Part I contributes to a richer understanding of the conceptual aspects and conditions of transnational solidarity. The first five chapters raise crucial questions. What is the history of the concept of solidarity? How can transnational solidarity be defined and understood? What are the symbols and myths of transnational solidarity? How can different solidarities co-exist and how do we chose between conflicting solidarities? Through philosophical, sociological, historical, political, anthropological, psychological and ancient Greek thought, we are drawn into an interdisciplinary universe with transnational solidarity at the heart.

Solidarity is a concept strongly linked to the twentieth century and its burning issues of conflicts between capital and labour in a secularised world. The pressing issues at the beginning of the twenty-first century transcend secularity and pose challenges for a post-secular, globalised world of migration and movements of human beings. Since the end of the Cold War, and especially since 9/11 in 2001, the re-emergence of (often conservative) religions and the role of religious affiliations have given rise to many reflections and motivated many research projects on issues related to conflicts, minorities and religious perspectives. This chapter reflects on the challenges, difficulties and potentials for trans-religious expressions and forms of solidarity based amongst others on earlier research. What emerges out of the transformation of social structures, state structures and belief structures that take place alongside major technological changes might be understood as a situation of paradoxical conservatism or ‘subversive traditionalism’. This is a conservatism and traditionalism that continues to demand access to the benefits of modernity and ‘modern life’, while at the same time seeking to preserve a traditional or conservative (gender) order. It also gives rise to perhaps paradoxical forms of solidarity.

This book has been conceived in a period where transnational solidarity and co-operation seemed to be moving backwards rather than forwards. A prime example of this decline of transnational solidarity being the so-called refugee crisis in Europe in 2015. After the Brexit referendum in the UK in June 2016, and presidential elections in the USA later the same year, the political agenda turned inwards, focusing primarily on internal national perspectives in relation to areas such as environmental protection, aid to countries in the Third World and trade with the outside world. Recently, the EU has experienced a number of crises, among others an economic and financial crisis and later the refugee crisis. These crises have challenged transnational solidarity in Europe.

Gender and the development of a sense of justice: a Northern perspective

Carolyn Merchant's influential book The Death of Nature. Women, Ecology and the Scientific Revolution, originally appeared in 1980. Two years later, another very influential book on gender, justice and care was published. Carol Gilligan's In a Different Voice started a discussion about the difference between a primarily male ethic of justice and a primarily female morality of care. The morality of care was understood to rest on the understanding of relationships primarily towards concrete persons with whom we have special and valuable relationships. Gilligan quoted Freud, who concluded that women ‘show less sense of justice than men, that they are less ready to submit to the great exigencies of life, [and] that they are more often influenced in their judgements by feelings of affection or hostility’. She also quoted Jean Piaget, who considered that the legal sense was essential to moral development, and who viewed that this sense ‘is far less developed in little girls than in boys’.

Merchant does not mention Gilligan in her later book from 1989 on Ecological Revolutions: Nature, Gender, and Science in New England.