Does the European left have to choose between the nation-state and internationalism? Some considerations following Richard Rorty

Abstract

By applying the concept of democracy and the state proposed by Richard Rorty, the article aims to make a theoretical contribution to understanding frames of political mobilization and solidarity. While Rorty’s conceptual instruments stem from the field of epistemology and moral philosophy and have, so far, not been widely applied to theorizing statehood in general and labour market policy in particular, his ideas can help to understand leftist politics between inter- and re-nationalization. By drawing on empirical findings on debates and negotiations between European trade union organizations, the text proposes an idea on how to overcome a dualistic framework beyond a footloose cosmopolitanism and national protectionism.

1. Introduction

The unification of Europe through the integration of the member states into a common market and the political construction of a common currency area of some of these countries have led the European Union (EU) into a deep crisis in the course of the last decades. Given the socio-economic and democratic dislocations that this project entails, the EU is at a ‘crossroads’ in the view of a number of long-standing observers of different academic provenance (Habermas 2013; Streeck 2014). ‘The European Union’, as sociologist and political scientist Claus Offe (2015: 1) describes the situation, ‘finds itself at a crossroads between something considerably better or something much worse than the plainly unsustainable status quo’. From this perspective, a considerable improvement of its institutional structure succeeds or its disintegration will occur. Against the backdrop of enormous economic asymmetries (primarily between Northern and Southern Europe), pressure on labour markets (primarily between Eastern and Western Europe), and the actions of the Troika, for example, which are at least questionable in terms of democratic policy (Blyth 2013; Seikel 2019), the status quo seems hardly sustainable.

The question of whether optimism or pessimism is more appropriate in view of the crisis-ridden state of the EU (Kiess and Seeliger 2019) is hotly debated among experts as well as trade union movements and their (traditional) allies on the political left. However, in the face of urgent empirical questions, fundamental theoretical assumptions are usually not specified neither among activists nor among academics. In our view, the question of the mobilizability of labour interests becomes particularly relevant in this context as the process of European integration under conditions of economic globalization puts wage-earners in different countries in competition with each other. While on the one hand the European Union is based on the construction of a multi-level political system (Hooghe and Marks 2001) offering political opportunities, even if often disadvantageous ones, on the other hand the process of integration takes place through the integration of a common market, implying economic mechanisms or factual constraints (for which the German word ‘Sachzwänge’ has become metaphoric).

With regard to the question of the frame of reference of political mobilization, we argue in this article that Richard Rorty’s understanding of democracy and the state offers a number of points of departure, both from an epistemological and a normative point of view. While pragmatism does not constitute a main research approach to the subject area of European integration, neither in the field of political science (see exceptionally: Sabel and Zeitlin 2010) nor in the field of sociology (see exceptionally: Seeliger 2017a), a number of promising avenues for further theoretical thought and empirical study can be discerned in the axiomatic settings of this theoretical tradition.

First, Rorty’s anti-essentialist way of thinking can help us to reflect on implications of (possibly) teleological understandings of the integration process. ¹ Contrary to what advocates of a European Social Model or fundamental critics of the Single Currency Area seem to assume in the debate on European policy, Rorty’s pragmatist view of the social construction of political institutions denies ‘that there is always a goal on the horizon against which we necessarily converge’ (Scheel 2010: 188).

Second, through a reconstruction of and elaboration on a number of basic theoretical concepts that Rorty establishes in relation to the analysis of political institutions, we would like to highlight three tensions within which he examines their practical implementation and makes their normative assessment: The dualism of individually grounded freedom and solidarity-based equality as normative targets of a good life on a philosophical-anthropological level (1), the dualism between egalitarianism and constitutionalism in his understanding of democracy (2) and the dualism between national and international frameworks as reference spaces of political action (3).

