Introduction

Andrea Sangiovanni's lead essay is perhaps the most perspicuous and certainly the most ambitious theoretical account of solidarity to date. Its perspicacity derives both from Sangiovanni's facility with the methods and language of analytic philosophy, and from his willingness to clarify that language via engagement with neighboring discussions in critical social theory, social psychology, and the history of political thought. The pluralist spirit that guides his inquiry also signals its ambition. The account is designed to apply trans-contextually – that is, to be capable of clarifying practices and theories of solidarity that emerge from any given geographical space at any given time in (modern) history.

My aim in this response is to test the limits of Sangiovanni's account by placing it in dialogue with the history and present of anticolonial solidarity. I raise two main points. First, Sangiovanni's conceptual history of solidarity is limited by a neglect of the colonial context in which the concept of solidarity first emerged. I suggest that recontextualizing nineteenth-century solidarism in relation to French imperialism reveals some colonial limits to Léon Bourgeois's theory of solidarity. I then ask how contemporary theorists can avoid these limits. Second, Sangiovanni's normative account of solidarity is limited by a neglect of anticolonial solidarity. Surveying the history of anticolonial (inter)nationalism and contemporary anticolonial movements reveals a range of ways of seeing solidarity somewhat differently. Concepts like contestation and critique, and distinctions like hegemonic-subaltern and inclusive-exclusive, are central to the theory and practice of anticolonial solidarity. But they play almost no role in Sangiovanni's account. I therefore ask if these historical and practical limits suggest a possible theoretical one: namely, a difficulty in tracking the diverse kinds of practices that may be seen as central to anticolonial solidarity today. I call this a ‘possible’ limit because I hope that raising these points will provide an opportunity for Sangiovanni to correct any of my misinterpretations and to clarify his account by continuing the dialogue he so generously initiated.

Which history? Whose solidarity?

We lack a definitive history or even a robust historiographical discussion of solidarity. ¹ In this context, Sangiovanni's reconstruction of solidarity's conceptual history is a valuable contribution. This is the case, I emphasize, independent of the relationship between that history and Sangiovanni's more elaborate normative theory. But how should we see that relationship? After introducing his novel concept of solidarity, Sangiovanni suggests that ‘tracing the history of solidarity … is so important’ because

This is a welcome defense of a close relationship between historical understanding and political judgment. Its importance can be clarified by stating it negatively: if we were to misunderstand (i) ‘how and when’ solidarity emerged as a concept, then we would risk misunderstanding both (ii) the social and political problems the concept was initially designed to address and (iii) its role in our own practical and discursive contexts today. Note that this is more than a call for an intellectual division of labor between historians and theorists. On Sangiovanni's own terms, a normative theory of solidarity requires history to clarify its political relevance, and that history must be built in at the foundations.

The few intellectual histories of solidarity we have usually start with its rise to public prominence in France's Third Republic. The concept dates to the Roman law of obligations and appears in the Napoleonic Civil Code. Throughout the nineteenth century, philosophers, social reformers, and politicians used various understandings of solidarity to debate solutions to the ‘social question’ stemming from increasing inequality under the industrial division of labor. As the sense and reference of solidarity was expanded from a narrowly legal to a more broadly socio-political idea, it came to be seen as offering a middle position between the extreme poles of laissez-faire economic liberalism and communist collectivism. Thereby, it became integral to the theory and practice of early French liberalism, especially through the Radical Republican Party and the social movement for ‘solidarism’ (pp. 34–6).

This history is both accurate and limited. Even in such potted form, it meets the internal demands of Sangiovanni's account – it tells us how and when solidarity emerged (Third Republican social theory and practice), what it responded to (inequality), and what it could do for us (help us understand and address inequality). It is thus entirely appropriate for Sangiovanni and other political theorists to ground their normative theories on something like this story. But while ‘solidarism’ was indeed something like the ‘official philosophy for the Third Republic’ (p. 35 n. 66), historians of French imperialism have long emphasized that the idea of ‘the civilizing mission’ functioned concurrently as ‘the official ideology of the Third Republic's vast new empire’ (Conklin 1997, p. 11). The literature on civilization and the civilizing mission is immense, especially as compared to the nascent literature on solidarity. ² But despite the centrality of both ‘solidarity’ and ‘civilization’ to nineteenth-century French political thought, these literatures have never been brought together. What happens to our usual way of seeing ‘solidarity’ if we see it as emerging alongside ‘civilization’ in the practical and discursive context of France's Third Republic? Would this angle of vision allow us to appreciate certain aspects of solidarity that we might not have appreciated before?

