Unmasking the racism of orthodox international relations/international political economy theory

Introduction

In May 2020, Ole Wæver and Barry Buzan (2020a), founders of the Copenhagen School of security studies, produced an explosive response to the racist charge that was levied against the Copenhagen School by Alison Howell and Melanie Richter-Montpetit (2020) in Security Dialogue. This was complemented by the simultaneous release of a 98-page online response (Wæver and Buzan, 2020b), as well as Lene Hansen’s (2020) reply in Security Dialogue, given that she had also been singled out, albeit en passant, by Howell and Richter-Montpetit for deploying a ‘racist feminist’ approach when critiquing the Copenhagen School (Hansen, 2000). The strong reaction of those on the receiving end of the racist charge and the exceptional speed by which their responses materialized in journal-article form stands in stark contrast to the almost total absence of a reply to the charge of Orientalism/Eurocentrism that postcolonialists have levied against orthodox international relations theory for over two decades now.

My initial cue is taken from one line in Hansen’s reply, which suggests that the Orientalist charge (which is synonymous with the Eurocentric charge) is relatively unproblematic but that the racist charge is egregious. Note that from henceforth I shall refer to Orientalism as Eurocentrism given that the two are merely different labels for the same Western-centric phenomenon. My purpose here is to reveal Eurocentrism as a form of racism, thereby undermining the common assumption of a great divide between the E-word (Eurocentrism) and the R-word (racism). This is necessary because in international relations/international political economy Eurocentrism has somehow become a neutralized, hollowed-out term that, in effect, constitutes a comforting veil that covers up and thereby deflects from view Eurocentrism’s inherent cultural racism. While my approach certainly complements that of Howell and Richter-Montpetit, nevertheless mine grounds Eurocentrism in racism, whereas theirs views the two discourses as separate but complementary (Howell and Richter-Montpetit, 2020: 4).

Rather than critique the work of Hansen and Wæver/Buzan, I target the much wider terrain of orthodox international relations/international political economy theory, most specifically realism, liberalism and liberal constructivism. I show how orthodox international relations/international political economy theory’s Eurocentrism-cum-racism is performed in a double move, the first part of which whitewashes racism from the practice of world politics. Critically, in denying and covering up the racialized nature of world politics/global political economy, international relations/international political economy provides an unwitting apologia for racism. The second part of the double move constructs a racialized-hierarchical conception of world politics/global political economy that privileges the morally/politically/economically/culturally superior West and denigrates the non-West as the inferior/immoral/irrational/backward Other while simultaneously prescribing various imperialist normative postures. While before 1945 international theory was embedded in scientific racism and manifest (i.e. racially explicit) cultural racism that privileged race, thereafter its racism has been camouflaged by, or masked behind, apparently neutral cultural rhetoric that operates behind the backs of the vast majority of white academics (though right in front of many black and brown scholars). Critically, while race was everything in pre-1945 international theory, thereafter it is apparently nothing, in that race ostensibly disappears as if it died out all of a sudden in 1945. In short, in this imaginary, we move from race is everything and everywhere before 1945 to now you see it, now you don’t thereafter.

The key that unlocks the door into this long-temporal epistemic passage is recognizing that racism is a polymorphous shapeshifter that crystallizes in different guises across the last three centuries. Thus, while the idiom of white Western superiority and white normativity/normality has remained constant, its guise has changed over time, crystallizing as scientific racism and manifest cultural racism before 1945 and then morphing into subliminal cultural racism thereafter. Much as the Jim Crow laws segregated white from black people in the United States, so pre-1945 international relations/international political economy theory viewed world politics through an analytical lens that constructed an imaginary line of racialized apartheid between white Westerners and non-white peoples outside of the West (and between whites and non-whites within the West as it was effectively the ‘pristine white’ West that orthodox international relations scholars had in mind given that non-whites were out of mind, having been segregated into visible ontological ghettos/reservations). And, for the post-1945 era, I argue that modern orthodox international relations/international political economy theory does not provide objective value-free analysis but imposes the New Jim Crow laws of world politics/global political economy in its explanatory accounts, wherein non-white peoples/societies are segregated into invisible ontological ghettos. This renders international relations’ view of the Western creation of a bright new racist-free world after 1945 as probably the greatest illusion that the discipline propagates.