Consideration of these three tensions in Rorty’s work can improve our understanding of political action logics within the multi-level system of the European Union. In the tradition of pragmatist thinking, we should not understand them as opposing options for action, but rather as frames of reference relevant to action for obstinate actors who negotiate concrete meaning in practice and thus repeatedly reveal transcendent and surprising ideas and orientations (Joas 1996; Overdevest 2011).

In the following, a brief sketch of the logics of action of (left-wing) distributional politics in the context of the multi-level system of the European Union serves as the object of the subsequent theoretical discussion. The reconstruction of the theoretical concepts then illustrates the three dualisms in Rorty’s work. A concluding section summarizes our argument with regard to the importance of a European public sphere and culture.

2. Between ‘Class’ and ‘Nation’ – distributional conflicts in the course of European integration

The question of the distribution of social wealth has received new attention following the financial crisis of 2008ff (Piketty 2014; Alvaredo et al. 2017). The representatives of social classes usually struggle for answers in the fields of collective bargaining and social policy. The historical binding of these two fields to the arena of the nation state poses a distributional problem under conditions of globalization. Claus Offe and Berger (1982) reduced this problem to a simple formula in the early 1980s: Capital, they argued, could – unlike labour – act in a globally mobile manner. In the current debate about immigration into (supposedly) overburdened social systems, the constellation of labour market policy appears even more complicated: While companies undermine collectively agreed standards through the irregular employment of migrants on the one hand, liberal economists call for the abolition of the minimum wage under conditions of the refugee crisis on the other (DIE ZEIT 2018). At the same time, further pressure is put on welfare states in beggar-thy-neighbour-attempts to be ‘more competitive’ than the rest of the world (or, in our case, the European Union).

Both constellations (competition between locations due to pressure to relocate and undercutting of collectively agreed standards due to labour migration) put both the nation state and the European Union under pressure to act. Much more so, trade unions and parties of the political left are today confronted with a double challenge: While the deepening of integration with the common market increases the need for common political positions, the rapid enlargement of the Union makes it increasingly difficult to establish such positions. For the redistribution of social welfare requires, above all, viable coalitions that are strong enough to negotiate. However, the interests of Central and Eastern European wage-earners often do not coincide with those of their Western European colleagues. The actors of the European left (interested in distribution policy) may find themselves in a conflict of goals: the respective frame of reference for political mobilization is either the members of their countries of origin or the members of their political milieus in the international framework.

Following Jürgen Habermas (2013: 83), two paradigmatic attitudes toward these forms of European integration can be found within the political left: The positive integration of a European Social Model and the renationalization of class conflict. The question of why wage-earners do not effectively aggregate their interests in opposition to the capitalist organization of the economy (or even for the purpose of overcoming it) has traditionally been one of the guiding questions of critical social theory. While the class structure of capitalist societies and the general significance of employment in the process of socialization mark a central point of reference for classical critical theorizing (Horkheimer and Adorno 1988; Marcuse 2003), concrete processes of the organization of collective interests do not fall into its resort. Accordingly, both pessimistic contributions, blaming the integration process for a disempowerment of national redistribution coalitions (Streeck 2014), and vehement contributions promoting a somehow ‘social’ integration are apodictic.

2.1 Cross-border organization against cross-border capital

Redistributive politics, like all politics, is based on the establishment of coalitions. On the question of how exactly such coalitions are to be established in practice, two variants of strategy can be distinguished in the current historical constellation: the organization of international bargaining power and the defense of national institutions. Both variants can be justified both morally and functionally.

The intellectual history of internationalism can be traced from Greek antiquity through Kant’s writing On Perpetual Peace or the Communist Manifesto to the founding of the United Nations. The moral justification for the necessity of the largest possible political communities are the universal claims of people on the basis of their humanity. Since it is not foreseeable under the ‘veil of ignorance’ (Rawls 1999) in which part of the world one will be born, no spatial division of the community into nation-states can be justified.

