Introduction
The dramatic worldwide rise of populist nationalism during the mid-late 2010s has heralded a difficult period for internationalist foreign policy, and a challenging environment for cosmopolitan ethics and their tentative empirical manifestations in foreign policy.Footnote 1 In the vernacular of the English School, it indicates a significant challenge to solidarism in international society – a vision of world politics governed by thicker norms of conduct and a nascent human-centred outlook.Footnote 2 This ‘populist moment’ presents a pertinent opening for examining important questions about the legitimacy, trajectory, and conditions of possibility for solidarist international society and the role foreign policy might play in its advancement. This article argues that the rise of populism demonstrates the deep contestation within Western states of the solidarist normative trajectory and presents it with a dual challenge. Firstly, the anti-elitist claims of populist politics and its contestation of legitimate authority pose important general challenges to the legitimacy of the norms and governance institutions of solidarist international society. Secondly, the growth of populist nationalism in the 2010s poses a particular challenge to the nascent cosmopolitan-mindedness of solidarism, through its re-emphasis on the primacy of exclusionary national communities and a narrower ethical frame of reference. Taken together, they indicate an important problem of the disconnection between the foreign policy direction of states that have often been enthusiastic supporters of solidarist international society, and the everyday lives of their internal constituencies.
The main theoretical contributions of the article are its examination of the populist challenge to solidarist international society and its development of a tentative framework for progressive foreign policy that might ameliorate these tensions and support a more legitimate solidarism. This article revisits good international citizenship – a framework for progressive foreign policy closely associated with the English School, through which states might work towards purposes beyond themselves and potentially in a cosmopolitan-minded direction.Footnote 3 This article builds upon this to develop a conceptualization of good global statehood – an expanded iteration of good international citizenship. This addresses more directly the challenge of internal legitimacy and the weaknesses in good international citizenship's conception of ‘enlightened national interest’. Drawing from ‘post-universalistic’ cosmopolitan approaches and calls for greater consideration of the normative value of pluralism emerging from within the English School, good global statehood advances a co-production methodology for foreign policy, to enhance connections between solidarist international society and everyday-lived experiences, communities, and identities within the state.
The First section of the article explores the ‘populist moment’ of the 2010s and the dual challenge this poses to the evolution of solidarist international society. The Second section explores the limitations of existing conceptions of good international citizenship and the need to address questions of diversity and ‘revived pluralism’. The Third section outlines good global statehood, as a framework for progressive foreign policy that challenges the ontological usefulness of the national interest and embeds a commitment to co-production and dialogue in the formulation of foreign policy.
The ‘cosmopolitan-minded’ state and the English School
Foreign policy sits at the interface between the state as a notionally bounded community and the ‘outside’ of world politics. However, the neat demarcation between inside and outside, if one ever really existed, is increasingly subverted by the trans-nationalization of human relations and the pressing global problems that accompany them. To varying degrees, the encounter with non-citizens and cultural difference has become an aspect of the ‘everyday’, what Beck refers to as ‘banal cosmopolitanism’.Footnote 4 However, there remains an obvious tension between accentuated trans-nationalization and the continued dominance of the state as an organizational unit of world politics and delimiter of moral solidarity. Foreign policy, as a guide for state interactions in world politics, is premised on the distinction of the national self from those outside. However, despite its exclusionary characteristics, some cosmopolitan thinkers have made more direct arguments for the state as the most appropriate institutional vehicle for the realization of a cosmopolitan normative agenda.Footnote 5 Eckersley highlights the problem of the atomized and disconnected individual subject typically assumed by liberal cosmopolitan accounts, and points towards the significance of particularistic forms of moral community as incubators of cosmopolitan selves.Footnote 6 The understanding of progressive foreign policy within this article follows this logic – embedding commitments to global responsibility, transborder moral solidarity, and the pursuit of a world common good. Progressive foreign policy demonstrates a level of ‘cosmopolitan-mindedness’, in at least latently positioning the state as a contributor to the wellbeing of a broader community of humankind. The precise issues that might be included and the nature of their interaction with the national interest vary considerably and have formed the substance of the debate on progressive foreign policy.Footnote 7
The idea that foreign policy can be other-regarding and directed at purposes beyond narrow national interests, occupies a significant strand of English School thought. English School writers have explored the challenge of ‘utopian realism’ – the desire to seek moral progress and smooth the trans-nationalization of human relations, whilst at the same time maintaining a healthy scepticism and an awareness of the constraints of a world of states and their more limited moral horizons.Footnote 8 The presence of a dialectal struggle between the desire for moral progress in world politics and the realities of power, interest, and moral pluralism, are well captured in intellectual histories of the English School's key contributors.Footnote 9 The identification of a progression from a pluralist international society to a thicker solidarist conception of inter-state relations, with more fully developed and enforceable norms, reflects the capability of the state to work towards purposes beyond its immediate interests and (arguably) to engender a nascent form of cosmopolitan moral purpose with duties to a wider community of humankind.Footnote 10 The English School is thus a ‘middle ground’ ethical position, seeking to reconcile concerns for orderly coexistence between states (pluralism), with more advanced forms of collective global consciousness (solidarism). For the analytical purposes of this article, pluralist and solidarist conceptions of international society are located in two areas – as a social system of existing and emerging rules, norms, and institutions that constitutes international society, and as a normative vision that informs a state's foreign policy.Footnote 11 It is the impact of populist politics on these two areas, and the question of the appropriate normative response, that the article examines.
The pluralist conception of international society, favoured by Bull in The Anarchical Society, suggests that states have demonstrated the capability to develop minimal rules for coexistence, based on concerns for the prevention of violence, the keeping of agreements, and the preservation of state sovereignty.Footnote 12 However, these minimal rules reflect the convergence of state interests in avoiding disorder, rather than any broader consensus on values or cosmopolitan transborder moral solidarity.Footnote 13 Bull juxtaposes these functional concerns against conceptions of cosmopolitan justice which ‘concerns not the common ends or values of the society of states, but rather the common ends or values of the universal society of all mankind, whose constituent members are individual human beings’.Footnote 14
The solidarist conception goes significantly further than pluralism in its understanding of the scope for cooperation and transborder moral concern. However, its precise normative extent remains contested within the English School debate. In keeping with Buzan's framing of the pluralist–solidarist debate as spectrum of positions, solidarism itself might be understood to have two distinctive but also interlinked streams.Footnote 15 The first stream, reflected Bull's early work on the Grotian conception, sees solidarism as concerned with a thicker system of enforceable rules, norms, and institutions that govern international society, beyond the minimal norms of coexistence evident in pluralism.Footnote 16 These fall short of global government and thus maintain a society of sovereign states, but are premised on ‘close collaboration’ between states and their ‘close adherence to constitutional principles of international order to which they have given their assent’.Footnote 17 The empirical presence of rules and institutions relating to trade, regional integration, scientific collaboration, arms control, environmental protection, and collective security, both reflect advanced levels of inter-state convergence and typically go beyond minimal norms of coexistence.