Robert Vitalis’s (2000, 2005) pioneering analyses talk about the hegemonic ‘norm against noticing’ race and racism in international relations. To prevent confusion, the problem is not simply the failure to notice racism. For were orthodox international relations theorists to notice racism in world politics, they would soon realize that their theories are ontologically ill-equipped to conceptualize it. Conventional international relations theory’s lens is simply not calibrated to detect racism, so that the latter’s presence in world politics always goes under its ontological radar scanner. Thus, the whitewashing of racism in world politics becomes structurally hardwired into the core of orthodox international relations theory (see Henderson, 2013; Sampson, 2002; Vitalis, 2000, 2015). And it is this denial of racism in world politics that is one of the symptoms of international relations’ enduring racism. Had international relations scholars started out with an anti-racist predisposition, they would surely have designed their theories differently.

International relations scholars might reply by arguing that even if racism exists in world politics, nevertheless, other causal variables such as anarchy, international society/regimes, states and markets are far more important. I offer two replies: first, that these concepts are all fundamentally embedded in racialized norms; and, second, even if we assume that racism is not the sole variable in determining world politics – which it is not (not least because of ‘intersectionality’) – nevertheless, to factor it out altogether and to ignore its relevance completely is to be, albeit unwittingly, complicit in its existence, thereby contributing performatively to its reproduction in the global sphere.

My argument develops through six sections. In the first I alight on the problematic sentence contained in Hansen’s article that is suggestive of a ‘great divide’ between Orientalism/Eurocentrism and racism. The second section reveals the core components of Eurocentrism while showing how this discourse can be equated with cultural racism, thereby dissolving the ‘great divide’. The third section introduces the theme of racism-as-polymorphous-shapeshifter, revealing how racism’s guise morphs over time both in everyday life and world politics while becoming expressed increasingly in disguised or subliminal terms but retaining oppressive practices. The fourth section reveals how the evolution of orthodox international relations theory has mirrored the cycle of racism in world politics and everyday life. The fifth section focuses on the racist double move that neorealism, liberalism and (liberal) constructivism perform, while the sixth solves the conundrum as to how orthodox international relations scholars, the vast majority of whom are most probably non-racist (though not anti-racist) in their personal lives, have subscribed, albeit unwittingly, to racist theories of world politics/global political economy.

International relations’ construction of a ‘great divide’ between racism and Eurocentrism: The problem of overreacting to the racist charge and underreacting to the Eurocentric charge

The most acute issue that struck me about the racism controversy in Security Dialogue is found down a quiet side-path that exists well back from the sound and fury of the debate surrounding Howell and Richter-Montpetit and the Copenhagen School of security studies. For there we encounter a seemingly innocuous statement found in Hansen’s (2020: 379) reply when she objects to Howell and Richter-Montpetit’s charge of racism against her work by asserting that ‘racist is . . . a term that resonates within public and politicized discourse in a way that many other academic terms – including Orientalism [i.e. Eurocentrism], for example – do not’. I recall poignantly how this statement leapt off the page as I read it and how the sound and fury of the racism debate receded rapidly into a muffled background. Notwithstanding Edward Said’s ([1978] 2003) claim that Orientalism/Eurocentrism is congruent with (imperialist) racism, the lamentable truth is that Hansen’s putative statement speaks to the common international relations/international political economy perception. But it does so only because Eurocentrism and racism have been so egregiously misunderstood. For in the eyes of most orthodox international relations/international political economy scholars, Orientalism/Eurocentrism is likely nothing much to worry about and is unworthy of a response. Notable here is Meera Sabaratnam’s observation that

I was at an IR event last year where the speaker jovially declared that they just did not care about being, and being accused of being, Eurocentric. At the time, I found it both a little shocking and depressing that they could see fit to dispense with that fig leaf of serious acknowledgement that often accompanies discussions of Eurocentrism. . . What only struck me later was also the possibility that the speaker also didn’t really understand the issue which was batted away so carelessly. Indeed, it is unclear that many ‘mainstream’ IR scholars truly understand the problem of Eurocentrism, given the mythologised twin deaths of colonialism and scientific racism in 1945 (or so). (Sabaratnam, 2012, emphasis in original)

This immediately raises some acute definitional problems.