On a functional level, however, the greatest possible framing of political communities results from a well-understood self-interest: If the task of a trade union is to set the price of labour as high as possible, the formation of corresponding wage cartels must necessarily take place on an international scale. ² In the EU, corresponding political efforts are manifested in the idea of a European social model (Fetzer 2009). The task of such an EU-wide regulatory system would be to coordinate labour and employment standards and welfare institutions (such as in the form of a European unemployment insurance) from or through Brussels. In this way, according to the functional justification, the relocation of production abroad (within the EU, at least) and the employment of foreign wage-earners at dumping wages could be prevented. From this first perspective, the EU’s path from an association of sovereigns to a commonwealth leads via a European social model.

Because of its de facto non-existence, the discussion about the EU-European social model has a mere hypothetical character. At the moment, the scope and extent of the redistribution envisaged appear as unclear as the corresponding (national or regional) responsibilities and their temporal duration. Unlike in the authoritarian supranationalism of the troika (Seikel 2019), a left-wing answer to these questions could not be formulated through the engagement of political ‘experts’, but ‘must involve substantial redistribution (between regions, social classes, economic sectors, generations, member states, points in time) of material resources, a democratic polity is needed in which the European citizenry is represented, conflicting distributional claims are processed, and taxing and spending rights vested’ (Offe 2015: 84).

2.2 Nation-state defense of social achievements in global competition

From a second perspective, similar moral and functional motivations coincide in the justification of a leftist project to safeguard national welfare and collective bargaining institutions. ³ Here, the national framing of political solidarity communities follows from the fact that in many countries an entitlement to public benefits derives from previous payments. At the same time, a second argument follows from the difficulty of trade unions to organize foreign wage-earners. Here, for example, the initiatives of transnational wage coordination that have been under way since the 1960s have so far shown only very limited success. While the international ‘Collective Bargaining and Social Policy Conference’ convenes every few years – as in the metal sector, for example – in order to pass nominal resolutions, concrete (national) collective bargaining usually inevitably reverts to local political patterns of behaviour (Seeliger 2017b).

It is true that European issues have led to a politicization of EU citizens (Hooghe and Marks 2009; Lahusen 2021). In the absence of an effective European government, however, there is no clear institutional addressee for transnationalized claims-making. At the same time, such mobilization, if it occurs at all, faces a multiple heterogeneity problem: In addition to linguistic borders, national economic and distributional regimes remain in effect; the interest of some wage-earners in free movement contrasts with the interest of others in limited job competition. Progressive left-wing parties and trade union organizations, too, must take note of this heterogeneity.

A further point of criticism for representatives of a left-national project arises from the increasingly self-referential decision-making and legitimacy patterns of the EU as a political regime. When, for example, the European Court of Justice acts as a ‘liberalization engine’ (Höpner 2014) by interpreting the European treaties in favour of market freedoms, or the Troika’s crisis management explicitly overrides the interests of national electorates, this confirms the criticism of the Union’s democratic deficit that has been circulating for some time (Schäfer 2006).

At the same time, this lack of ability of national political bodies to safeguard national social protection against pressure from the EU level can be broadly generalized to the (absence of the) creation of EU-wide institutions for social and collective bargaining policy. A binding structure of internationally valid rules for labour and employment has so far remained on the intentional level. European integration on the basis of a common market alone, however, renders the EU indeed a liberalization project. At the same time, the primary framework of political mobilization remains the nation-state – which shows not least in the success of the far-right in recent years which feeds on Euroskeptic sentiment (Ford et al. 2012; Kiess et al. 2017; Vasilopoulou 2017).

Just like the supporters of a European social model, the proponents of a left-wing re-nationalization project must ask themselves where they intend to get support for their project under the given political balance of power. Furthermore, a thoroughly heterogeneous spectrum of political attitudes can be discerned, for example, with regard to the question of the continued existence of the common currency regime. Both left-wing projects – the national and the European – seem to lack conceptual contours as well as political assertiveness. A reflection on the premises and implications from Richard Rorty’s pragmatist point of view could at least help to better reflect the problematic situation described here.

