many of the functions of the home, but one cannot be or feel at home in it.^90 Yet on
occasion it can provide much-needed shelter and sustenance. For those who have
nowhere to feel at home, either because they simply have no home, or because
their home is lacking in the basic amenities of warmth and shelter (or freedom from
massacre or enslavement), “hotels” can mean the difference between life and
death. The obvious parallel to draw in terms of humanitarianism is the plight of the
refugee discussed earlier, which Walzer alludes to in relation to the hotel room
analogy in Interpretation and Social Criticism , and explores in more general terms in
Spheres of Justice.^91 As Calhoun notes, the stateless are “citizens of the world” in its
more terrifying sense of “exclusion from citizenship and rights in particular
states”.^92 Perhaps, then, we might think of the refugee as an involuntary citizen of
the world, one who exposes the hardship that reliance on that citizenship entails.
Yet for the refugee fleeing persecution, it is everything. The granting of the status of
refugee does not solve any of the thicker problems that led to the flight of the
refugee in the first place, but our urge to rescue demands that we grant it. It is a
sticking plaster, a term frequently used by humanitarians to describe their efforts. A
sticking plaster is of course very “thin”, dealing only with symptoms. Yet when the
patient is bleeding to death, it is vital. No-one can heal a corpse, whoever is paying
the medical bills.
Interestingly, the internationalist account of moral minimalism Walzer
provides is not entirely antithetical to cosmopolitan thought as an organising
perspective on our moral life. The recent restatement of philosophical
cosmopolitanism by Appiah is of particular relevance, for the account it provides of
90
Walzer cites Franz Kafka, who claimed to feel at home in hotel rooms, as an exception,
noting the irony that to express his satisfaction with hotels, Kafka used the expression “at
home.” Michael Walzer, Interpretation and Social Criticism (London: Harvard University
Press, 1987), 15. The hotel analogy is also discussed in Brown, Sovereignty, Rights and
Justice 91 , 93.
Michael Walzer, Spheres of Justice: A Defence of Pluralism and Equality (New York: Basic
Books, 1983), 48-51. Walzer, Interpretation and Social Criticism , 15-16. The International
Rescue Committee features as its motto “from harm to home”. The sad reality is that for
most displaced people in the world today, the best they can hope for is probably a “hotel”.
International Rescue Committee. Available at http://www.theirc.org/; accessed on 01
August 2010. 92
Calhoun, "Cosmopolitanism in the Modern Social Imaginary": 109.