compelled to choose between despotism and inertia.”^51 The idea that people have
often engaged in progressive humanitarian politics both locally and internationally
is a powerful one. To focus exclusively on either tiny localised or huge global
problems is surely a recipe for disillusion. More importantly, it fails to reflect the
complexity of our empathetic, solidaristic responses and commitments. This starts
to explain why on a very local level how often the same “usual suspects” turn up in
campaigns for both local, national and international causes. Similarly at state level,
it is arguably no accident that states with highly developed domestic welfare states
are often also the most generous givers of aid, and these are the ones most often
described as internationalist. They recognise boundaries within their spheres of
solidarity, but see them as a site of adjudication, rather than blanket exclusion or
inclusion.
Indeed, Lawler emphasises the importance of politics at levels other than a
blanket global civil society, pointing to the work done by Cranford Pratt on how the
“humane internationalisms” of usual suspect putative “good international citizens”
like the Scandinavian countries, the Netherlands and Canada have been nourished
by the character of domestic politics and collective identity formation in those
states.^52 Lawler emphasises though that
51
Giuseppe Mazzini, "The Duties of Man", in Life and Writings of Joseph Mazzini, Vol. 4:
Critical and Literary (London: Smith, Elder & Co., 1891). Giuseppe Mazzini, "Principles of
Cosmopolitanism", in Life and Writings of Joseph Mazzini, Vol. 3: Autobiographical and
Political (London: Smith, Elder & Co., 1891), 7-8. For a useful recent selection of Mazzini’s
writings, that brings his international thought more fully into focus, see Giuseppe Mazzini, A
Cosmopolitanism of Nations: Giuseppe Mazzini's Writing on Democracy, Nation Building,
and International Relations , ed. Stefano Recchia and Nadia Urbinati (Oxford: Princeton
University Press, 2009). For an exception to the tendency for international theory to neglect
Mazzini, see Martin Wight, Four Seminal Thinkers in International Theory: Machiavelli,
Grotius, Kant, and Mazzini 52 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).
Lawler draws on Cranford Pratt, ed., Internationalism under Strain: The North-South
Policies of Canada, the Netherlands, Norway, and Sweden (Toronto: University of Toronto
Press, 1989). Cranford Pratt, ed., Middle Power Internationalism: The North-South
Dimension (Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1990). See also Peter Lawler, "Janus-
Faced Solidarity: Danish Internationalism Reconsidered", Cooperation and Conflict 42, no. 1
(2007).On the idea of good international citizenship in practice, see also Peter Lawler, "The
Good Citizen Australia?" Asian Studies Review 16, no. 2 (1992). Nicholas J. Wheeler and Tim
Dunne, "Good International Citizenship: A Third Way for British Foreign Policy",
International Affairs 74, no. 4 (1998).