3. What can Richard Rorty’s political theory contribute to the understanding of European integration?

While Rorty’s oeuvre as a whole can be read as political philosophy in the sense that the contrasting of theory and practice exposes implicit discrepancies and false axioms of contemporary philosophy, in the following we would like to refer primarily to two of Rorty’s monographs. The first is Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Rorty 1989), which addresses the question of social cohesion in the process of social development from a predominantly political-theoretical perspective. A pragmatist-postmodern inspired redefinition of the three basic concepts mentioned in the title serves Rorty for the epistemological foundation of his social philosophy. Secondly, we will focus on Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth-Century America (Rorty 1998), in which Rorty takes a position on the relationship between the debate on class and identity politics, which is currently gaining momentum again.

3.1 Rorty’s epistemological-methodological foundations

At the beginning of Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, Rorty describes the French Revolution as an important point of reference for political utopias that would have advanced social modernization (just as, in the overall historical course, it would have advanced the history of humanity as a whole). The sudden upheaval had shown how ‘the whole vocabulary of social relations and the whole range of social institutions could be replaced almost overnight’ (Rorty 1989: (3). ‘To the intellectuals of the time’, Scheel paraphrases the consequences described by Rorty, ‘it was demonstrated that changes that had been thought impossible turned out to be feasible after all’ (Scheel 2010: 187).

A similar argument can in principle be applied to the development of the European Union. Started as an (indirect) security policy project for the pacification of the European continent, the EU has developed from a trade partnership of a few core countries into an international power structure that influences the realities of millions of citizens – for better or for worse, but in any case on a continent-wide scale. The fact that, against the background of recent developments in the relationship between national democracy and supranational authoritarianism (Deppe 2013), the supposed progressive thrust of this development is now questioned confirms the potential of intellectual stimulation insofar as the leftist intellectual dogma of cosmopolitanism is now increasingly coming under pressure (Streeck 2015). It is remarkable that the application of Rorty’s ideas to the subject area of international politics has so far largely failed to materialize (for an exception, see Hellmann 2017).

In addition to his epistemological-social-philosophical foundations, we would like to draw on a primarily realpolitik-oriented contribution by Rorty as a second point of reference. In his book Achieving Our Country: The American Left and Patriotism (1998), Rorty makes a reference to the political practice of the U.S. academic left. ⁴ Rorty in his polemic counters the left’s focus on anti-discrimination and identity politics with a ‘call to conversion’ (Auer 2004: 150). While Rorty’s strong class-political focus may seem surprising – not least in view of his linguistic-philosophical starting point and his co-eternity with postmodern thought – it simultaneously holds strong implications for his understanding of politics and democracy, which we find worth elaborating.

In the following, we propose to understand politics in the most fundamental sense of the word as negotiation and decision-making about the generally binding rules between actors with different interests. Discussions and conflicts are resolved through decision-making procedures such as elections and disputes ranging from parliamentary debates to strikes or boycotts to armed conflicts. The ultimate goals of political action do not lie within the political itself, but are directed toward the realization of an extra-political goal (remember, for example, the so-called ‘soccer war’ between Honduras and El Salvador in July 1969).

Democracy then constitutes a special case of political order. As Jürgen Habermas (2011: 49) notes, democratic self-determination presupposes ‘that the addressees of binding laws are at the same time their authors’ and thus constitutes a form of public will formation. The political public sphere is constituted as a space of discursive settlement of divergent interests and ideas, in the course of which ‘all persons concerned have equal and effective opportunities to exert influence’, and which ‘produces normatively justifiable solutions to problems’ (Zürn 1998: 233). ⁵

Following the widespread view that the democratic order comes closest to the ideal of a just society, social-scientific research on democracy is based on both empirical-analytical and normative considerations. The pragmatist variant of this theory represents, as Filipović describes, a specific manifestation: ‘Philosophical pragmatism seeks the answer to the question of what resources and potentials modern society needs for people to live together well and justly in reflection on democratic practice’ (Filipović 2009: 133).