The connection is clear in Durkheim's Division of Labour in Society (1893). We are familiar with his famous distinction between ‘mechanical solidarity’, which derives from similarities and subsumes the individual personality within the group; and ‘organic solidarity’, which links individuals to society through differential and specialized functions in the division of labor. Less familiar is how that distinction is connected to a hierarchical contrast between ‘higher’ civilized and ‘lower’ uncivilized peoples. Durkheim's concluding discussion of international politics clarifies his view: by ‘backward’ societies characterized by mechanical solidarity, he means to identify not just remnants of Europe's feudal past but contemporary non-European societies. The ‘uncivilized-mechanical’/‘civilized-organic’ contrast provides a schema for Durkheim to claim that uncivilized non-Europeans are incapable of both freedom and justice. That is, they can achieve only an ‘apparent’ liberty and their morality is less ‘rational’ and less ‘human’. The colonial implications of this schema are equally clear: industrial nations should pursue the goal of ‘universal brotherhood’ by organizing a ‘society of European peoples’ and continuing their colonial policies, or what Durkheim calls ‘the absorption or elimination of less advanced societies’. ³ Durkheim's view of empire is of course contested. ⁴ My point here is simply that the close internal relationship of ‘solidarity’ and ‘civilization’ in his text allowed them to function together in a language that, at a minimum, legitimated the Third Republic's colonial policies.

We can see a similar connection in Durkheim's contemporary Léon Bourgeois, a French statesman who briefly served as prime minister and was one of the initial architects of the League of Nations. Bourgeois's pamphlet Solidarité (1895) was the intellectual foundation of the solidarist movement. Sangiovanni rightly draws our attention to his influence and helpfully clarifies his account of solidarity (pp. 35–9). To briefly reiterate, two aspects are fundamental. The first is Bourgeois's view of contemporary inequalities as the accumulated product of joint social production in the division of labor over time. The second follows from this extended temporal perspective: we are born into society owing a ‘social debt’ to both past generations and our contemporaries. Bourgeois's real innovation was to devise a thought experiment to specify the content of this debt at a given moment. What he called the ‘quasi-contract’ comes rather close to Rawls’ ‘original position’: like Rawls, Bourgeois suggested that we should imagine what distribution of the benefits and burdens of social interdependence we would agree to if we were free and equal members of a contract prior to our association. This thought experiment then provides a normative standard against which to evaluate social institutions and which guides policies for their reform (Bourgeois 1902, pp. 136–40). ⁵ Also like Rawls, Bourgeois saw this theory as supporting a social democratic vision of distributive justice and increasing social solidarity. This is obviously an appealing view for many political philosophers today.

While this reconstruction is accurate, it neglects the extent to which Bourgeois's political career was marked from beginning to end by France's colonial entanglements. The central plank of his Radical Republican platform was an income tax reform bill that he hoped would address France's roiling political, fiscal, and colonial crises. The Long Depression of 1873–95 had put the social question back on the map, and the 1884 law permitting trade unions signaled the growing strength of the socialist movement. But the immediate context of his brief stint as prime minister was a deeply controversial colonial policy. He entered office in November 1895, just after French troops occupied Madagascar in an operation that was widely recognized as an expense of both funds and human life wildly disproportionate to its presumed difficulty and potential benefit (Blais 2007, pp. 22ff). He left office in April 1896, after losing a vote on the credits necessary to repatriate the imperial forces from Madagascar. While parts of Solidarité had appeared in serialized form, it was this political failure that led him to publish it, unchanged, as his hugely successful pamphlet. In short, Bourgeois's brief stint in France's highest political office was decisively shaped by his involvement in French colonial policy.

It is of course not wrong to see solidarity as emerging in response to the social question. Bourgeois argued that the great strength of solidarity was its orientation to overcoming economic and social inequality. It was a ‘materialist’ concept, devoid of the ‘metaphysical’ trappings of the older idea of fraternity, which it ought therefore to replace in an updated Radical Republican triad (Comte 1883, pp. 100–1). But solidarity was also in some sense a new master concept – rather than merely sit alongside the principles of liberty and equality, it presupposed and expressed their existence and unity. Following Alfred Fouillée's theory of modern society as a ‘contractual regime’, it was also intended to replace prevailing Christian notions of charity, seen as unable to address the stark inequalities of industrial society. Instead, modern citizens needed to recognize the duty of what Fouillée called ‘reparative justice’. Where charity was an asymmetrical duty of the rich to relieve the suffering of the poor, reparative justice was symmetrical, a duty of each to repair the historically rooted contemporary injustices felt by all (Fouillée 1880, pp. 420–1, 325ff., 357–62). Bourgeois saw his idea of the social debt as developing Fouillée's reparative justice in a more practical direction. He rejected the language of ‘duty’ as overly abstract, repeatedly defending his choice of ‘debt’ precisely because of its concrete grounding in real inequalities (Bourgeois 1902, pp. 106ff). ⁶ With the idea of social debt at its core, then, Bourgeois's view of solidarity is distinguished from charity because it is material and historical. The ground of our obligation to redress contemporary inequality is not merely an abstract ideal of justice or moral equality. Rather, the obligation to repair injustice is in the first instance an obligation to repay a debt, as material inequalities are the legacy of joint social production through history.