What do most international relations/international political economy scholars have in mind when they think of racism and Eurocentrism? I am guessing that they perceive racism to be a discourse of aggressive and hateful intent, which they associate with the far right/alt-right, that dismisses non-Western races/societies as permanently inferior, regressive and static while embodying within its theoretical DNA a conception of imperial genocide that resonates with Adolf Hitler’s brand of Nazi racism. By contrast, I am guessing that they imagine Eurocentrism (Orientalism) to constitute an innocent and natural form of methodological bias that derives merely from living in the West and that leads international relations/international political economy scholars to focus their attention exclusively on the West. For such thinking asks rhetorically: ‘Since a tendency towards self-centredness is not unique to the West then what is all the E-word fuss about?’ This implies that if international relations/international political economy scholars simply widened their lens to focus on the non-Western world, then the charge of Eurocentrism would evaporate as quickly as it had crystallized in the first place. Neither of these understandings is anywhere near accurate.

Nevertheless, the immediate point is that if these two superficial conceptions of Eurocentrism and racism are more-or-less reflective of what most orthodox international relations/international political economy scholars hold, then juxtaposing one against the other suggests a ‘great divide’ between them, with one considered to be mildly, if at all, problematic and the other deemed egregious. Accordingly, this requires us to think through the relationship between Eurocentrism and racism. Importantly, this perception of a ‘great divide’ can explain why orthodox international relations/international political economy scholars rarely flinch when accused of being Eurocentric but positively jump out of their skin when charged with being racist. Thus, the disciplinary assumption seems to be that the Eurocentric charge is not really a problem but that the racist charge is so catastrophic that it demands an urgent response. Still, the fact that international relations scholars overreact to the racist charge and underreact to the Eurocentric charge helps explain in part why it is that after some two decades of intensive and mounting critiques of Eurocentrism, postcolonialism has made so little impact on the orthodox mainstream.

It is true that there have been two debate fora that critiqued the argument in my own book (Hobson, 2012) that Eurocentrism is not a form of racism (see Gruffydd Jones, 2016; Hozić, 2016; Rutazibwa, 2016; Sabaratnam, 2012; Sajed and Inayatullah, 2016; Vucetic, 2012; see also Rao, 2015). But, after a decade of agonizing reflection and self-interrogation, I now concede the argument by reneging on my earlier (2012) ontological-separationist claim. This is in part because of the penetrative critiques that my aforementioned interlocutors made – with my new position emerging tentatively in my response piece (Hobson, 2016) – and in part because my previous ‘strategic reluctance’ to deploy the racist charge, which Olivia Rutazibwa (2016) so powerfully problematizes, simply backfired because only a handful of orthodox international relations/international political economy scholars have responded to the E-word critique. For it turns out that the Eurocentric depth-charge simply failed to explode beneath the waterline. And I now concede that my previous (2012) position served merely to insulate orthodox international relations scholars from the racist charge, thereby furnishing them with the proverbial comfortable mattress upon which they could sleep easy at night. Anecdotal evidence for this lies in the point that Niall Ferguson (2011: 8) embraced the Eurocentric label as a badge of honour but hit the roof when Pankaj Mishra accused him of being racist (see Mishra, 2011).

If ever there were a candidate that should be the subject of a key debate in international relations/international political economy, if not the fifth great debate, then Eurocentrism/racism should be it (a point I return to later). For if orthodox international theorists do not explain world politics/global political economy in an objective, positivist and genuinely universalist manner but parochially celebrate the West as the sole progressive proactive subject of, and as the ideal normative referent in, world politics/global political economy (Hobson, 2012: 1), while simultaneously erasing racism to produce a deracinated/whitewashed picture of world politics/global political economy, then they are both misleading our students and providing an apologia for racism. So, the issues at stake now concern defining Eurocentrism and understanding how it can be equated with cultural racism, thereby deconstructing the ‘great divide perception’.

