human
differences, but in their capacity as
chosen and ultimately disposable instruments
for political action and social support.
The postethnic principle of “affliation
by revocable consent” encourages
individuals to join forces with other people
with whom they ‘identify,’ but to
choose for themselves just how much
of their energies they want to commit
to this or that solidarity, including one
founded on common ancestry. [12] Prominent
in marking this new turn are recent,
ambitious books by Kwame Anthony
Appiah, Seyla Benhabib, Rogers Brubaker,
Amy Gutmann, John Lie, and
Rogers Smith. [13] A great virtue of all of
these works is that each recognizes the
need to confront the ‘we’ question in a
world of increasingly global dynamics.
No single formula will apply in every
situation where the allocation of energies
amid a variety of overlapping and
sometimes competing affliations is at
stake. The problem of solidarity has to
be addressed differently depending on
the specifc constitutional and cultural
circumstances in which it arises. Our
historical situation obviously demands
wide solidarities, but universalist projects
neglect at their peril the demands
for belonging and intimacy that fuel particularist
movements. A determination
to balance the wide and the narrow lies
behind the prodigious flowering of programs
and proposals recently advanced
as ‘cosmopolitan,’ all of which can be
construed as a family of responses to the
problem of solidarity. [14] Many cosmopolitan
initiatives warn against the premature
jettisoning of the nation-state.
In an epoch of increasing migration
with attendant cultural diversification,
there is much to be said for the secular,
civic nation as a central solidarity, capable
of ensuring at least basic human
rights and welfare for members of demographically
heterogeneous societies.
Such a solidarity promises to mediate
between the species and the varieties
of humankind more creatively and concretely
than do universalist and particularist
programs. The examples of Canada,
France, India, and the United States
can remind us how extensive is the spectrum
of possibilities for such national
solidarities, ranging from the French
reluctance to recognize affiliations
smaller than the nation to India’s refined system of subgroup recognition.
But my purpose here is not to pretend
to have solved the problem of solidarity,
only to register its profundity and ubiquity,
and to suggest that our errors in
dealing with it are more often on the
particularist than on the universalist
side. There are fewer and fewer places to
hide from forces that operate in a global
arena. “There’s no hiding place down
there,” warned an old gospel song. Nor
is there a hiding place ‘up here.’ If we do
not take on as much of the world as we
can, the world will come to us, and on
terms over which we will have even less
control than we do now.
NOTES
1. Samuel Scheffler, Boundaries and Allegiances: Problems of Justice and Responsibility in Liberal Thought (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 65.
2. For a highly informative comparative account of how the notion of ‘identity’ is currently understood and employed in a variety of nations around the world, see Nadia Tazi, ed., Keywords: Identity (New York: The Other Press, 2004). The classic study of the history of this idea in the United States down to about 1980 is Philip Gleason, “Identifying Identity: A Semantic History,” Journal of American History lxix (1983): 910–931.
3. Portions of this essay are drawn from the preface to a book being published simultaneously, David A. Hollinger, Cosmopolitanism and
Solidarity (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2006).
4. For a characteristic example, see this Global Community Slams Gaza Incursion, posted June 29, 2006 (an account of diplomatic reactions to military actions by Israel).
5. The Oxford English Dictionary’s first entry for solidarity dates from the mid-nineteenth century; that for community as a body of people
dates from the fourteenth century. Credit for the development of solidarity as a tool of social theory is generally given to Émile Durkheim.
Its more frequent use in recent years in places where the less precise word, community, had often been employed owes much to the work
of Richard Rorty, especially his Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988).
6. Charles Taylor et al., Multiculturalism and “The Politics of Recognition” (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1992).
7. For a fresh study of the volatile controversy of the late 1950s over the issue of adding religion to the census, see Kevin M. Schultz, “Religion as Identity in Postwar America: The Last Serious Attempt to Put a Question on Religion in the United States Census,” Journal
of American History xciii (September 2006): 359–384.
8. For critical discussions of census policy today, see the Winter 2005 issue of Dædalus, especially the essay by Kenneth Prewitt, “Racial Classifications in America: Where Do We Go From Here?” 5–17.
9. Amartya Sen, Identity and Violence: The Illusion of Destiny (New York: W. W. Norton, 2006).
10. Linda Martin Alcoff, Visible Identities: Race, Gender, and the Self (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 5. This ambitious theoretical treatise is weakened by Alcoff’s determination to bring ethnoracial identities into a single frame of analysis with gender identities, whose connection to a physical binary creates somewhat different challenges for analysis than do identities related to the species-wide spectrum of blending colors and morphological traits. Alcoff’s arguments could be translated into the vocabulary of solidarity, and thus construed as pleas for solidarities that can diminish the mistreatment of people on account of their sex and color. But Alcoff herself returns repeatedly to the historic ordinance of physical characteristics, and thus sharply confnes the domain within which identity/solidarity formation can be expected to take place.
11. See, for example, most of the contributions to Paula M. L. Moya and Michael R. Hames-Garcia, eds., Reclaiming Identity: Realist Theory and the Predicament of Postmodernism (Berkeley:University of California Press, 2000).
12. I have developed this principle in Postethnic America: Beyond Multiculturalism (New York: Basic Books, 2006).
13. Kwame Anthony Appiah, The Ethics of Identity (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2005);
Seyla Benhabib, The Claims of Culture: Equality and Diversity in the Global Era (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2002);
Rogers Brubaker, Ethnicity Without Groups (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004);
Amy Gutmann, Identity in Democracy (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2003);
John Lie, Modern Peoplehood (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004);
Rogers M. Smith, Stories of Peoplehood: The Politics and Morals of Political Membership (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003).
14. A convenient compendium of the initiatives recently offered in the name of cosmopolitanism is Steve Vertovec and Robin Cohen, eds.,
Conceiving Cosmopolitanism: Theory, Context, and Practice (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002). For a vigorous, popular manifesto, see Kwame Anthony Appiah, Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers (New York: W. W. Norton, 2006).
David A. Hollinger, a Fellow of the American Academy since 1997, is Preston Hotchkis Professor of American History at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the editor of a volume recently published under the auspices of the Academy, “The Humanities and the Dynamics of Inclusion since World War II” (2006). His “Postethnic America: Beyond Multiculturalism” was just republished in an expanded Tenth Anniversary Edition (2006). He is also the coeditor of “Reappraising Oppenheimer” (with Cathryn Carson, 2005).
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