But Bourgeois and his contemporaries were perfectly aware that the social question could not neatly be separated from the colonial question. When his pamphlet was published, colonization was widely coming to be considered what the political economist Paul Leroy-Beaulieu called ‘a matter of life and death for France’. The most important ideologist of French imperialism, Leroy-Beaulieu's reference text Modern Colonization was even more influential than Bourgeois's pamphlet. As he explained to his many readers, the relationship between metropole and colonies was rightly understood as one of ‘a permanent exchange of influences, a reciprocity of services, a continuity of relations – in a word, mutual dependence’ (Leroy-Beaulieu 1877). ⁷ As a monarchist and laissez-faire economist, it should come as no surprise that Leroy-Beaulieu objected to the solidarists’ view of solidarity. For him, solidarity should be seen as more like charity, a duty of conscience felt by the well-off to elevate the downtrodden. The problem with the language of a social debt was that it left the ‘so-called creditors’ in the position to determine the actual legal terms of repayment. If the rich came to see themselves as legally obligated to repay a debt, they would be entirely at the discretion of the poor to fix the terms – and moreover to do so endlessly. ⁸ The same would be true, by analogy, if an imperial power that recognized its mutual dependence on its colonial subjects came to conceive of that relationship as establishing a legal debt.

Some of his early readers attacked Bourgeois for failing to address the French Empire or colonialism in his pamphlet on solidarity. Edmond Demolins was a monarchist critic of the Third Republic who opposed solidarism from the antidemocratic right. He was best known as a supporter of ‘Anglo-Saxon’ models of public education, which he explained as following from and enforcing an individualist spirit of ‘particularism’. On his view, the ‘recent fashion’ for ‘solidarity in French thought’ was an attempt by Bourgeois and his followers to subject the individual to the community, which would ultimately destroy the individualism that drove historical progress (Demolins 1897, p. 322). ⁹ In a mostly laborious critique, Demolins intriguingly accused Bourgeois of having been insufficiently attentive to and unrealistic about contemporary French imperialism. Colonial rule is despotic from top to bottom; a feudal system of property, arbitrary justice, and servitude in which the ‘soldier sets an example for the civilian’ in their attempt to ‘master’ native servants. It enforces the moral degeneration of the colonizer, leading even the ‘most civilized’ to revert to ‘barbaric’ treatment of the colonized as lower than domestic animals. Demolins criticized Bourgeois for failing to consider such ‘examples from our colonization processes’. If he had, he would have seen that human beings were naturally less inclined to support than to exploit and dominate others. And this, in turn, proved that the solidarists’ faith in modern Europeans to recognize a legal debt and moral obligation to their fellow citizens was an unrealistic fantasy.

Bourgeois did not respond to Demolins. But he did eventually clarify his agreement with Leroy-Beaulieu that solidarity could not be extended to the colonies. Well before he was named first president of the League of Nations, he put the language of solidarity to sporadic but revealing use in his international thought. As early as 1899, he argued that a growing recognition of the ‘ever-closer economic solidarity of nations’ had made ‘world peace’ a real possibility. All that was needed was for a ‘society of nations’ to actualize this latent unity by organizing and defining the common material, economic, intellectual, and moral interests of civilized states. The ‘civilized-uncivilized’ opposition grounds his view of international legislation, which he saw as creating a domain of equality ‘open to all civilized states’, which it would ‘envelop’ in a ‘network of peace’. He celebrated the 1907 International Convention of Arbitration in the same terms, as affirming what, in this context, he was willing to call the ‘duty of solidarity’ that applied ‘between civilized peoples’. By the time he discussed the Balkan Crisis of 1913, it was clear that his real concern was with ‘the great powers’ acting on ‘the solidarity of their permanent interests’ (Bourgeois 1913, pp. 22, 40, 62–3, 228–9, 239–40). ¹⁰ And while he saw Japan's proposed racial equality bill at the Paris Peace Conference as grounded in an ‘indisputable principle of justice’, he refused to apply it universally, restricting it to ‘civilized’ members of the League (Shimazu 2002, pp. 29, 119). ¹¹ In this way, he reduced the universal principle of ‘human solidarity’ to a parochial one, the ‘solidarity of European interests’ (Bourgeois 1913, p. 239).

This brief recontextualization of Bourgeois's account of solidarity provides a slightly different answer to Sangiovanni's historical questions. On this view, solidarity emerged in the metropole of a rapidly expanding empire as a response to intertwined social, fiscal, and colonial crises. This allows us better to understand its contested political uses as (i) a normative standard of welfare policies, (ii) an index of European social and civilizational superiority, and (iii) a core feature of legitimating discourses of colonialism. A charitable interpretation would see Bourgeois's colonial limits as surprising. Like Leroy-Beaulieu, he knew that the Third Republic and its colonies were mutually dependent. If nothing else, his political failure to pass tax reform clearly demonstrated that any attempt to redress contemporary inequalities through welfare policy at home was inseparable from colonial policy abroad. The emphasis on material interdependence and gestures to a sort of historical injustice in his theory of solidarity gave him resources to extend it to the colonies. But for him, solidarity is a feature only of European societies that have reached that state of civilizational development at which the fair distribution of the benefits and burdens of the social division of labor has become the central political problem. The quasi-contract thought experiment responds to the contemporary inequalities it purports to address by abstracting away from their real historical roots. It thereby disavows what we know that he knew – namely, that the very possibility of relations of solidarity among citizens of the metropole is itself dependent upon extractive relations with the colonies. In this way, it shields from view the colonial origins of the benefits to be redistributed and generates a misunderstanding of the European societies to which it was designed to apply.

