Alasia Nuti’s generous critique helpfully presses me to clarify and expand the framework of transnational cosmopolitanism and the notion of political craft. Nuti inquires about the approach’s ability to grapple with the racialized identities that undergird the injustice of neoliberal globalization, asks about the book’s implications for “the responsibilities of privileged domestic and international actors,” and questions whether the project can inform Europe’s management of its current crisis and its being assailed by right-wing populism. These are connected challenges because the abilities of Western citizens to acknowledge responsibility (the second challenge) depends on abandoning certain identity constructions grounded in particular political communities (the first challenge), without which the EU cannot be transformed into a transnational project of justice (the third challenge).

I want to start by remarking that my focus on “political craft” explicitly avoids prescribing particular obligations-cum-responsibilities for privileged European citizens in favor of attending to the power formations that prevent subjects from understanding their own position in relations of domination and tracking possible political paths toward acknowledgment and transformation. My transnational focus, moreover, implies that European subjects need not think about “distant others” to practice this learning; instead, they can explore their positionality vis-à-vis British, French, and German citizens of Afro-Caribbean, Moroccan, and Turkish descent, whose experiences within Europe echo experiences of postcolonial racialized injustice elsewhere in the West and the Global South. Thus, if there is a notion of responsibility in the book, it is one that follows from the process of acknowledgment described, and it is built around solidarity work with antiracist and anti-(neo)imperialist activist groups within and outside Europe. Although Nuti deems this process too destabilizing for subjects whose identities and solidarities are racially segregated, it was also not necessarily smooth earlier for the black subjects whom Du Bois addressed, who were either under the spell of white supremacy or committed to a US democratic project narrowly understood (pp. 127–28). Whereas for privileged Europeans the work would also require a willingness to let go of the subjective and material privileges made possible by domination, the aesthetic dimensions in Du Bois’s thought (pp. 97–102) entail that the transformation of our self-understanding and the sensible texture of political communities are necessary for political change to follow. This transformation is beyond the purview of neo-Kantians who consider the deepening of democratization as prior to and separate from that of integration into ever-growing federations modeled after European forms (chapters 2 and 3). Instead, Du Bois sees racialized domination as operating in both realms, and European federations as fastening colonial domination rather than undoing it (p. 118).

Finally, Nuti worries that an attempt to overcome the European project would currently backfire on the broader transnational project I advocate. Yet, the EU management of the Greek crisis suggested that certain populations, or at least certain economic sectors therein, are privileged over the well-being of the weakest members of the union whose economies are vulnerable to a macroeconomically unsound common currency. In its handling of the crisis, Europe confirmed its claim to legitimacy to be about unifying the continent economically in ways that constrain individual polities’ ability to realize important democratic values (Turkuler Isiksel, Europe’s Functional Constitution, 2016, p. 9). For progressive projects to cogently oppose these constraints without falling into the trap of exclusively searching the national realm for answers, as has happened, a transnational and antiracist cosmopolitanism is necessary, one that maps the common neoliberal currents that profit from both precarious black and brown labor across the continent and the retrenchment of the social and economic privileges that low-skilled whites took for granted (pp. 182–84).

Transnational cosmopolitanism, moreover, illuminates how the EU project—alongside Europe’s geopolitical and military alliances—props up elite European actors and corporations to reap the benefit from neoliberal globalization writ large. The question is, How could Europe “decolonize and truly renovate” itself without breaking with these central tenets? Such a project would require developing capacious mechanisms to connect the constituencies mentioned earlier with transnational progressive actors also implicated in (because affected by) the EU project in a way that politicizes these questions. However this is done, the framework of transnational cosmopolitanism endeavors to support and provide guidance for a political craft that abandons parochialisms and critiques of the global that privilege particular citizens and sectors within the European project.