Throughout his work, Rorty connects his strong focus on praxis as people’s active engagement with others and themselves to a research strategy of anti-essentialism, within which he treats with scepticism the notion of fixed meanings – quite in the pragmatist sense. ‘Human rights foundationalism’, Rorty justifies his post-metaphysical epistemology with regard to democratic practice, ‘is the continuing attempt by quasi Platonists to win, at last, a final victory over their opponents' (Rorty 1998a: 170). He thus directs his polemic at the claim that there exist ontological cores of political justificatory patterns or higher ethical frames of reference. Politics in general and democracy in particular can thus be understood as sequences of ‘institutionalized uncertainty’ (Müller 2011: 242). Auer emphasizes the epistemological-methodological consequences for a social science of democracy and politics in this sense: ‘Less and less self-evident “truths” could thereby be presupposed for the processes of political will formation – even democracy itself now becomes visible as one political order among others, whose factual validity is based on political decisions (Auer 2004: 11)’.

While this condensed description of strict anti-essentialism elucidates Rorty’s epistemology, the following section serves to introduce three dualisms, which recur in his further considerations of political processes.

3.2 Three dualisms in Rorty’s political philosophy

On a philosophical-anthropological level, we identify a first dualism in Rorty’s thinking, namely a dualism in the ‘relationship between individual freedom and solidary equality’ (Selk and Jörke 2012: 278). In Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, Rorty characterizes a liberal state of mind through a fundamental striving to avoid cruelty. Such avoidance can manifest itself in the form of ‘solidarity as sensitivity to the suffering of others’ (Filipović 2009: 138). ⁶ However, this understanding of solidarity as providing support to the weak or vulnerable can at the same time be contrasted with a conflict-theoretical understanding of Rorty, according to which society should be understood ‘as a band of eccentrics collaborating for purposes of mutual protection rather than as a band of fellow spirits united by a common goal’ (Rorty 1989: 59).

The topos of such a communicative context implies an appreciation of individual and collective self-realization in the liberal literal sense. ‘A liberal society’, according to Rorty, ‘is one whose ideals can be fulfilled by persuasion rather than force, by reform rather than revolution, by the free and open encounters of present linguistic and other practices with suggestions for new practices’ (ibid. 60). At the same time, however, he assumes the same processuality for the development of empathic identification with others: Solidarity, according to Rorty, ‘is to be achieved not by inquiry but by imagination, the imaginative ability to see strange people as fellow sufferers’ (ibid. xvi). Individual self-realization in controversial discourse on the one hand and solidary participation on the other would thus be contingent, as it were – their supposed substance would paradoxically lie in the procedural.

As a second dualism, two dominant understandings of democracy (Selk and Jörke 2012: 268) can be identified in Rorty’s work, namely, a constitutional and an egalitarian conception of democracy. Since social life is in principle not subject to a fixed form, social forms have been subordinated to a (changing) political structure in the course of history. Formal-normative justifications fall under this heading, as do the independent dynamics of institutionalized actor constellations or practices. In contrast, Selk and Jörke recognize the understanding of an egalitarian democracy, ‘which is not limited to a formal arrangement of political institutions and procedures, but is also supported by the ideal of equal opportunities’ (ibid.). While, it could be argued, a constitutional view focuses primarily on administrative substance and procedure of democratic governance, an egalitarian perspective, on the contrary, invokes the ‘democratic ethos’: ‘As a practice, this ethos is not committed to an integrating pre-identified or fundamentally justified goal, but consists in developing and trying out new political institutions that are better than the old ones’ (Filipović 2009: 138). The emphasis on this reflexive component of democratic thought thus also points – entirely in the sense of Rorty – to the ‘justificatory equal originality of anti-essentialism and democracy’ (Auer 2004: 74).