The second distinctive stream within solidarism is a cosmopolitan-minded normative inclination. Whilst still situated within the exclusionary practices of a world of states, this stream demonstrates a nascent movement towards a cosmopolitan moral consciousness, positioning individuals beyond state borders as an important ethical reference point. Despite initially closing down the possibilities for cosmopolitan-minded state action, Bull's later work and that of Vincent demonstrates increasing concern with the fragility of the international order and the demands for justice emerging from the global South.Footnote 18 They focus more closely on the development of a ‘world common good’ – that states might be able to work in pursuit of purposes beyond their own immediate interests and support the wellbeing of vulnerable non-citizens. The normative case for solidarist international society emerged as a response to moral deficiencies of a pluralist society of states – ‘the denial of the rights of small nations and indigenous peoples, and the absence of means of protecting individuals from human rights abuses’.Footnote 19 The expansion of solidarist international society is evident in the advancement of the international human rights regime, refugee protection norms, human security concepts, and the ongoing development of ‘cosmopolitan harm conventions’ to reduce the harmful impact of transnational processes on vulnerable individuals.Footnote 20 In practical terms, this has been reflected in the foundation of the International Criminal Court, expanded conceptions of continental citizenship within the European Union (EU), the increasing traction of the responsibility to protect (R2P) principle and a widened remit for UN peacekeeping. This secondary stream within solidarism brings it closest to statist versions of cosmopolitanism, with state action informed by transborder moral concern.Footnote 21
This cosmopolitan mindedness remains a controversial component within the English School debate, as it blurs the boundaries between an orderly society of sovereign states and a potentially cosmopolitan post-state or world society arrangement.Footnote 22 Buzan has attempted to capture these two strands of solidarism in his dual conception of ‘state-centric’ and ‘cosmopolitan’ variants of solidarism – the former concerned with state's development of thicker international norms to address complex global problems, and the latter with the focus on the broader community of humankind as an equal reference point to the society of states.Footnote 23 Whilst not dismissing the normative potential of the cosmopolitan variant, Buzan claims that the state-centric variant remains dominant in the practice of solidarist international society. However, dissenting views have also suggested that developments in international criminal law and humanitarian intervention do now position individual human beings as key ethical and legal reference points alongside the state.Footnote 24 Solidarism itself thus incorporates a spectrum of possible practices, reflected in at least normative convergence beyond minimal coexistence and towards a ‘world common good’, and at the farthest extent to fuller recognition of individual human beings as equal reference points in international society.
Building on the pluralist–solidarist spectrum, the English School has been closely associated with the research agenda on good international citizenship, as a framework for progressive foreign policy. Drawing from Gareth Evans' vision for Australian foreign policy during the 1990s, good international citizenship has evolved in the English School lexicon as a conceptualization of responsible statehood and ‘enlightened national interest’ – the sense that the state can act towards purposes beyond itself.Footnote 25 A good international citizen is not obliged to ‘act in ways which will jeopardize its survival or endanger its vital national interests’.Footnote 26 However, they are expected to contribute to the global common good and to ‘permit the growth of sub-national and cosmopolitan loyalties which have previously been foreclosed’.Footnote 27 In practice, being a good international citizen involves striking a day-to-day balance between three different spheres of ethical obligation in their foreign policy – between responsibilities to the national interest, to the norms of international society, and cosmopolitan ethical responsibilities to the wider human community.Footnote 28 Striking this balance between different spheres of ethical obligation has much in common with Jackson's conception of ‘situational ethics’, in ‘making the best moral choice that the circumstances permit’.Footnote 29 When pursuing their ‘enlightened’ national interest they must navigate the inevitable tensions that arise between these spheres of ethical responsibility, exercising prudence in considering the consequences of foreign policy choices for the national interest but also the impact on those outside the national community.Footnote 30 In keeping with the English School's middle-ground ethical position, normative progress in world politics is a goal, but a critical awareness of the constraints of the current statist international order is retained.Footnote 31
Crises of legitimacy: the ‘populist moment’ and the revolt against solidarist international society
The rise of populism during the 2010s raises important questions about the stability and longevity of solidarist international society and the nascent forms of good international citizenship that emerged during the post-Cold War period. This section explores the ways in which the exclusionary nationalisms, reassertions of sovereignty and anti-elite sentiments, characteristic of populist politics during this period, pose a critical challenge to solidarism. English School analyses have long focussed on the challenges of achieving consensus on expanded normative agendas between the constituent members of international society. However, the central claim made here is that rise of populism reveals a fragile consensus on progressive foreign policy and the solidarist normative trajectory, within the states that have typically been its vanguard.
A frequent criticism of both cosmopolitan ethics and English School solidarism is that these outlooks reflect culturally situated viewpoints derived principally from Western states.Footnote 32 States claiming to act as local agents of a world common good or ‘campaigning in the name of solidarism’, raise obvious questions about who defines what is for the good of the world and what values are promoted in solidarist international society.Footnote 33 These questions indicate deficits in what Hurrell refers to as substantive legitimacy – the extent to which the vales around which conceptions of a world common good have ‘generality or global force’.Footnote 34 Given the role of power in the constitution of solidarist international society, the problem of legitimacy deficits and uneven international consensus on thicker norms is an ongoing and familiar challenge.
