This raises two important points. Firstly, that if we detach ourselves from the
“emergency imaginary” and take a broader perspective on the humanitarian gains
of the last two centuries, it is clear that the development of Western liberal
democracies has created extremely robust “humanitarian spaces” for those
fortunate enough to live in them. Though international efforts, especially those of
Britain, were crucial in abolishing the Atlantic slave trade in the nineteenth century,
the abolition of slavery itself was largely achieved at national level.^57 One way of
seeing this is as exposing the limitations of what international humanitarianism can
achieve, and seeing sovereignty as a barrier to humanitarian penetration and
achievement. But the abolition of slavery in different countries is no less a
humanitarian achievement: it was not a matter of agreement between insiders, but
rather the transformation of non-human outsiders to human insiders within each
country. The process of identification and recognition had a dynamic that is
important to acknowledge. Moreover, it would be to do a disservice to all those
who struggled and in the case of the American Civil War, literally fought for a state
free from slavery, sometimes on behalf of themselves, sometimes on behalf of
others.
What was made clear in the previous section was the unpalatable nature of
life in any political space, even “humanitarian ones”, devoid entirely of the qualities
of the “good state”, whether “quasi-states” or “outlaw states”, to take two possible
ways of framing the problem.^58 It is hard to imagine even the keenest cultural
relativist writing a paean to life in contemporary Mogadishu. Moreover, the plight
of the stateless is a famously bleak one, revealing, in Hannah Arendt’s powerful
phrase, the “abstract nakedness of being nothing but human”.^59 Humanitarian
57
58 Finnemore, The Purpose of Intervention , 68.
Robert Jackson, Quasi-States: Sovereignty, International Relations and the Third World
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). Rawl 59 s, The Law of Peoples.
Cited in R. J. Vincent, Human Rights and International Relations (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1986), 151.