Solidarity: From Civic Friendship to a Global Legal Community (review)

"Without writing, there is no urban republic; without printing, no modern state constitution; and without electronic media, no transnational human and cosmopolitan rights." This is typical of the perceptive apothegms that dot this carefully crafted and cautiously idealistic book. Brunkhorst, a philosopher-sociologist who teaches at Flensburg, argues that increasing ability to access the Internet, plus the efforts of the NGOs to create a transnational civil society, offer some faint hope that the human race may pull itself together in time to avoid catastrophe—to save us from accepting tyranny as the only alternative to anarchy. He urges that we stop yearning for an impossible global Gemeinschaft. For a global legal community (globale Rechtsgenossenschaft) would suffice to ensure both liberty and equality, even in the absence of anything much like Bruderschaft.

In the book's first section ("Stages of Solidarity"), Brunkhorst has intriguing things to say about the difference between Greek friendship, which was incapable of challenging the institutions of the polis, and universalistic Christian brotherhood. He shows how our contemporary notion of democratic citizenship draws upon both "Judeo-Christian brotherly solidarity and Greco-Roman civic solidarity." These chapters embody an admirable combination of philosophical sophistication with historical scholarship.

In the remainder of the book, he canvasses the prospects for a utopia in which a "juridification of global society in terms of basic rights" provides not just protection against governmental oppression but also against "private economic encroachments on freedom." Brunkhorst has a lot of sensible things to say about, for example, the street protests at the G8 meetings, the powers of the German Federal Constitutional Court and of its EU counterpart, and the possibility that 9/11 and its likely follow-ups may, in the longer run, encourage international cooperation.

Devotees of Realpolitik will dismiss this book as mere whistling in the dark. But Brunkhorst succeeds in making our hopes for a global democracy seem a bit less ludicrous.