The level of consensus between states on the norms and practices of solidarist international society remains important. However, the legitimacy of these norms and practices within states has been a notable blind spot of the English School debate. In foreign policy analysis, a long-standing body of research has examined the diverse ways in which foreign policy elites are connected to domestic politics, interest groups, and the ebb and flow of public opinion.Footnote 35 Zurn draws out the ways in which the evolution of global governance institutions has become increasing politicised and contested within societies, and how this has driven a resultant shift from elite and technocratic modes of decision making, to the evolution of global governance becoming shaped by an increasingly polarized public debate.Footnote 36 Post-functionalist approaches have identified a similar movement from a technocratic process of EU institutional evolution, towards one which is deeply contested in polarized domestic debates between inclusive and exclusive conceptions of national identity.Footnote 37 Domestic identities and processes of political contestation thus have significant salience for the evolution of institutional structures associated with solidarist international society. The English School's blind spot on the domestic legitimacy of solidarist international society mirrors what Kaarbo identifies in other major international relations theories, as their disconnection from foreign policy analysis scholarship and the domestic contexts it more openly explores.Footnote 38
The electoral success of populist nationalist movements during the mid-late 2010s raises important questions about the level of analysis used when considering the legitimacy of solidarist international society. The ‘populist moment’ in Europe and North America was reflected in the referendum victory of the campaign for Britain to leave the EU, the election of Donald Trump in the USA, election victories for Poland's Law and Justice party, Italy's Lega, and Hungary's Fidesz. Outside Europe and North America, the election of Narendra Modi in India, Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, and Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines, have also demonstrated similar, though not identical, characteristics of populist nationalism. Although ideologically divergent from the broader nationalist trend, the electoral success of Syriza in Greece and the rise of Podemos in Spain, also demonstrate some commonalities with the populist politics of this period.
This article uses the terminology of a ‘populist moment’ to describe the concurrent electoral successes or growing influence, of a range of political movements that drew heavily on a populist repertoire of discursive techniques. The idea of a ‘moment’ should not be taken to remove populism from its temporal context, and its apparent apex in the late-2010s is reflective of longer-term and well-studied processes.Footnote 39 However, the mid-late-2010s does demonstrate a ‘clustering in time and space’ of populist influence in shaping the political trajectories of the USA, India, Brazil, and a number of prominent states in Europe. Brubaker conceptualizes the populist moment in Europe, in part as a product of long-term drivers – a decline in the legitimacy of political parties as mediators of the relations between everyday lives and political elites, alongside anxieties about economic globalization and immigration, which have created openings for populist claims to ‘protect’ ‘the people’ from economic marginalization and cultural dilution.Footnote 40 The more temporally specific populist moment is the meeting point of these longer-term drivers with a confluence of proximate influences – legacies of the 2008 Crash, the 2015 onset of the European Refugee ‘Crisis’, and security concerns prompted by the wave of ISIS terror attacks from 2015 to 2018.Footnote 41 The idea of a populist moment is also reflected in Inglehart and Norris' suggestion of a temporal ‘tipping point’ and cultural backlash, driven by a longer-term ‘silent revolution’ in societal values, alongside anxieties about immigration and economic inequality.Footnote 42 Although evidently connected to longer-term processes, the idea of the populist moment draws the domestic influences on foreign policy and the evolution of international society, into sharp relief. The concurrent electoral success of a range of populist movements marks an important juncture in the potential unfolding of a post-liberal world order.Footnote 43
Populist politics is premised on a sense of antagonistic relations and a moralized distinction between the ‘pure people’ and a ‘corrupt elite’, with populist movements framing themselves as the legitimate embodiment of the people.Footnote 44 Within populist discourse the boundaries of groups that are framed as the authentic ‘people’ are variable and context specific. The flexibility of the populist understanding of ‘the people’ allows for its discourse and mobilizational strategies to be attached to a variety of different political projects, across a wide ideological spectrum. Populism is thus not a monolithic movement and its flexibility has led to it being varyingly defined a discursive repertoire or a ‘thin-centred ideology’, which can be overlaid onto contextually specific political projects.Footnote 45 The diversity of these political projects means that the early impact of the populist moment on the configuration of international society is unlikely to be uniform.Footnote 46
Despite the flexibility of populism, its core characteristics and the specific manifestations of nationalist and/or authoritarian modes of populism of the mid-late-2010s pose important challenges to solidarist trajectories in world politics and to future aspirations for normatively progressive foreign policy. Firstly, the anti-elite orientation of all populist discourse constructs a vertical form of oppositional relations between the governance structures of the political elite and ‘the people’, however defined.Footnote 47 An important component of this vertical opposition is a deep cynicism towards the traditional institutions and actors that have mediated relations between the elite and everyday people.Footnote 48 The ‘corrupt elite’ might be constructed at the domestic level, but the anti-elite challenge can also be directed upwards to the global governance institutions of solidarist international society, which have already become subject to increased domestic politicization and societal contestation.Footnote 49
The traction achieved by populist narratives suggests at least a latent sense of disconnection between the norms and practices of solidarist international society, and the everyday-lived experiences of significant segments of electorates in states ordinarily supportive of its normative trajectory. In the UK, the anti-elitism has manifested itself as a project of ‘taking back control’ from the bureaucrats of supra-national EU institutions. In the USA, Lofflmann argues that the rise of Trump was effectively a symptom of a ‘long-standing gap between public opinion and the attitudes of a bipartisan elite on American global engagement’.Footnote 50 The rhetorical direction of travel in both cases is towards the repatriation power closer to ‘the people’ and recalibrating global responsibilities to better serve the national self-community.
Populist nationalism, as the dominant trend in the populist moment of the 2010s, has a secondary implication for solidarist international society, in its construction of a horizontal form of oppositional relations – this time between those inside the bounded national community, who are understood to be ‘the people’, and those who are outside.Footnote 51 Populist politics has been strongly associated with anti-pluralism and the accentuation of community boundaries.Footnote 52 Mudde argues that the ‘people in populist propaganda are neither real nor all inclusive, but are in fact a mythical and constructed sub-set of the population’.Footnote 53 For Laclau, the populist rendering of ‘the people’ ‘is something less than the totality of the members of the community: it is a partial component which nevertheless aspires to be conceived as the only legitimate totality’.Footnote 54 Although there is no overall consensus on whether populist politics are inherently exclusionary, the moral bifurcation between the ‘corrupt’ and the ‘pure’ provides powerful discursive tools to segment and divide communal groups and to reinforce the boundaries between citizens and non-citizens.