The contemporary implications of returning to Bourgeois are thus at least ambiguous. For Sangiovanni, the point of doing so is primarily to introduce two sets of analytical distinctions that play a prominent role throughout his essay. It provides an account of ‘social solidarity’ understood as both material interdependence and moral identification with others in the division of labor, and generates a distinction between the grounds, object, and scope of solidarity (pp. 38–9). But it also serves as an ‘analogue’ for the original normative argument about the grounds of ‘civic solidarity’: for Sangiovanni, citizens identify with one another as joint participants not simply in the division of labor but ‘in reproducing, reforming, and authoring common institutions’, a ‘more fundamental contribution to the basic structure that makes our contribution through work to the joint social product possible in the first place’ (p. 77). A recontextualized Bourgeois reminds us of his and his contemporaries’ understanding that colonization makes citizens’ contributions to the basic structure possible in the first place. For the metropolitan division of labor is part of the political economy of empire, which supports national civic institutions and generates whatever wealth might be redistributed through them. To root an account of solidarity in a genealogy starting with Bourgeois does not commit us to a developmentalist philosophy of history or hierarchical schema of civilization. But insofar as the lineages of empire persist through mechanisms of both formal and informal imperialism today, we must avoid reproducing accounts of solidarity that obscure the history and present of neocolonialism. For if we fail to do so, we misrepresent our own societies to ourselves, and misunderstand the political uses to which our theories of solidarity might be put in them.

Sangiovanni's account of civic solidarity has promising resources to avoid these kinds of misrepresentations. Seeing citizenship as something like joint authorship is intended to ground an account of civic solidarity as a ‘commitment to overcoming, together, the adversity created by … legacies of racism, sexism, colonialism, and other forms of arbitrary exclusion and oppression’ (p. 78). The language of basic structures and arbitrary exclusions comes from Rawls: I have already noted the points of contact between Rawls and Bourgeois's ideas, and there is a sense in which the foregoing provides a sort of genealogical analogue of certain philosophical critiques of Rawls’ liberalism. One of these, most familiar from the late Charles Mills, emphasizes that the ‘exclusions’ of racism and colonialism are more than merely morally arbitrary: they are both materially constitutive of the political-economic basic structure of modern Western societies, and normatively constitutive of the very distinction between reasonableness and arbitrariness. Sangiovanni's account is not an instance of what Mills called ‘ideal theory as ideology’, for it seems consistent with what Sangiovanni elsewhere calls his ‘practice-dependent institutionalism’ (Sangiovanni 2016, pp. 3–23). Nor does it evade the history of colonization. Its commitment to (conceptual) history distances it from the attempt to transcend history shared by Rawls’ veil of ignorance and Bourgeois's quasi-contract. But there is an opening here to ask how, exactly, an account of civic solidarity grounded in Bourgeois and gesturing to Rawls, avoids what Mills called the ‘coloniality of Rawls’ socio-political and normative assumptions’. Sangiovanni notes that these assumptions are in a sense prefigured in Bourgeois. I have suggested that what Mills called their ‘coloniality’ is, too. What difference, if any, does this deeper sense of ‘how and when the concept of solidarity emerged’ make to our understanding of its ‘political uses and possibilities’ today? Should this history be incorporated into Sangiovanni's account, or can it be safely disregarded? If the former, how; if the latter, why?

What is ‘anticolonial’ ‘solidarity’?

On November 18–21, 2021, Canada's paramilitary Royal Canadian Mounted Police invaded unceded Gidimt’en Clan territories of the Wet'suwet’en First Nation in the north-western central interior of British Columbia (BC). They forcibly removed Wet'suwet’en land defenders under an injunction granted to Coastal GasLink, a company constructing a 670-kilometer fracked-gas pipeline as part of the single largest private investment in Canadian history. Each clan within the Wet'suwet’en Nation have full jurisdiction under their law to control access to their territory. Peaceful women and elders were faced with heavy assault rifles and the full colonial violence of a state invasion on unceded territories. Approximately twenty land defenders and accredited media were arrested. This was the third such invasion of Wet'suwet’en territories since 2019. ¹²

Wet'suwet’en Hereditary Chiefs and land defenders engage in a range of solidarity practices as part of their ongoing resistance to settler colonialism. These include reconnecting to traditional territories through the kinds of local exercises of individual and collective self-determination known as indigenous ‘resurgence’, such as at the Unist’ot’en reoccupation Camp. ¹³ They extend to solidarity with other Indigenous nations, such as the historic meeting with the Mohawk Nations that helped to coordinate the Shut Down Canada blockade, which halted the entire eastern network of the Canadian National Railway. ¹⁴ Or the issuing of ‘invitations’ to engage in place-based solidarity on Indigenous territory, such as the Tiny House Warrior Project in which settler activists construct small structures (tiny houses), which they transport and place on the proposed pipeline route to block construction. ¹⁵ Or yet wider ‘calls’ to ‘international solidarity’ issued by the Wet'suwet’en Hereditary Chiefs, to which thousands of anticolonial and environmental activists have responded in a global wave of demonstrations, direct actions, and traffic, rail, and port blockades. ¹⁶

These practices ‘of and for freedom’ have long and complicated histories. ¹⁷ Any attempt to think of them together as practices of solidarity raises challenging theoretical and practical questions. What does it mean for settlers to act in solidarity with local practitioners of Indigenous resurgence? ¹⁸ How is the nation-to-nation solidarity of Indigenous peoples similar to the solidarity between Indigenous peoples and settlers? What are the relevant differences between an ‘invitation’ to place-based solidarity on Indigenous territory, and an international ‘call’ to solidarity with Indigenous peoples? Perhaps most important in this context, should we expect a concept of solidarity to account for all these practices?

