But we still face the problem of moving from emotional reaction to political
action, or rather of creating politicised emotions. Suski suggests that “[an] emotion
can be labelled political when it incites an active response to suffering.”^95 For Luc
Boltanski:
the consolidation of the humanitarian movement depends, at least in part,
on its ability to clarify and make explicit the connection, which is often
realised in practice by its members, between distant causes and the
traditions, sensibilities and even interests of those who organise support for
these causes.^96The example of British abolitionism reminds us of some useful considerations of
how images of slavery, such as those mentioned at the beginning of this section,
can be drawn on to create a broader political will to act. Chaim Kaufmann and
Robert Pape show that over a sixty year period from 1807 to 1867, the British state
undertook what was “the most expensive international moral effort in modern
world history” at a cost of 1.8 percent per annum of national income and 5,000
British lives, figures that dwarf the current British international development aid
budget, say, or indeed the number of US soldiers whose deaths prompted the
United States to withdraw from Somalia after “Black Hawk Down”.^97
Kaufmann and Pape acknowledge that the abolitionists were driven to some
extent by a basic moral universalism. “Once Britons recognized Africans as fellow
human beings, their dignity could not be completely denied.”^98 But they make the
case for that recognition of basic dignity and the reaction to it being nested in much
thicker, particular moral identities, which were nevertheless broadened through
abolitionist campaigning to include a wider sense of common humanity.
[The] reasons why so many British abolitionists were willing to accept very
high costs to correct injustices thousands of miles away were not based on
95
96 Suski, "Children, Suffering and the Humanitarian Appeal", 217. Italics in original.
97 Boltanski, Distant Suffering , xiv.
Chaim D. Kaufmann and Robert A. Pape, "Explaining Costly International Moral Action:
Britain's Sixty-Year Campaign against the Atlantic Slave Trade", International Organization
53, no. 4 (1999): 631-637. 98
Ibid.: 644.