in elaborating an internationalist politics that might take seriously the capacity of
states to endeavour change, both internally and externally.
III Humanity Through Thick and Thin: Michael Walzer and the Internationalist Tradition
This section aims to flesh out the intuition that the internationalist tradition is a
vital middle ground in international political theory, unstable admittedly, but a
necessary conduit for our muddled solidarities, and especially the international
politicisation of a sense of common humanity. It will examine the sort of moral
minimalism described by Michael Walzer in Thick and Thin , which is a good starting
point.^65 Walzer is a particularly useful figure here because, among other things,
while his international theory sets itself explicitly against cosmopolitanism, Walzer
describes himself, and plausibly so, as an internationalist theorist.^66 Walzer is also
always explicit that his theme is solidarity. Analysing how he derives his
internationalism reveals something about how “old-fashioned” internationalism has
been somewhat obscured by the dominance of cosmopolitanism, and often left
unexpressed by many of its other communitarian critics. The point here is that the
internationalists in international political theory are not necessarily different people
from the cosmopolitans or communitarians we are familiar with, but that this facet
of their thought, and the fruitful meeting point it entails, is under-explored.^67
Jon Elster famously described Walzer as a phenomenologist of the moral
life.^68 Meant as a criticism, for our purposes it constitutes an advantage. Walzer
studies moral problems and our responses to them as they actually arise. The
opening of Thick and Thin recounts the experience of witnessing on television
65
66 Walzer, Thick and Thin.
See for example Michael Walzer, "Michael Walzer on the American Left", Dissent Winter
(2007). 67
An important recent study that examines a similarly wide range of Walzer’s work, and
also argues against impartialist cosmopolitan perspectives, though with a somewhat
different purpose, is Toni Erskine, Embedded Cosmopolitanism: Duties to Strangers and
Enemies in a World of 'Dislocated Communities' 68 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008).
Cited in Brown, Sovereignty, Rights and Justice , 94.