De(con)structing the ‘great divide’: Revealing Eurocentrism and its equivalence to cultural racism

There are four key properties of Eurocentrism as it developed in the 18th and 19th centuries in Europe, the first of which bludgeons the world in all of its complexity into a facile binary juxtaposition, wherein East and West are viewed as entirely separate, self-constituting entities rather than hybrid phenomena that are products of constantly iterated co-constitutive interactions. The second property elevates the West to the superior zone of (white) ‘civilization’ owing to its exceptional, rational institutions/culture. This underpins the hierarchical ‘white Western’ standard of civilization and the idiom of white Western superiority. Thus, Western civilization stands atop in the ‘First World’ on account of its rational-cultural civilized properties, while strewn out below it stands the irrational ‘Second World’ of (brown and yellow) ‘Oriental despotic barbarism’, with the primitive ‘Third World’ of ‘anarchic (black) savagery’ kneeling at the bottom. In essence, these two properties of Eurocentrism entail a ‘segregation’ of East and West that is analogous to the Jim Crow laws, wherein an imaginary civilizational frontier or line of civilizational apartheid segregates the superior West from the inferior Eastern societies and peoples that are herded into visible ontological ghettos.

The third key property comprises the Eurocentric ‘logic of immanence’ in that only the exceptional West has the rationality to endogenously generate, or auto-progress into, modernity and to subsequently shape and drive world politics/global political economy – or what I call the Eurocentric big bang theory (Hobson, 2012, 2021). In this imaginary, it is the benign, pioneering West that is responsible for creating all of the ‘progressive’ political and economic institutions and norms – including sovereignty, liberal capitalism/global capitalism, freer trade and human rights – that underpin world politics/global political economy, given that only Europe is blessed with rational institutions and culture (see also Sabaratnam, 2020: 14–17). For at no point is the non-West accredited with contributing to these phenomena given that it exhibits merely regressive, backward characteristics that have no place in the modern world.

Finally, the fourth property comprises a normative imperialist posture that takes one of two forms, either a direct or an indirect modality. Those who subscribe to a direct imperialist politics do so on the basis that non-Western peoples are unable to progress into economic and political modernity owing to their irrational cultures and institutions such that their only hope of ‘liberation’ from their ‘self-imposed’ backwardness lies in the emancipatory paternalist imperial civilizing mission, which delivers the requisite rational institutions and culture that only the West can provide. On first blush, the indirect imperialist modus operandi appears as diametrically opposite, given that it is highly critical of empire. But, for example, in the works of Adam Smith and Immanuel Kant we find that Western imperialist logic sneaks in through the backdoor of their Western universalist epistemology. Thus, while they robustly critiqued European empire, they were, nevertheless, insistent that all societies must develop into political and economic modernity by copying the ‘natural’ path that had been trailblazed by the pioneering Europeans (Hobson, 2012: 59–83). In short, the world can only enter the ‘end of history’ and thereby enjoy perpetual peace and prosperity once all non-Western societies learn to dance to the emancipatory Western imperial beat by ceding their cultural sovereignty and becoming Western. Thus, in this imaginary, the world must conform to ‘white Western normality’ because non-Western values and characteristics are viewed as deviant and require Western correction. How, then, might Eurocentrism be conflated with cultural racism?

The term ‘cultural racism’ was used by various European critical race scholars initially to conceptualize Western hostility to non-Western immigrants, which was coupled with the anti-multiculturalist idea that Western and non-Western cultures are incompatible such that their co-existence cannot be tolerated within a single society. Robert Miles (1993) used the term in this way, as did Étienne Balibar (1991) and Martin Barker (1981) in their respective concepts of ‘neo-racism’ and ‘new racism’. Although it captures an important element of a particular everyday Weltanschauung that is reflected in extremist far-right political movements, as well as in the Brexit Party in the UK and Donald Trump’s brand of Republican politics in the USA, nevertheless, most orthodox international relations/international political economy scholars would genuinely have little or no truck with this approach. So, a poor fit with the disciplinary orthodoxy?

