ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the nature of cosmopolitan solidarity and discusses some of the difficulties that its conceptualisation raises. The possibility both of expanding the basis of solidarity beyond the boundaries of the nation and of overcoming the more mythic elements of national consciousness has been widely investigated within the contemporary cosmopolitan literature. Two of the main cornerstones of solidarity in the modern era have been nations and classes and the two of the main forms of self-understanding have been those of nationalism and socialism. The idea of cosmopolitan solidarity is both continuous with the modern history of solidarity and an attempt to address the problems of exclusion and violence associated with it. The temptation to substitute human compassion for cosmopolitan solidarity subsumes an egalitarian sense of shared responsibility to the contingencies of feeling. Cosmopolitan solidarity may be nurtured by compassion but it is rooted in the soil of universal human rights.