In approaching these questions, I find it helpful to think of ‘anticolonial solidarity’ as an uncertain combination of two contested family-resemblance concepts. They are (i) contested in that their meanings are fought over in the practical struggles in which they are deployed to (re)describe and (re)evaluate the practices and relationships being contested. ¹⁹ They are (ii) family-resemblance concepts in that their criteria necessarily vary between the actors who deploy them and across contexts of struggle. To identify a given practice as one of ‘anticolonial solidarity’ is simply to say that the practices and attitudes of the actors share sufficient criteria of ‘solidarity’ and ‘anticolonialism’ to bear the name ‘anticolonial solidarity’. ²⁰ In this way of proceeding, the above questions are answered by surveying the contemporary and historical practices or families of ‘anticolonial solidarity’. What follows is one such (partial and defeasible) survey. ²¹ The point of the survey is not to excavate a concept with a set of (universally valid) conditions against which to evaluate political practices, thereby settling the contest of meanings. Rather, my aim is to approach the history of ‘anticolonial’ political thought in a way that illuminates both the contested nature of ‘solidarity’ and the vibrant field of practices of ‘anticolonial solidarity’ today.

Sangiovanni does not discuss (Indigenous) anticolonialism in any detail. But there are hints that its framework can help to make sense of such practices. Section 3 explores four ‘grounds’ or ‘right reasons’ for acting in solidarity: way of life, role, condition and experience, or cause (pp. 67–91). This framework is helpful because it allows us clearly to distinguish between different types of solidarity. The ground of socialist solidarity is either the workers’ role as producers in the division of labor or their condition as oppressed or exploited by capitalism (pp. 45–7). The ground of feminist solidarity is women's condition of ‘subjection to a subordinating gendered social structure’ (p. 85). The ground of nationalist solidarity is identification with others based on a shared way of life. The ‘Sioux nation’ provides an intriguing example (pp. 68–71), and a footnote suggests that this framework can track my examples, by analogy, as instances of ‘anticolonial solidarities’. Like Third World anticolonial nationalisms, local Indigenous resurgence could be seen as solidarity grounded in a shared way of life; like Pan-African or Red Power anticolonialism, Indigenous internationalism could be seen as solidarity grounded in a common condition as ‘structurally dominated by settler powers’. Respondents to local ‘invitations’ or global ‘calls’ could then be seen as ‘allies in these struggles’, who ‘count as acting in solidarity on the basis of identification with’ the cause of anticolonialism (p. 68 n. 146).

These analogies are productive but potentially limited. Many Indigenous thinkers and activists have understood their nationalisms in opposition to both First and Third World varieties. ²² Sangiovanni adopts David Miller's account of nationalism as belief in a ‘territorially defined public culture that binds together a group of people across generations’. Because this definition includes nationalists that do ‘not seek statehood’ (p. 68), it seems to account for those Indigenous nationalisms that are specifically ‘non-statist’ (Alfred 1995, p. 9). But how well it can track the ways that Indigenous nationalists understand their efforts ‘to govern and determine themselves’ (p. 68) is initially unclear. For Lakota scholar Vine Deloria Jr., ‘nationhood’ and ‘self-government’ are not simply two possible goals of Indigenous political movements but, rather, ‘two entirely different positions in the world.’ For ‘self-government’ is ‘not an Indian idea’ but a legacy of European theory and practice. Though ‘an exceedingly useful concept’ around which Indigenous movements had organized, in the US ‘self-government’ had come to be understood in terms of ‘domestic dependent nation’ status. ²³ It could therefore ‘never supplant the intangible, spiritual, and emotional aspirations of American Indians’ captured by their understanding of ‘nationhood’. For Deloria, Indigenous nations are ‘unique in the world’ because, while they understood ‘self-government’ in more expansive terms, they were constrained to practice it in the context of ‘a wholly new and modern civilization that has been transported to their lands’ (Deloria and Lytle 1984, pp. 13, 15, 2). As Hawaiian nationalist Huanani-Kay Trask explained, following Deloria, Indigenous nationalists therefore had to ‘speak in a different language than Old World nationalism’ (Trask 1999, p. 59, cf. p. 62). ²⁴ The understanding of concepts generated from reflection on European nationalism cannot, then, be assumed to apply by analogy to Indigenous anticolonialisms. Testing their ability to track those practices would require a more contextual and comparative approach than Sangiovanni provides.