Critical race scholars who deploy the term ‘cultural racism’ are clear that it is ‘racism without biological racism’ that, like Eurocentrism, analyses the world through a cultural-institutional lens. Thus, cultural racism and Eurocentric institutionalism share in a cultural/institutional conception of difference and Otherness that forms the pedestal upon which the idiom of white Western superiority and white normativity/normality stands. And both treat the white West as the ideal referent in the global system, with the non-white non-Western world being viewed as inferior and as a ‘deviant problem’ to be solved, preferably through a Western ‘civilizing mission’ of white normalization. It is not that Eurocentrism and cultural racism ignore the non-West but that they deploy a heavily polarized Western-filtered lens that always centres progressive and benign Western agency in the foreground. For neither is the non-West appreciated on its own terms nor is its predicament, which is based partially on the pernicious effects of Western imperialism, acknowledged.

Speaking of cultural racism, James Blaut argues that ‘most academics believe that the typical members of what used to be called inferior races have a capacity equal to that of other so-called races, but they have not been able to realize this capacity’ (Blaut, 1992: 290, emphasis in original) because of cultural/institutional blockages. By which he means that non-Western peoples have not yet learned to live and think in ‘rational’ ways because they have not embraced white culture and Western institutions. All of which is precisely congruent with Eurocentrism. Interestingly, Blaut argues that between 1800 and 1850 ‘religious racism’ dominated, while ‘biological racism’ (i.e. scientific racism) monopolized the 1850–1950 period much as ‘cultural racism’ has prevailed in the last 70 years. Apart from the fact that explicit/manifest cultural racism was entwined with scientific racism through all manner of overlaps long before 1945, nevertheless, critics might object by arguing that cultural difference cannot be equated with racism. Three points by way of reply.

First, the 1965 Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights ‘International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination’ asserts that the term racial discrimination ‘shall mean any distinction, exclusion, restriction or preference based on race, colour, descent, or national or ethnic origin’ (United Nations, 1965: Part 1, Article 1, Clause 1), while the later UNESCO ‘Declaration on Race and Racial Prejudice’ includes discrimination on religious and cultural grounds within its definition of racism (United Nations, 1978: Articles 1, 3, 5, 9). All of this shifts our conception of racism beyond pure biological difference and into the realm of culture and institutions. Second, as I explain shortly, modern (subliminal) cultural racism reconvenes core tropes of scientific and manifest cultural racism. And, third, cultural difference was always a fundamental component of scientific racism. Accordingly, a plausible case can be made to treat Eurocentrism as synonymous with ‘cultural racism’, which, in turn, renders the common perception of a great divide between the E- and R-words as a myth. Before I turn to examining the specific modality of racism that underpins post-1945 orthodox international relations/international political economy theory, I need to preface that discussion by revealing racism as a shapeshifter that morphs over time into different guises within everyday life and world politics.

Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose¹: Racism as shapeshifter – The polymorphous cycles of racism in everyday life and world politics

While liberal conceptions construct a progressive-evolutionary vision of world politics wherein racism gradually evaporates as the bright sunlight of modernity intensifies, nevertheless, numerous critical race scholars point to a recurring dark cycle of racial control that marks the long history of modernity (e.g. Alexander, 2012: 20–58; Bonilla-Silva, 2018: 17–52; Omi and Winant, 2014: 84–91; Perry, 2007). Focusing on the United States, Michelle Alexander (2012: 21) asserts that

racial history . . . is highly adaptable [or polymorphous]. The rules and reasons the political system employs to enforce status relations of any kind, including racial hierarchy, evolve and change as they are challenged. The valiant efforts to abolish slavery and Jim Crow and to achieve greater racial equality have brought about significant changes in the legal framework of American society – new ‘rules of the game,’ so to speak. These new rules have been justified by new rhetoric, new language, and a new social consensus, while producing many of the same results. This dynamic, which legal scholar Reva Siegel has dubbed ‘[racist] preservation through transformation,’ is the process through which white privilege is maintained, though the rules and rhetoric change.

This ‘Groundhog Day’ cycle entails pyrrhic moments of black victory being subsequently rolled back by a white backlash whereby white racial control is reasserted once more, albeit in a new guise, thereby rendering the liberal conception of a temporal movement of linear progress towards black liberation/justice as but a Whiggish construct. For racism is a polymorphous shapeshifter, crystallizing in different guises over time but retaining its oppressive properties. Accordingly, it is not that racism is progressively undermined over time but that its outward appearance becomes progressively more hidden, camouflaged or sublimated – at least in the eyes of white people.

