In this chapter, I take up the challenge of moving beyond a monist approach to solidarity. The notion that diverse citizens become obligated towards one another only through sharing national commonalities is a deeply influential one. It pervades everyday perceptions of the social world, witnessed through, on the one hand, the growing expectation in public discourses and naturalisation tests that immigrants internalise national values, and on the other hand, the public backlash in Western democracies towards multicultural policies deemed to encourage social fragmentation. It has, moreover, gained a respectable following in philosophical circles, where nationally defined principles of justice, values and cultures are extolled for their supposed indispensability in cultivating bonds between diverse strangers.

I argue such monist insights need to be rejected, as they are founded on mistaken assumptions about the nature of collective identity and imply a programme of national socialisation that is both normatively unsustainable and lacks practicality in contexts of deep diversity. What monists identify as common national culture, values, principles, traditions, and so on, are, on closer inspection, not so common at all, but artefacts of dominant actors whose position of privilege allow them to present these artefacts as normal and matter of fact aspects of social life. Moreover, monists complacently assume that the promotion of these artefacts is a benign process of simply putting aside supposedly ‘selfish’ or ‘sectarian’ interests in the name of converging around a common national good. In doing so, monists are blind to the structures of domination their programme sanctifies and naive about the potential of their programme's promise to bring about cooperation and fellow-feeling, rather than hostility and division.

In the place of the essentialism of monist theories, I develop a concept of solidarity that avoids dependence on shared cultural attributes. Solidarity, I propose, is what differently situated actors experience when they are prepared to respect each other's stated desires for self-determination, recognition and distribution.