Chapter 5 locates Beirut historically within the geopolitics of revolutionary Third Worldism in the aftermath of the devastating 1967 Arab–Israeli war. It investigates the aesthetic emergence of Palestinian revolutionary struggle in and through the printscapes that marked Beirut’s public culture and street life. It analyses the visual culture that reclaimed the Arab city as a revolutionary nodal site in the imagination of its inhabitants and in networks of solidarities, Arab intellectuals and artists — Palestinian, Syrian, Iraqi and Egyptian — who crossed paths in Beirut’s long 1960s. The chapter reveals how Arab artists responded to the 1967 defeat and were radicalized by the revolutionary promise of the Palestinian liberation struggle. It argues that the radicalization of the role of the Arab artist in society at this particular historical juncture was productive of new aesthetic sensibilities that were carried in and through the reproducibility of printed media. The mobility of magazines, posters, mail art and artists’ books lent visibility to the Palestinian struggle and aestheticized its revolutionary discourse in the public realm. It demonstrates how the cosmopolitanism of Beirut as the ‘Paris of the East’ was displaced into the radical cosmopolitanism of ‘Arab Hanoi’ in this revolutionary quest.

Recently, people on both sides of the Atlantic have been wrestling with questions concerning the priority they should give residents of their own country versus distant others. In Europe, the issue of the acceptance and treatment of migrants from the Middle East and North Africa came to prominence. Likewise, in the USA, President Trump attempted to bar Muslims from entering the county, increased the deportation of undocumented migrants fleeing violence and hardship in Latin America and drastically cut the number of admissible refugees. The issue of priority to ‘countrymen’ has also arisen in debates about international trade, as well as in regard to foreign aid and the obligation to maintain regional and global alliances. These practical contexts raise questions of what we owe ‘outsiders’, whether they be distantly situated or attempting to migrate to our own or to a different state, and the conflicting solidarities. Should we always stand in solidarity with fellow citizens or other members of our own political communities, or should we equally prioritize solidarity with oppressed or suffering others outside our borders? In this chapter, I attempt to clarify these issues by analysing two main senses of solidarity and discussing the question of negotiating between them when they conflict.

The chapter explores the symbols and myths of EU transnational solidarity through a threefold analysis of transnational solidarity within, across, and beyond the EU. Based on post-Cold War study of the EU in global politics over the past three decades, it compares and contrasts transnational solidarity from communitarian and cosmopolitan perspectives before advocating a cosmopolitical understanding of EU transnational solidarity in a global context. The chapter examines transnational solidarity within the EU by looking at symbols and myths of communitarian, cosmopolitan and cosmopolitical solidarities. It then looks across the borders of the EU to consider the symbols and myths of communitarian, cosmopolitan, and cosmopolitical solidarities within the European neighbourhood. It then goes beyond the EU to analyse the symbols and myths of communitarian, cosmopolitan and cosmopolitical solidarities with distantly situated others through EU external actions. It concludes by arguing the need to clearly identify, in line with Carol Gould, transnational EU solidarities as overlapping networks of relations that share and support actions to eliminate oppression or reduce suffering. It further argues that cosmopolitical solidarities that network and share global ethics with local politics are more likely to take actions in concert that are caring and empathic towards distantly situated others.

This chapter studies the growing phenomenon of transnational co-operation between and among cities in Europe. This co-operation is driven by other actors than state-level actors, is (or at least claims to be) closer to the citizens, and is based on specific challenges facing cities in different countries. Central to the development is an increased legal and political role for the city transnationally. At a time with multiple challenges to solidarity, the aim is to assess whether co-operation initiatives between and among cities in Europe could be a means through which to create or contribute towards a European transnational solidarity. The focus is on cities within the territorial space of the EU. That being said, the phenomenon of intercity co-operation is by no means confined to Europe (or to the [EU]) and we therefore include prominent global initiatives in which European cities participate at the end of the chapter. The chapter has a special focus on the internal lack of solidarity between cosmopolitan big cities and small towns/rural areas, which seems to be a new trend in many countries, at the same time as we see transnational city solidarity appearing across borders.