The same is true of ideas of ‘self-determination’ in Indigenous and Third World internationalisms. ²⁵ Pan-Africanists like Tanzania's Julius Nyerere coupled the expulsion of colonial rulers through national independence with attempts to secure non-hierarchical forms of international interdependence through institutions like the New International Economic Order (NIEO) (Getachew, 2019). ²⁶ But Indigenous groups contested Third World politics of self-determination from both sides. Members of one of Tanzania's largest Indigenous groups, the Maasai, argued that Nyerere's national development strategies were a continuation of the ‘alienation of our land and its resources’ initiated by European colonizers (Parkipuny 1989). ²⁷ For the World Council of Indigenous Peoples (WCIP), the NIEO was an attempt to institutionalize at a global level these very strategies that were ‘ravaging tribal areas to which indigenous peoples have been moved’. As such, it was a ‘blueprint for the total destruction of indigenous peoples’. In response, they argued for a ‘global dialogue’ on the NIEO that would include Indigenous peoples and guaranteed their ‘right of self-determination’. ²⁸ They also critically distinguished their view of self-determination from familiar Third World understandings: where Nyerere saw national self-determination as grounded in and scaling up from individual ‘self-reliance’, the WCIP saw self-determination as a right of ethnic ‘groups’ or ‘peoples’; where the NIEO sought the economic interdependence of capitalist and socialist postcolonial nation-states, the WCIP's aim of ‘sovereignty’ over Indigenous ‘land and culture’ explicitly rejected understandings of land ‘ownership’ common to both capitalist and socialist schools of industrial development. From the perspective of these Indigenous ‘Fourth World’ anticolonialists, Third World uses of self-determination were less a reinvention than a continuation of a truncated and colonial understanding of a purportedly universal value.

I provide these examples not to suggest that any given view of self-government or self-determination is in some sense the ‘correct’ one. I want rather to emphasize that these and other concepts central to anticolonial political theory and practice have always been deeply contested. For Mohawk scholar Taiaiake Alfred, such contestation is ‘the necessary by-product of rejecting the legacy of an unjust history and the struggle to re-integrate traditional values in the community’. For just as ‘challenging the laws and structures of a colonial regime’ leads to ‘reaction by, and confrontation with, the state’, so does it lead activists to contest the ‘nature and meaning of tradition’ itself, generating ‘factionalism and conflict’ within the movement (Alfred 1995, p. 2). ²⁹

Sangiovanni's brief discussion of Sioux nationalist solidarity does not register anything like this political-conceptual contestation. It suggests that solidarists can see the grounds of their identification differently, and even take these ‘differences and disagreements’ themselves to be partly constitutive of ‘what it means to be’, say, Sioux (p. 15). Yet it remains unclear the degree to which Sangiovanni takes this mode of identification to be open to revision, how pragmatic (or pragmatist) it is. ³⁰ For while solidarity is said not to ‘preclude even profound disagreement’ (p. 22), only the account of ‘civic solidarity’ foregrounds ‘profound disagreement about the character and requirements of the values and ideals that underlie common institutions’; also noting citizens’ ‘readiness to define them through deliberation (and sometimes more open conflict)’ (p. 78). This is explicitly contrasted with (Sioux) nationalist solidarity: citizens are attached to modern states because of ‘what they do together, which defines, in part, who they are’, whereas ‘nationalists have it the other way around: who we are should define what we do together’ (p. 78). Insofar as Indigenous and other anticolonial (inter)nationalists emphasize the centrality of precisely these kinds of contestation to their practices, why should they be restricted to the practices of citizens of modern states? If Sangiovanni's account of nationalist solidarity is to be exemplified by the Sioux and extended by analogy to Indigenous resurgence, it could be strengthened by clarifying its approach to these more agonistic dimensions of anticolonial theory and practice. It would thereby avoid ascribing an implausible degree of pre-political unity, consensus – or worse, mechanical solidarity – to anticolonial (inter)nationalisms, Indigenous or otherwise. ³¹

This is important because these kinds of contestation are especially prominent in discussions of anticolonial solidarity. In 1977, the WCIP's Workshop on ‘Indigenous Ideology and Philosophy’ introduced a distinction between different kinds of solidarity (my emphases):

Settler colonialism produces a rift between ‘dominant society’ and ‘dominated’ ethnic groups, which may or may not be numerical ‘minorities’. The former has ‘dominant political and economic influence’, ‘cultural and linguistic prestige’, and ‘a tendency to expand its norm system beyond the borders of its ethnic area’. As ‘solidarity’ is central to the colonial system of norms, members of the dominant society set the terms and ‘conditions’ of what it means for both settlers and Indigenous peoples to act in ‘solidarity’. Its ‘representatives’ consolidate these conditions through ‘legislation’ and, especially, by demanding ‘respect’ for a ‘legal system’ that systematically ‘disregards the ethnic and cultural plurality of citizens’. ³² The rift in settler society is thus simultaneously discursive and practical: political power attempts to settle the meaning of the concepts through which it is exercised.