A fundamental example of an egalitarian interjection is Rorty’s commitment to a programmatic reorientation of the U.S. left. In Pride in Our Country, the author intervenes in what he sees as a politico-economically empty discourse by adding a distributive component to the left’s public engagement and thus a material dimension to its understanding of democracy: Ultimate civil rights in the sense of a ‘freedom to’ can namely – we know this at the latest since the work of Thomas Humphrey Marshall (1992) – only be realized under conditions of minimum social standards.

Based on Rorty’s assumption that solidarity is a central moment of social cohesion (see above), we turn to a third dualism in his work, the social framework of political mobilization. The central contrast here is between Rorty’s emphasis on a general liberalism that goes hand in hand with ultimate aspirations on the one hand, and the social construction of such solidarity on the other. The central institution that came into play in the course of such constructions is the nation-state for the epoch of modernity. In the same vein, Rorty generally uses the United States as an example for his empirical-historical illustrations. From this perspective, the project of egalitarian democracy represents one of institutionalizing civic rights within a national framework (Selk and Jörke 2012: 269). It follows, as Rorty notes at the end of Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, ‘that our sense of solidarity is strongest when those with whom solidarity is expressed are thought of as “one of us”, where “us” means something smaller and more local than the human race’ (ibid. 191).

The givenness of national collectives thus continues to complicate the orientation between the poles of the dualism of individual freedom and solidary equality. For if the ostensible frame of reference of solidaristic action lies in the national (or even: local) framework, although potential addressees are also located outside this framework, to which group should solidarity then refer?

4. Does the European left have to choose between the nation state and internationalism?

On a practical level, Rorty (1998b: 86) anticipates in Achieving Our Country a debate that has gained intensity within the European left for some years now. This is – not limited to this but in particular also – the debate outlined above in relation to the European constellation between advocates of a defense of national welfare institutions and internationalist-motivated proponents of a European social model.

In view of the current crisis of the European Union, the aim of the present article was to relate Richard Rorty’s understanding of politics and democracy to the possibilities for action of the political left. Under conditions of site competition and migration-related wage pressure, the strategies of political mobilization in the context of European distribution conflicts are oriented, on the one hand, toward a national community of solidarity and struggle and, on the other, toward an international(istic) reference group of political actors with the goal of a European social model. What, then, can the discussion with Rorty tell us in this context?

European integration is a complex political undertaking whose orientation and justification are fragile projects – in this context, Hans-Jörg Trenz also refers to the EU as ‘an institutional order seeking legitimacy’ (Trenz 2012: 323). In contrast to functionalist or structuralist perspectives on European integration, be they pessimistic or optimistic, Rorty’s anti-essentialist research perspective sensitizes us to implicit presuppositions or even teleologies of the underlying patterns of justification in each case.

Starting from the basic anti-dualist (Ansell 2011: 11) assumption of pragmatist philosophy, which locates the solution to problems of action not in the absolutization of abstract logics but in the inherent dynamics and imponderables of social practice, we have identified three dualisms in Rorty’s work whose respective ends function as framing elements of his thinking – one philosophical-anthropological, one in his understanding of democracy and one in his reflections on the appropriate framework of political mobilization. As our discussion has shown, Rorty resolutely locates himself between all the poles and, in a pragmatic sense, ‘for the question of the cohesion of society, recurs above all to democratic practice’ (Filipović 2009: 157).