This moral bifurcation is accentuated by politics of anxiety and a discontent with the status quo amongst key segments of the electorate, built upon and reinforced by the populist discursive repertoire.Footnote 55 Populist narratives have typically focussed on a sense of national decline, humiliation, marginalization, cultural dilution, and the risks of domination by outsiders, whether contextualized as immigrants or supra-national organizations. These narratives draw upon and stimulate feelings of deep ontological anxiety regarding one's place in an increasingly confusing world, and in some cases a nostalgia for an idealized communal past.Footnote 56 Taggart conceptualizes this as the populist ‘heartland’ – a vision of an ideal bounded community, constructed retrospectively from the past as that which has been lost.Footnote 57 Juxtaposed against the cosmopolitan-minded trajectories of solidarist international society, the populist promise of ontological stability is not through transborder bonds of solidarity, but through the re-assertion of national self-hood and the primacy of narrower visions of community. Whether expressed in Trump's ambivalence about white supremacism and overt hostility to central American migrants, or Narendra Modi's Hindu nationalism, populist nationalism constructs the image of a homogenous national ‘self’, despite the presence of extensive internal diversity and high levels of global connection. For de Orellana and Michelsen, the reactionary internationalism of the populist ‘new right’ is couched in ‘the adoption of a resistant subjectivity grounded on a birth-culture identity’.Footnote 58 Although ostensibly mobilizing the ‘people’ against ‘elites’, the anti-pluralism of the populist moment privileges a narrow and highly particular and exclusionary account of the national ‘we’, whose interests are to be defended in the face of hostile outsiders and internal others. In place of an expanding solidarist international society, where individual human beings feature as key reference points, reactionary internationalism conceives universalized liberal norms as intrinsically harmful to the capacity of individual states to maintain national particularities.Footnote 59 As a sovereigntist inversion of the tentative movements towards cosmopolitan-minded, progressive foreign policies, the logics of populist nationalism point towards forms of regressive foreign policy and the fragmentation of the solidarist normative architecture.
In the short-term, the extent to which populist electoral success in the 2010s has translated into empirical foreign policy shifts is contested, with some suggestions that a high degree of continuity with existing policy trajectories has been evident.Footnote 60 In these accounts, institutional conservatism and the residual power of the existing norms and structures of the liberal international order, have limited the scope for more radical challenges by populist governments to the status quo. Other accounts have however gone further in suggesting emerging shifts and revisionist patterns. These accounts focus on the more assertively sovereigntist and anti-globalist direction of foreign policy, challenging the ‘elitist’ institutions of international society and developing patterns of alignment amongst authoritarian populist governments.Footnote 61 Although there is limited empirical evidence of a consistent pattern of populist foreign policy, the populist moment reveals the widespread traction and emotive appeal of anti-elite narratives and exclusionary articulations of identity across different members of international society. The acute challenge for solidarist international society to which this article's reformulation of good international citizenship responds, is to the connection of the populist repertoire with exclusionary nationalism, and the varying electoral crystallizations of this during the 2010s. At the same time, populist politics viewed in its most broad conceptualization and detached from the temporal context of the populist moment, asks significant questions about elite authority and the appropriate connection between governance structures and the individuals subject to their rule. The disconnect between the development of shared ideas, values, and norms set at the diplomatic level, and the everyday outlooks of electorally significant sections of the domestic public directs analytical attention towards the relationship between the intra-societal and the international societal, as intersecting realms of normative contestation. Both McDonald and Beardsworth's examinations of internationalist foreign policy move more directly towards the question of intra-societal dynamics in creating conditions of political possibility and more secure domestic anchorage for an internationalist orientation.Footnote 62 The challenge to the twin streams of solidarist international society, from within many of the states historically most supportive of it, suggests the fragmentation of a singular conception of ‘enlightened’ national interest, around which public support might be mobilized. In place of an idea of ‘enlightened’ national interest, that might harmonize national priorities with the thickening of international society, the rise of populism reflects a radical internal dissensus on how the state's national interest and its relationship to other areas of ethical obligation are conceived.
Questions of how the national interest is conceptualized, whose interests it serves and how this relates to external spheres of ethical obligation, have particular salience for good international citizenship and progressive foreign policy. The remainder of this article contributes to the relatively small number of conceptualizations of progressive foreign policy in response to the populist moment.Footnote 63 The next section examines the limitations of existing iterations of good international citizenship in addressing the ontological slipperiness of national interest and in responding to internal challenges to the normative direction of solidarist international society. It explores how the framework might be reconceptualized in light of the populist challenge. This reconceptualization – referred to as good global statehood – provides a methodology for improving connections between solidarist normative ambitions and the diverse everyday contexts in which the inhabitants of states are located.
Reconceiving progressive foreign policy: pluralist paths to solidarist international society
Good international citizenship and the limits of ‘enlightened’ national interest
Enlightened national interest, as a reconciliation of national interest with global responsibilities and ethical regard for the other, is an integral component of the good international citizenship framework, discussed above. It is a framework for ‘principles of foreign policy which can promote the moral ideal of the unity of humankind’, whilst accepting the importance of the state as a key emotional and political reference point in world politics.Footnote 64 However, as developed in the existing literature, good international citizenship requires a more thorough re-imagination rather than a simple re-articulation, if it is to address the challenges posed by the rise of populism. The framework is heavily linked to the expansion of solidarist international society at the end of the Cold War and implicitly to the liberal triumphalism of the period. Multilateralism, international law, and the robust defence of human rights have been recurrent themes, both in Evans' initial outline of the concept and in its subsequent formulations.Footnote 65 The difficulty lies not necessarily with the norms, practices, and institutions advocated by the good international citizenship literature, rather in the implicit assumption of their legitimacy amongst the inhabitants of those states taking on the mantle of a good international citizen. The ‘enlightened’ national interests of good international citizen states, that might strengthen and expand solidarist international society, are implicitly framed as the product of a stable internal consensus and a unified national position.
As argued above, the populist mobilization of a sense of disconnection from the politics of ‘the elite’, alongside a prominent exclusionary nationalist/nativist discourse, has significant implications for the legitimacy of solidarist international society. Good international citizenship, in existing formulations, contains no substantive consideration of how this sense of disconnection might be counteracted, or how other-regarding commitments in foreign policy might be grounded in a reliable internal consensus on values, identities, and interests. Addressing the legitimacy of good international citizenship has tended to focus on the development of inter-state, rather than intra-state consensus on the norms and values to be promoted in foreign policy.Footnote 66 In making the case for a leftist foreign policy response to the rise of populism, Colas argues that
Any progressive transformation of our world has to start from radical change within existing states – ideally the largest and most powerful ones. In the face of the national-populist mobilisations of nativist identities, democratic internationalists have another political repertoire to offer, built on an unapologetic invocation of the ordinary, humdrum universalism in most people's everyday lives across the world.Footnote 67
From this perspective, the diverse, frequently global, everyday contexts, in which the inhabitants of states are located, represent a foundation point for progressive foreign policy. In its unreconstructed form, good international citizenship invokes transborder ethical concern as a component of ‘enlightened’ national interest, but remains a platform to be formulated by foreign policy elites, articulated through the conventional channels of inter-state diplomacy and potentially insufficiently anchored in everyday subjectivities and lived experiences.
