It is a call to a political humanitarian internationalism, contra the impotence implied
by Mazzini’s warning of the perils of a jaded cosmopolitanism. Benenson’s call was
heeded by a coalition familiar to students of abolitionism: Unitarians, Quakers, and
secular progressives. Interestingly, Stephen Hopgood tells us that initially Amnesty
had trouble building Southern membership, and evolved its balance between thick
and thin in a manner parallel to the development of Latin American liberation
theology “that stressed local circumstances, the preference of God for the poor,
and the prospect of earthly salvation”, against the blanket universalism of the
Church.^88 Hopgood stresses the marginality and internationalism of Amnesty’s early
supporters: they resemble the internal critics Walzer celebrates.^89 So Walzer, in
pointing to Amnesty, is highlighting a model that both draws on a similar political
coalition of humanitarian activists, with thick moral conceptions. Yet it is able to
function effectively precisely because of the thinness of its message of
understanding, of rejection of threats to “Life” and “Liberty,” a message to be
thickened out and implemented locally.
This is vital in explicating the space in a Walzerian internationalism for the
humanitarian impulse. Quite clearly, this space is larger than the dominant debates
within international political theory would suggest. The previous chapter showed
how the prioritisation of intervention within international political theory leads to
an implied identification of humanitarianism and humanitarian intervention. Walzer
is as guilty of this as the next theorist, but the preceding paragraphs confirm that
this identification would be quite wrong, for it is precisely the humanitarian
impulse, and the humanitarian solidarities that emerge from it, that speaks to his
understanding of internationalism.
Walzer has used the analogy of the hotel room to elucidate the meaning of
moral minimalism. A hotel room replicates in anonymous and often anodyne form
88
Ibid., 59. This relates back to the point made in the previous chapter about human rights
being more effective when articulated as a local vernacular, rather than as a kind of moral
Esperanto. 89
Notably in Walzer, The Company of Critics: Social Criticism and Political Commitment in
the Twentieth Century