ABSTRACT
Since the foundational work by Habermas on the ‘public sphere’, the idea that democracy is grounded in relational spaces of bottom-up communication – by which citizens intervene through their public interactions on the largest array of issues and daily concerns – has stood out as a new and more meaningful framework guiding much sociological research on citizenship, including their relationships of contestation and solidarity, beyond the more traditional attention to main institutional actors and processes. Habermas himself took his first steps within the disciplinary field of ‘critical theory’, drawing on the astonishing technological progress in communication systems from the 1950s onwards, and hence, the expanding media-based ‘culture industry’. This chapter investigates and compares mediated solidarity discourses within national public spheres in which mutual obligations between states and discusses the equal rights of individuals across borders.