Embracing lived experiences and banal, everyday modes of global connection, opens up further questions regarding the spheres of ethical obligation – – to the national interest, to international society, and to a broader community of humankind – incorporated in good international citizenship.Footnote 68 The framework is premised on the addition of other-regarding ethical concerns (Bull's ‘purposes beyond ourselves’), to the ontologically stable, traditional foreign policy preoccupation of national interest. However, the populist moment has cast into sharp relief the ontological instability of the ‘national interest’ as a coherent sphere of ethical obligation. Such ontological instability is well recognized within pre-existing foreign policy analysis scholarship, which has long questioned the possibility of generating a unified and singular idea of the national interest. For US foreign policy, both Trubowitz and Clinton have challenged the idea of a singular and constant national interest, charting its domestic contestation between sectional groups, and the multiple ways in which it might be understood.Footnote 69 This theme of internal contestation and ontological instability is also evident in research on national role conceptions, which points towards common gaps between the national role conceptions held by elites and those of the wider population, leading to processes of vertical role competition between these groups.Footnote 70 This theme of internal contestation is similarly evident in Hill's examination of comparative European foreign policy, where he argues that the danger of elite-level policy makers continuing to frame national interest ‘as if it were always homogenous and self-evident’, is that it will become perceived as synonymous with the top-down imposition of elite outlooks.Footnote 71 From this perspective, maintaining the artifice of a singular and unified national interest in good international citizenship, risks playing further into the anti-elite narrative of populist politics.
National interest is also premised on the assumption of a stable national ‘we’ community of shared interest. Without necessarily challenging the idea that localized forms of community matter, politically and ethically, both cosmopolitan and non-cosmopolitan thought has pointed consistently towards the flexibility of national community and the disaggregation of citizenship in a world of more fluid identities.Footnote 72 The populist moment has revealed intense polarization and fragmentation of identities within Western states and fundamental clashes of values on issues of immigration, national sovereignty, and responsibilities to non-citizens.Footnote 73 Consequently, the invocation of national interest as a compartmentalized reference point within an unreconstructed conception of good international citizenship sits uneasily with the less readily evident singular national community whose interests are to be served by foreign policy. To forge a more legitimate and durable framework for progressive foreign policy from the useful, if limiting, conceptual foundations of good international citizenship, critical questions must be asked about the nature of the interconnections between different spheres of ethical responsibility, about how ideas of national interest are constructed and legitimized, and about the precise identity of the ‘we’ community whose interests are pursued in foreign policy.
Fluid community and dynamic ethical practice
Developments in pluralist and ‘post-universalistic’ cosmopolitan thought are harnessed here to help respond to these critical questions and make the evolutionary step from good international citizenship, towards the good global statehood framework advanced by this article. Good global statehood builds from recognition of the inter-relationship, rather than a mutual exclusivity or antagonism, between pluralism and solidarism within the English School.Footnote 74 Such recognition parallels earlier moves by ‘post-universalistic’ cosmopolitan thinkers to locate a ‘communitarian path to cosmopolitanism’ – to find an anchorage for cosmopolitan ethical commitments in more localized forms of political community.Footnote 75 Drawing from this logic, the evolutionary step for good international citizenship in light of the populist challenge, is towards the development of a stronger foundation for progressive foreign policy within the everyday ethical practice of localized forms of community and identity.
The emphasis on established community as an anchor point for ethical reflection is a central concern for traditional accounts of pluralism within the English School. For traditional pluralists, the moral diversity of national communities largely precludes the development of thicker ethical norms in world politics. However, Williams' ‘revived pluralism’ is highly critical of the ‘ossified’ pluralist vision of international society – as excessively conservative in its emphasis on the immutable position of the state as delineator of moral community.Footnote 76 Although framing community membership as a ‘permanent and indestructible feature of being human in a general sense, a fundamental reference point for ethical reflection and a vehicle for exercising human agency’, he departs from the static association of such community with the state.Footnote 77 To counteract ‘ossification’ and to help re-vitalize English School pluralism's normative commitment to preserving and promoting the diversity of human life, he advocates conceiving ‘community as a verb’:
‘To community’, then, is to change and to develop and to alter through social interaction, organized around issues of common interest, amongst a group of humans sharing a common identity or ‘we feeling’. Community is therefore understood within pluralism in broad terms. Communities can exist amongst individuals at very diverse scales and they are not exclusive, or at least not necessarily so – to be a member of one community is not to renounce membership of all others.Footnote 78
The state as an established moral community, with a distinctive ‘we-feeling’, remains a vital reference point, with a high level of affective legitimacy when compared to the more remote the institutions of solidarist international society. However, Williams' ‘community as a verb’ emphasizes the fluidity of community boundaries and the continual formation, reformation, and adjustment of communal identities. Similarly, Erskine's conception of ‘embedded cosmopolitanism’ involves the acceptance that ‘the communities that define us are best understood as multiple, multifarious, overlapping and often territorially dispersed’ and that being a member of one particularist community does not entail seeing non-members as ‘situated in a completely distinct and separate network of meanings and practices’.Footnote 79 The significance afforded to community contexts also has much in common with recent pragmatist thinking on ethics and human rights.Footnote 80 Drawing from the work of John Dewey, Hoover situates the construction and practice of ethics within concrete, lived social contexts, rather than abstract ethical commitments.Footnote 81 As with Williams, Hoover's commitment is to a fundamentally pluralist ethos, one that leads to neither the reification of the state as the location of such lived social contexts, nor the inevitable emergence of a post-state cosmopolitan community.Footnote 82 Contrary to the populist preoccupation with state and nation, anchoring progressive foreign policy in everyday ideas of community thus requires an acceptance that the boundaries of such communities are themselves fluid and permeable.
The politics of the populist moment provides an empirical illustration of the tension between the continued salience of the national community as a boundary of ethical concern, and the myriad of other forms of identity, solidarity, and community to which individuals may be connected. However, rather than identifying this as something that needs to be suppressed, tamed, or resolved, the pluralist approach recognizes this as a normal condition of communal life. This can be best navigated through dynamic ethical practice – committed to continual contestation and self-critique, without aspiration to an idealized end state or convergence around grand normative frameworks.Footnote 83 For ‘post-universalistic’ forms of cosmopolitanism, rather than framing a cosmopolitan future as a knowable end-state, defined by universal values, cosmopolitanism is similarly rendered as a dynamic process of dialogic or conversation-based ethical engagement between self and other.Footnote 84 This process creates space for new sites of ethical obligation and shared values to emerge, running alongside, but not necessarily in tension with traditional connections to the state or national community. Although the precise renderings of dynamic ethical practice differ between ‘revived’ English School pluralists, pragmatists, and post-universalistic cosmopolitans, clear shared commitments are evident – to the importance of concrete lived experiences and communities as loci of ethical life, to radical inclusivity in political decision-making, to critical self-reflection on one's own identity and situatedness, and to an openness to change through a process of ethical engagement where the outcomes are not pre-ordained.
