scholarship is, indeed, increasingly cognisant of these problems.^60 For Tanja
Schuemer-Cross and Ben Heaven Taylor: "[the] primary focus of global
humanitarian efforts must be to support states to safeguard the right to life of their
own citizens."^61 Moreover, it is tangible issues such as these that spurs Lawler to
note that “the refusal of much critical IR scholarship to engage with foreign policy
theory and practice, although often framed in a contemporary critical discourse of
‘re-politicisation’, is simply bad politics: it lets most states o ff the hook”.^62
Indeed, while Walzer’s rejoinder to Martha Nussbaum’s plea for a
cosmopolitan education was set out earlier, Appiah’s is also interesting here,
coming as it does from a cosmopolitan perspective:
It is because humans live best on a smaller scale that we should defend not
just the state, but the county, the town, the street, the business, the craft,
the profession, and the family, as communities, as circles among the many
circles that are narrower than the human horizon, that are appropriate
spheres of moral concern. We should, as cosmopolitans, defend the right of
others to live in democratic states with rich possibilities of association within
and across their borders, states of which they can be patriotic citizens.^63Humanitarianism cautions against the “the dangers of a presumptive moral
universalism”, to borrow a phrase from Lawler, and the crusading excesses with
which a smug accommodation with Western liberal power can engender.^64 But it
also demands that we allow for the presumptions of a humbler moral universalism,
60
Paul Harvey, Towards Good Humanitarian Government: The Role of the Affected State in
Disaster Response , HPG Report 29 (London: ODI, 2009). See also Collinson, Elhawary and
Muggah, States of Fragility. Interestingly, for some, successful involvement in state-building
can co-exist with a humanitarianism premised on neutral, impartial and independent
action. See Giulio Di Blasi, "Humanitarian State Building: The Experience of Steering
Committees in Southern Lebanon", Journal of Humanitarian Assistance (3 May 2010).
Available at http://jha.ac/2010/05/03/humanitarian-state-building-the-experience-of-
steering-committees-in-southern-lebanon/; accessed 61 on 21 June 2010.
Tanja Schuemer-Cross and Ben Heaven Taylor, The Right to Survive: The Humanitarian
Challenge for the Twenty-First Century 62 (Oxford: Oxfam International, 2009), 112.
63 Lawler, "The Good State: In Praise of 'Classical' Internationalism": 441.
Kwame Anthony Appiah, "Cosmopolitan Patriots", in For Love of Country? , ed. Joshua
Cohen (Boston: Beacon Press, 2002), 29. 64
Lawler, "The Good State: In Praise of 'Classical' Internationalism": 448.