The history of anticolonial political thought is replete with such critiques and the distinction (implicit here) between ‘hegemonic’ and ‘counter-hegemonic’ or ‘subaltern’ solidarities. ³³ Each of Deloria Jr., Trask, Alfred, and the WCIP, in different contexts, argued that hegemonic understandings of normative concepts were integral to the ongoing colonization of Indigenous peoples. In response, they engaged in alternative practices of self-government, self-determination, and solidarity, and articulated counter-hegemonic understandings of those concepts to track those practices. This critical framework is hardly unique to Indigenous anticolonialisms. W. E. B. Du Bois famously argued that solidarity among European peoples and states facilitated an imperial project rooted in the false ‘idea of an exclusive White Man's World’. As he put it in 1924, Western imperialism had created a world system in which ‘blacks and browns and yellows, subdued, cajoled and governed by white men, form a laboring proletariat subject to European white democracy which industry controls’. As such, including the world's majority of dominated ‘darker races’ in a truly democratic global system would constitute a ‘tremendous revolt against the solidarity of the West’. Crucially, imperial solidarity also dominated White Europeans. The ‘myth’ of White supremacy ‘misled’ the ‘dimly thinking’ working classes, rendering them mere ‘blind executives’ of their industrial-imperialist masters (Du Bois 1925, pp. 431, 442). ³⁴ The hegemonic understanding of solidarity was therefore ideological in the fullest sense: grounded in a false belief that, in legitimating practices of colonization, brings those who hold it into unwitting contradiction with the democratic values they otherwise purport to hold and, thereby, into a condition of unfreedom. ³⁵

Sangiovanni's account addresses neither the critique of hegemonic solidarity nor the distinction with counter-hegemonic or subaltern solidarity common to anticolonial political thought. It does, however, suggest that ‘solidarity always aims … to change the order of things’; that it is ‘transformative and critical’ (p. 34). And yet, as we have seen, many anticolonial thinkers emphasize the multiple ways that appeals to ‘solidarity’ are frequently used to consolidate rather than transform the (neo)colonial order. They agree with Sangiovanni's gloss that solidarity among and between colonized peoples can be grounded in their common condition of ‘structural[] dominat[ion] by settler powers’ (p. 68 n. 146). They insist that precisely this condition generates ideological and practical conflict. They also insist, further, that it necessitates an approach to ‘solidarity’ grounded in explicit critique of the political-ideological structures and everyday practices constituting the given injustice or practice of domination to which counter-hegemonic practices of solidarity respond and seek to transform. The mode of ‘critique’ of course varies across thinkers and contexts. In 1924, Du Bois urged a global historical perspective to reorient political thinking ‘to the periphery of the vast circle and to the unseen and inarticulate workers within the World Shadow’. ³⁶ The WCIP projected Indigenous voices to break the ‘conspiracy of silence regarding the condition of indigenous nations’ and illuminated practices that, in 1981, remained ‘in the shadows of nation-state exploitation’. ³⁷ In each case, critique is seen as inseparable from, and a necessary starting point, of anticolonial solidarity, for it both unmasks hegemonic understandings of solidarity as ideological and alerts us to those subaltern theories and practices of solidarity we might otherwise miss. Sangiovanni has elsewhere suggested a ‘dialectic’ between ‘constructive’ and ‘demystifying’ approaches to political philosophy. ³⁸ If his account is an instance of the former, then perhaps pursuing that suggestion would enable it more closely to track theories and practices of anticolonial solidarity, in which the latter is so prominent.

This emphasis on contestation and critique allows us to return to the contemporary practices of anticolonial solidarity among and with the Wet'suwet’en people with which I began. In academic and activist contexts across Canada, there are two main ways of describing efforts to establish new forms of Indigenous–settler relations: ‘reconciliation’ and ‘resurgence’. These are deeply contested concepts utilized by both Indigenous and settler people. For some, reconciliation is a new form of (state-sponsored) recolonization, from which resurgence necessarily ‘turns away’ or ‘refuses’ (Simpson 2014). ³⁹ Others see reconciliation as a transformative practice, alongside which resurgence might operate in a more nuanced ‘double decolonization strategy’. ⁴⁰ Both approaches start from critique of, and opposition to, settler colonialism. They share an analysis of colonial violence towards Indigenous persons and peoples. However, as Nishnaabeg legal theorist Aaron Mills explains, they diverge in their analyses of (i) the ‘structural violence’ of settler society and (ii) how power organizes ‘the field of possible movement’ for anticolonial practice more broadly (Mills 2018, pp. 136–7). ⁴¹ Resurgence generally sees structural violence as ‘subjection to settler life ways’ enforced by the constitutional order; anticolonial practice must therefore be organized ‘outside of the formal mechanisms’ of dissent. Reconciliation generally sees structural violence as ‘exclusion from’ the constitutional order; anticolonial practice should therefore pragmatically demand reform and eventual transformation of that order, especially by including Indigenous legal orders and resurgent modes of relationality within or alongside it (Mills 2018, esp. 139–40; 144–5). ⁴²

As this (contestable) sketch suggests, the divergence between resurgence and reconciliation arguably extends to how practitioners see both the form ‘solidarity’ might take and the possibilities for building it between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people. Both are committed to what Indigenous thinkers Glen Coulthard and Leanne Simpson have called ‘grounded normativity’ as a kind of ‘place-based solidarity’. Coulthard describes grounded normativities as ‘modalities of Indigenous land-connected practices and longstanding experiential knowledge that inform and structure our ethical engagements with the world and our relationships with human and non-human others over time’ (Coulthard 2014, p. 13). Grounded normativities ground expansive relations of solidarity between people, land, and more-than-human nature. But because they generate ‘profoundly different conceptualizations of nationhood and governmentality’ in local contexts, the ethical or political responsibilities they generate are unique to a given nation (Simpson 2017, p. 22). While resurgence and reconciliation agree that grounded normativity grounds Indigenous nationalist solidarity, they disagree about what this entails for solidarity with other humans beyond a given nation.