Focussing on community and dynamic ethical practice offers important tools for responding to the challenge of populist nationalism to solidarist international society. It allows recognition of the disconnections between the emotional legitimacy of familiar forms of community and identity, and the expansion of supranational governance and transborder ethical consciousness. However, these approaches simultaneously recognize the fluidity of communal identity and reject the monolithic rendering of the national ‘we’ – a homogenous national community with a unified sense of national interest – articulated by populist nationalism. The idea of community and ethics as things that are practiced dynamically creates openings for a ‘pluralist path to a solidarist world politics’. Rather than a solidarist international society conceived as an end-state, pursuing a pluralist path involves conceiving it as a continual process of developing and maintaining connections between an expanding trans-national normative horizon, and everyday-lived experiences, identities, and community links. At the same time, where the revived pluralist, pragmatist, and post-universalistic cosmopolitan approaches are significantly less clear, is how they might translate into the policy and practice of the state. How might their commitments – to a focus on ethics as rooted in everyday (though intrinsically fluid) understandings of communal life, and a dynamic practice of dialogue and ethical reflexivity – come to inform progressive foreign policy? The principles of good global statehood advanced in the next section make such a translation of these commitments into a revised framework for normatively progressive foreign policy.
Enacting good global statehood
This section provides an initial formulation of the good global statehood framework, as a theoretical advancement on existing formulations of good international citizenship that responds to the challenge of populist politics. Providing two broad principles for progressive foreign policy, its advancement on earlier conceptualizations of good international citizenship, comes in the integration of dynamic ethical practice and the decompartmentalization of national interest, to help build a more reliable consensus on the structures and normative values of solidarist international society.
‘De-othering’ foreign policy: from national to transnational common interests
The aim of good global statehood is to forge a pluralist path to a more legitimate solidarist international society. Its normative innovation is in counteracting populist narratives by better connecting solidarist trajectories in international society with divergent lived experiences, interests, and preferences at the most local level. A first stage in the pursuit of this objective is to challenge the dichotomy within foreign policy, between the national self, whose interests, values, and identity are projected, and the external ‘foreign’ world towards whom such policies are directed. This contrasts with ideas of enlightened national interest in earlier iterations of good international citizenship, which rely on the neat rendering of separate spheres of ethical obligation – that additional responsibilities to outsiders can be tacked onto obligations to co-nationals.Footnote 85 Ethical responsibilities are rendered as concentric circles – with spatial proximity largely determining the depth of moral concern.Footnote 86 If the insights of ‘revived’ English School pluralists and post-universalistic cosmopolitans are taken seriously, this construction underplays the extent to which community loyalties, including those that cross borders, overlap one another, without hierarchy of concern being necessary. For instance, foreign policy action on climate change simultaneously involves discharging ethical responsibilities to co-nationals, to a stable international order, to the security of the human species, and to the biosphere and the non-human world. To regard the ‘self’ community as something that can be disaggregated or prioritized in this process, is to ignore the intrinsic connections between these sites of ethical obligation and might compromise the overall objective of preventing environmental crisis. De-othering foreign policy as an evolutionary step from good international citizenship to good global statehood involves conceptualizing different spheres of obligation in a non-hierarchical ethical relationship. Viewed this way, the analytical term ‘foreign’ policy – its suggestion of dealings with that which is foreign or alien – becomes a misnomer and a terminology shift to ‘global policy’ better captures such a non-hierarchical relationship. In keeping with the idea of a pluralist path to solidarist international society, this is not the erasure of different sites of obligation into one singular sense of moral community. It is rather a starting point for an analysis of foreign policy that accepts a deep pluralist bricolage of interconnected, relational, and overlapping sites of interest and obligation, as more accurately reflecting of the concrete realities of contemporary world politics than an image of neat concentric circles that define core and peripheral ethical commitments.Footnote 87 De-othering foreign policy presents a forthright challenge to populist nationalism's typically aggressive re-assertion of the primacy of the singular national community, and has important implications for the continued salience of national interest, as both a theoretical and discursive tool.
At a theoretical level, de-othering foreign policy leads good global statehood to move from using ‘enlightened’ national interest as a central reference point for progressive foreign policy, towards a concept of transnational common interest. Transnational common interest is premised on the understanding that spheres of interest and ethical obligation are relational and overlapping, and that forms of community are not neatly delineated by the boundaries of the state. It is not the search for a singular interest of humankind which, as with the homogenized national interest, is likely to stifle pluralism. Rather, transnational common interest entails developing and mapping connections (or disconnections) between the most localized communal interests – for instance town, city, or other sub-national grouping – and other transnational sites of ethical concern and obligation in world politics. Mapping these divergent and complex forms of ethical relation provides a means of better understanding points of tension in the expansion of solidarist international society and developing a more durable consensus on a ‘world common good’.
As a discursive tool, this departure from national interest also necessitates a shift in how interest and obligation are narrated in foreign policy. Rather than simply attempting to ‘reclaim’ the national interest by challenging the policies and practices with which populist governments associate the national interest, progressive foreign policies informed by good global statehood demand a radically different narration from policy elites, of the relationship between everyday forms of ethical community and global political processes. The objective would be to challenge the basic premise of populist nationalists as speaking on behalf of a discrete national community of interest, by exposing the fluidity of this same community. The successful transition of transnational common interest from a theoretical construct to a practical ontological tool relies not only on its narration by foreign policymakers but also its interpellation, as recipient populations come to identify with the roles and subject positions it creates, naturalizing them as common-sense assumptions.Footnote 88 Herein lies a potential vulnerability of nascent claims regarding transnational common interest. Populist movements enjoy a significant advantage in their mobilization of the national interest, given the enduringly powerful affective qualities of the national community as a ‘common sense’ reference point for foreign policy. By the same logic, the national interest can also be deployed as a coercive rhetorical device to stifle suggestions of alternative transnational frames of reference, constructing an artificial binary between the ‘nation’ and cosmopolitan ‘citizens of nowhere’.Footnote 89 Conceiving and narrating transnational common interest as a means of revitalizing the domestic legitimacy of solidarism, thus also requires a practical methodology for establishing it as a common-sense reference point for foreign policy.
