The Politics of Humanity

Even if internationalism is an essentially domestically-generated practice

that reflects, moreover, a culturally-specific account of collective identity, its

sustenance necessarily requires not only following through rhetorical

declarations with practical and financial commitments but also an account of

the international in which practices of solidarity at least become possible

and can have real consequences.^53

Lawler notes that, though they may be attached to an ultimately exclusionary
sovereignty of their state, Western publics

also seem to empathise with distant publics reacting, often violently, to the

breach of their state’s sovereignty by coalitions of states supposedly acting

in the name of humanity, or to a failure to intervene in other, morally

compelling cases, or to the evident inequity of a globalising world

economy.^54

In other words, an internationalist perspective can be a humane, egalitarian one, if
the merits of living in functioning, humane states are taken seriously, and if the
ability to empathise is placed at its heart. Lawler argues that the state remains a
“viable form of human community”, one that “remains more an aspiration than a
reality for millions of people and whose dissolution is greeted with foreboding by
millions of others mindful of what may emerge in its place”.^55 For him, this is the
real danger of a blanket reliance on a deterministic reading of the evolution of
globalisation and global civil society:

Only a thoroughly benign and linear reading of accelerating

internationalisation or globalisation coupled with an ahistorical account of

the practice of sovereignty could lead straightforwardly to a celebration of

the decline of the sovereign state. Anything else must concede that there is

a real risk that any further erosion in the capacities of states may not be

neatly matched by the evolution of e ffective and legitimate structures of

local, regional or global public governance. Furthermore, such structures

that do emerge may exhibit much, perhaps all, of the partiality, inequity and

unaccountability of the present international order.^56

53
54 Lawler, "The Good State: In Praise of 'Classical' Internationalism": 437.
55 Ibid.: 439.
56 Ibid.: 434-435.
Ibid.: 440.