The Politics of Humanity

that our willingness to engage in humanitarian intervention may be far less than to
stop a suicide, as the risks and costs are likely to be much higher. But humanitarian
intervention is a particularly demanding form of humanitarianism, as well as a
problematic one, as was made clear in the previous chapter, so there is still a great
deal of value here in terms of conceptualising rescue in general terms: a very basic
idea of “life” has to be threatened, and we impulsively respond to that threat, in
spite of the inevitability of imperfect information and knowledge. Walzer’s
description of the farther reaches of his internationalism echoes the contingencies
and the moral mechanisms explored through the idea of the humanitarian impulse
in the previous chapters. This suggests that his internationalism provides a useful
international political theoretical context for the humanitarian impulse.
The space for the humanitarian impulse – the humanitarian space, then - has
arguably grown within Walzer’s thought, as he has become slightly more permissive
on the desirability of humanitarian interventions, though within the scope of very
similar ideas to those he wrote about three decades ago. We can track this
evolution via the essays collected in Arguing About War , in particular.^80 His essay on
“The Politics of Rescue” is perhaps the key statement here.^81 In effect, in Walzer we
find two facets of the threshold that defines the possibility of humanitarian
intervention. From his commitment, an internationalist commitment among other
things, to the principle of self-determination, he derives the legalist paradigm and
the prohibition of over-riding the norm of non-intervention except in cases “that
shock the moral conscience of mankind”.^82 We also glimpse another kind of
threshold, that of the willingness to act that lies within ourselves and draws on our
thick moral conceptions, the humanitarian urge to rescue, the humanitarian
impulse that emerges from our own particular mix of solidarities and empathetic
possibilities. We may argue with Walzer on the balance he strikes on any given
occasion, but this provides a more useful framework in which to assess the
desirability of humanitarian intervention than those who attempt to derive, in
80
81 Michael Walzer, Arguing About War (London: Yale University Press, 2004).
Walzer, "The Politics of Rescue". Also appears as Chapter 5 of Walzer, Arguing About
War 82.
Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars , 107.