A co-production methodology
Transnational common interest as a guiding concept in good global statehood presents distinct methodological challenges. Firstly, through what practices can transnational common interests be ascertained, in a way which recognizes a bricolage of intersecting interests in pluralistic world? Secondly, how might transnational common interests become connected with concrete lived experiences and subjectivities, and overcome the dominant exclusionary logic of national interest as a common-sense reference point for foreign policy? An answer can found by drawing the methodology of post-universalistic cosmopolitanism into practices of foreign policy co-production.
Post-universalistic cosmopolitanism is typified by the use of dialogic or conversation-based approaches, which create varied sites for divergent ethical communities to interact and to make connections between rooted communal lives and a collective global ethical consciousness.Footnote 90 Developing a resonant idea of transnational common interest in progressive foreign policy faces the challenge of internal dissensus between fluid domestic identity communities and a more ambiguous national ‘we’, in a similar way to challenges posed by radical ethical divergence in international society. Consequently, dialogue as a form of dynamic ethical practice has the adaptive potential to address the problem of ethical dissensus both within national communities, as well as between them. Within good global statehood, this is translated into a co-production methodology, which involves opening out foreign policy development and the dialogues through which it is formed, to a wider range of agents, both within and outside the state. The desired outcome would be the development of foreign policy commitments in pursuit of transnational common interests, which both resonate with day-to-day lived experiences and subjectivities, and are more critically attuned to pluralism in world politics. Domestic publics of limited membership remain highly significant for foreign policy, as sources of democratic legitimacy. However, the lived realities of these domestic publics involve frequent and often banal interactions with a larger transnational public sphere, one which has already demonstrated its potential as a basis for political engagement and action beyond the confines of the state system.Footnote 91 Advanced communications technologies and the internet in particular, have allowed for the emergence of new communities of both discourse and political action and, in doing so, created new forms of political subjectivity and new modes of citizenship.Footnote 92 Incorporating these nodes of connection in practices of co-production would allow progressive foreign policymaking to acknowledge the importance of geographically localized identities, without ceding to the populist refocussing on the primacy of exclusionary and neatly compartmentalized national communities.
These nodes of connection are not tidy cosmopolitan spaces produced by the gradual expansion of liberal solidarist norms, but a much messier pluralist space woven together by new digital communications technologies.Footnote 93 Diasporic communities, radical Islamist movements, pro-democracy/anti-authoritarian protesters, environmental activists, and far right groups, amongst many others, inhabit a sphere of dialogue and action that overspills territorial borders.Footnote 94 On the one hand, this messy pluralist environment creates greater possibility for resistance and transgression, undermining the linear movement towards solidarist international society, directed by states via conventional diplomatic channels.Footnote 95 On the other hand, it simultaneously creates openings for the co-production of foreign policy that might generate a solidarism made more legitimate by its fuller connection to lived forms of political community, identity, and ethical consciousness.
Foreign policy co-production necessitates states developing practices that can engage more directly with publics both within and transecting the borders of their state. In a messy, pluralist environment, this process lends itself to an agonistic approach and situational ethics, engaging with and embracing, rather than seeking to sanitize its contestation, contingency, and plurality.Footnote 96 Embracing ongoing contestation suggests that foreign policy co-production would necessarily be a continuously evolving and a perpetually unfinished discussion, where consensus may not always be reached. Similarly, the precepts of post-universalistic cosmopolitanism also emphasize the radically inclusive membership of dialogic communities, suggesting that all whose interests stand to be affected by a global political issue have the right to be included.Footnote 97 This presents an immediate practical difficulty for states attempting to develop coherent global policy. A radical democratic ethos of a continuously evolving and never-ending discussion, taking place amongst a dialogic community of potentially vast membership, is likely to be impractical. Co-production within good global statehood must therefore inevitably be truncated, both in terms of those brought into the policymaking process and the parameters of the discussion. For the purposes of developing a sense of transnational common interest, such a truncated and non-ideal co-productive process may in fact be sufficient. Although limited to below ideal levels of membership and scope, necessarily imperfect co-productive mechanisms still stand to counteract the anti-elite sentiment of populism, by creating a stronger feeling, amongst larger sections of the public, of being represented in foreign policy and the future direction of solidarist international society. Nevertheless, this raises important questions of where the parameters for inclusion and exclusion, and the scope of the discussion might be set. There are risks of over-representing sections of transnational publics, who might be already well-engaged with specific policy areas, or with specific forms of expert knowledge. The onus on practitioners of good global statehood must therefore be to work constantly towards shaping the parameters and platforms for dialogue towards ever greater inclusion, accessibility, and representativeness.
The move towards co-production, though a seemingly radical shift, already has a foundation in contemporary state practice. The permeation of foreign policy production by a wider range of actors – to parliaments, coalition partners, and private interests/lobby groups – is already well-established across Western democracies.Footnote 98 Broader trends of deliberative democracy and participatory governance are also evident in domestic spheres of public policy, with potentially significant promise in opening channels for foreign policy co-production. The mobilization of ‘mini-publics’ – a representative, randomly selected group of citizens, brought together to discuss an issue of public concern – in the form of deliberative panels, forums, or citizens assemblies, has become an increasingly common means of enhancing public engagement with policy debates.Footnote 99 The Republic of Ireland has become a notable example of the formal institutionalization of deliberative democratic process through the creation of the Citizens' Assembly (An Tionόl Saoránach). The 2016–18 Assembly played a significant role laying the groundwork for the 2018 referendum on constitutional changes to repeal the ban on abortion in Ireland.Footnote 100 Such forms of deliberative democracy are typically limited to internal publics and issues of more localized concern. However, there is no intrinsic reason why these practices could not be extended both to address foreign policy formulation and widened to include non-citizens, as a practical step in realizing a pluralist path to a more legitimate solidarist international society. Indeed, the construction of an inclusive deliberative platform for foreign policy development at the state level would mark an intermediate stage between domestic citizens assemblies and more ambitious visions of a deliberative global citizens assembly within the UN system.Footnote 101 In keeping with the normative direction of solidarist international society, a deliberative forum for foreign policy co-production with trans-national membership provides a means of advancing a cosmopolitan-minded outlook in state conduct, without necessarily moving towards a more fully fledged world society.