In conclusion, we would now like to show how the heuristic reference of the three dualisms can sensitize us in regards to the political dynamics and implications of the debate on cross-border distributional politics within the EU. The answer to the question whether the European left has to choose between national location security and international coalition building, unsurprisingly, remains unclear in view of its philosophical-anthropological implications insofar as both national and international solidarity in the sense of Rorty on the one hand, and the individual (respectively, collective-national) orientation of the respective political carriers on the other hand could be justified as maxims of action. At the same time, however, strategies that rely exclusively on a pure form of integrationist or nationalist orientation cannot be justified in this way: The fact that national institutions, under the premise that they would otherwise have to declare a possibly unsustainable internationalism to be the maxim of their representative political action, forego the representation of national interests appears just as unjustifiable under the condition of protecting individual and collective autonomy as the idea of irresponsibly pursuing national special paths regardless of their consequences.

Second, the challenges of distributive practice also transcend the simple juxtaposition of an egalitarian or contractualist interpretation of the concept of democracy. For while the absence of a viable social model at the European level (or at least of an assertive political pressure group that would want and be able to achieve it) would not suffice as a contractualist argument against such a model, an egalitarian ideal of democracy would also be too one-dimensional as a justification. Just because something appears to be unfeasible right now does not make it bad any more than something feasible would automatically be good because it is possible. Thus, also in this second dimension, a compromise between formulating idealistic goals on the one hand and restricting them by a (strictly speaking also anticipated) normative force of the factual on the other hand seems to be called for.

Similarly, with the bracket of political mobilization, the dualistic juxtaposition of national and international frames of reference sensitizes us to the contradictions that the representatives of left-wing European politics have to cope with in their daily business. With a view on preventing site competition and wage and social standard undercutting, both offer political opportunities and points of contact just as much as they present risks or even imply structural blockades. A principled decision in favour of one (and thus against another) of the variants therefore does not seem advisable, be it from a normative or from a functional point of view.

More generally, it can be concluded with Rorty that solutions to political problems do not arise from abstract considerations. ‘The idea that liberal societies are bound together by philosophical beliefs seems to me ludicrous’ (Rorty 1989: 86). The problem of the resilience of solidarity communities (and, strictly speaking, already the question of a discussion context that enables discussion and conceptualization of one) has been reduced by Vobruba and Preunkert (2015) to the formula of a ‘redistribution-proof identity’ of such communities. In order to establish a shared identity, political actors must be able to establish solidarity on a societal scale through ‘common vocabularies and common hopes’ (Rorty 1989: 86), which, according to Selk and Jörke, cannot be established by normative rhetoric alone (Selk and Jörke 2012: 279).

Thus, as already suggested, the question of whether the European left has to choose between the nation-state and internationalism in pursuing its political ambitions cannot be answered unambiguously with Rorty. As the reconstruction of his reflections has shown, the line of conflict identified in the first section within the political terrain is also found in his work in the form of apparently contradictory references and arguments. While his position in Achieving Our Country can be read as a clear advocacy of a national mobilization framework, in Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity we find a very clear (by his standards) universalist positing. A coherent political appropriation of his reflections thus appears impossible – neither in the sense of a left-national (Nölke 2017) nor a left-internationalist project (Brunkhorst 2014).

Finally, the possibility of a social construction of solidarity arises for Rorty from the role of the culture industry – or more precisely, the formative power of certain types of popular culture. By making us aware of certain perspectives, authors such as George Orwell or Upton Sinclair, by placing the oppressed as sensitive subjects at the centre of their representations, encourage us – according to Rorty (1991: 16) in his main work – to change perspectives. This transgression of a culturally pessimistic axiomatics, such as can be found in the writings of the Frankfurt School, represents another essential innovation in Rorty’s thought, which offers a promising starting point for a political sociology of European integration. In order to organize a left-wing policy of redistribution (or to discuss the preconditions for this on a European scale), political leaders would have to be able to form argumentative preferences; then they would be able to neutralize widespread fears, suspicions, accusations of the losers and the interpretation of conflicts in national categories to a certain extent. The emergence of a European public sphere, if it did emerge, would presumably exist not least in the form of such popular culture. Which books, podcasts, or political stickers would have to be received in which way is an open question for further reflection and discussion.