To track this aspect of the disagreement, it helps to introduce a further distinction between ‘inclusive’ and ‘exclusive’ solidarity. While largely absent from Sangiovanni's account, the distinction does appear in the brief account of ‘social movement solidarity’. Social movement solidarity is distinct because it is oppositional, like socialism, but differs according to each movement's view of the ‘grounds and object of solidaristic action’. While Sangiovanni's essay notes ‘the civil rights movement, feminism, disability, and LGBTQ movements’ (p. 53), its analysis might well be extended to anticolonialism. On one hand, ‘Black nationalist’ social movements are like anticolonial nationalism, in that they are grounded in both a shared condition of oppression and a way of life ‘centered on shared history, mores, and folkways’. Moreover, the ‘aim’ of establishing a Black nation permits the kind of internal contestation we have seen in anticolonial nationalist movements – here, whether Black nationalists should pursue (i) a separate state (Garvey) or (ii) ‘self-governing institutions and self-help’ (Malcolm X). On the other hand, Martin Luther King's approach to civil rights twinned socialism's oppositional character with a more ‘universalist and Christian form of mutualism and interdependence’, which allowed for ‘coalition between the civil rights and labor movements’ (pp. 55–6). King's view of solidarity is thus more ‘inclusive’ than Black nationalist solidarity, which, because it aims for ‘autonomy from White America’ (p. 55) is more ‘exclusive’.

This distinction is central to the politics of solidarity in anticolonial social movements today. Resurgence sees solidarity in more exclusive terms. For Simpson, grounded normativity allows for solidarity with non-Indigenous others grounded in resistance to settler colonialism understood as ‘dispossession, capitalism, white supremacy, and heteropatriarchy’. Solidarists are ‘allies’ from ‘communities of co-resistance’ who see and resist settler colonialism in the same way, radically uncoupled from dominant institutions. As such, resurgence solidarity requires exclusion of adversaries, especially ‘liberal white Canadians’ who ‘uphold’ settler colonialism; indeed, ‘there is virtually no room for white people in resurgence’. However, Simpson notes, when ‘constellations of co-resistance within grounded normativities … refuse to center whiteness, our real white allies show up in solidarity anyway’ (Simpson 2017, pp. 228–31).

Conversely (transformative) reconciliation sees solidarity in more inclusive terms. For Mills, the ground of this wider solidarity is the ‘mutual rootedness’ through which all humans are ‘always already in relationships’. Recognizing and building intentionally on mutual rootedness facilitates ‘treaty’ relations between communities. Proponents of reconciliation reject the binary oppositions in resurgence (real allies/false opponents) as a mistaken legacy of Third Worldism's ‘master–slave dialectics’ (colonizer/colonized), which they argue failed to bring about decolonization and is misapplied in Indigenous contexts. They ‘strongly reject’ visions of reconciliation that would ‘perpetuate unjust relationships of dispossession, domination, exploitation, and patriarchy’ (Burrows and Tully 2018, pp. 5–6). But Mills insists that relations of solidarity grounded in mutual rootedness can be strengthened ‘no matter the degree of difference in our norms’. While achieving a ‘good’, ‘non-violent relationship both within political communities and across them’ requires much hard work, it is ‘at least, always possible’ (Mills 2018, pp. 160, 156). ⁴³ The necessary exclusion of some White settlers in resurgence solidarity is seen as undermining the more inclusive solidarity in transformative reconciliation.

What are we to make of this survey of the history and present of anticolonial solidarity? Sangiovanni's essay is introduced by a concern with the widely felt ‘need for some form of collective resistance and mobilization that looks beyond electoral politics’, a hunger ‘for forms of meaningful and transformative joint action’ (p. 3). In the contested field of ‘solidarity’, ‘anticolonial’ theories and practices offer some of the most compelling such forms of resistance and transformation. I have suggested that approaching solidarity as a contested family-resemblance concept helps to foreground precisely those practices. Sangiovanni's essay explicitly rejects this approach (p. 5). Yet in doing so it neglects the ideas and distinctions central to anticolonial solidarity – like contestation and critique, and hegemonic-subaltern and inclusion-exclusion. Nor do the practices of anticolonial solidarity that flourish today, across diverse local, transnational, and global contexts, appear on its pages. Political theorists should celebrate Sangiovanni's effort to ‘guide our reflection’ on solidarity as a ‘distinctive social practice’ tied to ‘forms of collective resistance’ that might ‘right the balance’ of a ‘fragmented, unequal, and divisive politics’ (p. 124). But we must take care not to overlook those practices of solidarity in the first place.