Mechanisms for individual states to engage more directly with transnational publics have already been demonstrated in contemporary world politics, albeit without the co-productive intent required for the radical democratization of foreign policy. The evolution of public diplomacy, in an era of mass communication, represents one such empirical manifestation of new communicative conduits between states and foreign publics.Footnote 102 Practices of public diplomacy have been influenced significantly by advances in communications technology, social media, Web 2.0, and the movements of (global) public opinion ‘made up of turbulences of information in diversified media system’.Footnote 103 ‘New’ approaches to public diplomacy have sought to move it beyond soft power generation and nation branding, towards a mode of interaction that involves a two-way mode of dialogic communication between the state and foreign publics.Footnote 104 Although less well-established than formal modes of inter-state diplomacy, dialogue-based public diplomacy illustrates an existing practice of world politics through which states might engage in foreign policy co-production with globally connected publics. In keeping with the theme of ‘de-othering’ foreign policy, the principal shift required would be to conceive dialogic public diplomacy as a practice that is not solely directed towards ‘foreign’ publics, but one that would also incorporate publics within the state and the issues, identities, and communities that straddle national borders.
Nascent examples of the kinds of transborder deliberative and dialogic practices that reflect the co-productive intent of good global statehood have also already become apparent, most notably in the spheres of global governance and transnational environmental politics. Although not directly linked to the production of national foreign policy, the EU Conference on the Future of Europe demonstrates a clear effort by an organization embodying the expansion of solidarist international society, to develop new forms of legitimacy through transborder deliberative democratic practices. The Conference used a multilingual digital platform and a series of ‘European citizens panels’ consisting of 800 randomly selected European citizens, to develop proposals on future European policy on the economy, democracy, and values, climate change and the EU's role in the world. The input from these deliberative platforms was fed into a plenary conference discussion, involving representatives from the European Parliament, the European Council, European Commission, national Parliaments, and the citizens panels, which in turn yielded 49 proposals for the future development of the Union.Footnote 105 Although this initiative was not framed explicitly as a response to the challenge of populist politics, it reflects a clear effort to reconnect the politics of the EU with its citizens in the wake of Brexit and ongoing hostility from populist parties in mainland Europe. It demonstrates the ability to develop more inclusive modes of policy development across state borders, though the inside–outside distinctions amongst participants are softened by the EU's parallel framework of common European citizenship. Similar efforts to develop more legitimate and locally rooted modes of solidarism are also evident in the formation of the ‘Global Citizens Assembly’ for the COP26 climate change conference in November 2021. One hundred people selected by lottery from across the world, met as part of a five-block series of meetings before, during and after COP26, presenting a range of proposals to the conference and reviewing progress made.Footnote 106 Although the Global Citizen's Assembly was framed more explicitly as a bottom-up project, rather than something devised by a state or international organization, it again demonstrates the potential for developing an inclusive dialogic or deliberative community across state borders.
The co-productive methodology of good global statehood can ultimately generate a diverse and context-specific range of possible practical manifestations, using digital technologies to bridge geographic and linguistic divides. Whatever the specific implementation of co-creation, crafting a pluralist path to a more substantively legitimate solidarist world politics is the normative goal. At the same time, the embrace of the contestation and uncertainty intrinsic to a process of co-production means that the thicker systems of shared norms and values that it may generate for a solidarism of tomorrow, may look considerably different to the liberal solidarist order of today.
Conclusion
The ‘populist moment’ of the mid-late 2010s has unsettled assumptions about the future evolution of solidarist international society, where moral concern might cross state borders and ever more comprehensive systems of rules and norms are used to address pertinent planetary problems. The anti-elite narratives of populist politics provide a significant challenge to facets of globalization and established modes of global governance that are characteristic of solidarist international society. The emergent cosmopolitan-mindedness in state practice also associated with solidarism has similarly been challenged by a populist nationalist discourse often emphasizing the supremacy of the national community as a point of ethical responsibility and suspicion of outsiders.
Problematically, the various electoral breakthroughs of populist movements have revealed the fragility of the consensus on solidarist international society, within those same states that have acted as the bulwark for this agenda. Populist politics has drawn heavily on a sense of disconnection, between everyday lives and political ‘elites’, both domestic and transnational. The future evolution of solidarist international society continues to be contingent on the perennial concern of expanding consensus internationally. However, concern must also be directed towards building stronger legitimacy amongst domestic publics, for progressive foreign policies that seek to augment solidarist international society.
This article has sought to contribute to the theoretical debate within the English School, firstly by mapping out this challenge posed by populist politics to the evolution of solidarist international society. However, its secondary contribution is in advancing the concept of good global statehood, as a means of working towards a more legitimate and ultimately stable solidarism. It builds upon the debate on good international citizenship, but identifies the limitations of the compartmentalized understanding of national interest evident in earlier iterations of the concept and the relative inattention given to the need for internal consensus on progressive foreign policy.
Good global statehood acknowledges the emotional legitimacy enjoyed by familiar ‘traditional’ forms of community, the state, and the everyday contexts within which individuals are embedded, combined with the simultaneous recognition that individuals are located within multiple community contexts, often transecting the borders of the state. As a basis for foreign policy, the populist appeal to the primacy of the national community and its interests is premised on an impoverished rendering of the complexity of community identities and a sphere of ethical responsibility too limited to address pressing problems threatening humankind and the planetary biosphere. The theoretical advance of good global statehood is in the more explicit concern given to navigating the tensions between diverse lived experiences and spheres of moral community, effectively pursuing a ‘pluralist path to a solidarist international order’ when developing progressive foreign policy.
Rather than relying on a rendering of ‘enlightened national interest’, where overseas ethical concerns are ‘bolted on’ to pre-existing national interests, good global statehood is premised on the ‘de-othering’ of foreign policy, rejecting the assumption of an internally coherent national interior that can be ethically detached from the foreign ‘other’. As communities of interest, sites of ethical responsibility and vulnerabilities to common threats transect state boundaries, the distinctiveness of the ‘nation’ as a reference point and its usefulness in crafting a foreign policy agenda becomes less clear. ‘De-othering’ foreign policy thus invites the reconsideration of national interest as a useful ontological category, and a shift is made towards a conception of transnational common interest – a bricolage of different intersecting interests which might form the basis for a more legitimate solidarism. Ascertaining such a transnational common interest and developing stronger connections between solidarist internal society and everyday lives, could be achieved through a co-production methodology for progressive foreign policy. Using dialogic and deliberative approaches to open up the process of foreign policy development to those traditionally excluded, co-production offers the possibility of forging more legitimate norms and institutions of solidarist international society, amongst publics both within and across state borders.
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