In the United States, the era of Reconstruction entailed the end of slavery in 1865, together with the 14th Amendment (prohibition of states from denying due process and equal protection under the law), the 15th Amendment (the right to vote regardless of race) and the Ku Klux Klan Acts (which declared interference with voting regardless of race as a federal offence). But these progressive initiatives led on directly to a white backlash. In particular, the Southern states sought to circumvent these progressive initiatives while the emergence of the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) backed up the states’ reactionary activities through the organization’s sustained campaign of racist terrorism. Woodrow Wilson (1901: 11) typified this racist episteme when he argued that ‘the first practical result of the Reconstruction under the Acts of 1867 was the disenfranchisement . . . of the better whites and the consequent giving over of the Southern governments into the hands of the negroes’. Moreover, he dog-whistled to the KKK when he asserted that ‘the white men of the South were aroused by the mere instinct of self-preservation to rid themselves, by fair means or foul, of the intolerable burdens of governments sustained by the votes of ignorant negroes and conducted in the interests of [Negro] adventurers’ (Wilson, 1902: 58).

It was not long before the North retreated from the South to leave black people at the mercy of the white backlash via the Jim Crow era of racial segregation. Nothing changed until after World War II, with the next transformational-moment-cum-pyrrhic-victory coming exactly 100 years after the 13th Amendment (the abolition of black slavery) through the Voting Rights Act of 1965. But the death of Jim Crow was followed by a renewed white backlash that forged a New Jim Crow era that has remained up to the present (Alexander, 2012; Bonilla-Silva, 2018). And this ‘new’ era gained its legitimacy by dressing racism in more neutral cultural clothing while maintaining racial oppression. Thus, in this New Jim Crow era, the matrix of white power ensured that the black man would be held back not because of his inferior genes but by his inferior culture, though the ‘invisible empire’ of the KKK remained intact, albeit much diminished.

This American racial cycle comprises a microcosm of the wider cycle that has played out across the West. Thus, in the 18th and 19th centuries, the entwined discourses of scientific racism and manifest cultural racism underpinned the identity of the West, with both developing during and especially after the Atlantic slave trade. Liberal visions emphasize the ‘benign’ Western humanitarian drive, with the British termination of the slave trade in 1807 constituting the inception of a long, progressive process of black liberation from racial oppression. But this is problematic because Britain is celebrated for in effect putting out a fire that the British and other Europeans had started. Even so, the British did not put out the fire, because the ensuing white backlash saw racism and racist imperialism deepen after the end of the British slave trade, while the latter morphed into the highly oppressive indentured labour trade.

For many liberals at the time (e.g. Mitrany, 1933), the Paris Peace Conference and the creation of the League of Nations Mandate System was viewed as another turning point in the progressive liberation of black and brown people. However, in addition to Woodrow Wilson’s well-known rejection of the Japanese delegation’s proposal for a racial-equality clause, his prior enunciation of the principle of sovereignty in his (1918) Fourteen Points speech that triggered emancipatory hopes in the hearts of the colonized peoples turns out to have applied only to Eastern Europe and Wilson was categorically opposed to awarding sovereignty to non-Western polities. Surely, though, Wilson stood behind the ‘humanitarian’ Mandate system? Indeed he did, but only because the system was founded on the racist-imperial idea of ‘trusteeship’ that had first been explicitly conceived at the 1884 Berlin conference as the guiding principle of European imperialism in Africa. For this conception rested on the paternalist-racist assumption that the uncivilized races were not yet ready to rule themselves and therefore must be held under imperial trusteeship until they had ‘grown up’ (i.e. become Western). Once again, the Western mandate of racial-imperial oppression remained fully intact during the interwar period.

The next key ‘turning point’ occurs in the 1945–1960 period, when decolonization was allegedly bequeathed by the gracious hand of the benign West. Apart from the fact that decolonization was won by the nationalist movements against the resistance of the colonial powers, the subsequent postcolonial era has witnessed a continuation of racist practices, albeit in the camouflaged guise of subliminal cultural-racist concepts such as US hegemony and Western humanitarian intervention. But while one might anticipate that the task of (orthodox) international relations/international political economy scholars should be to deconstruct such subliminal cultural racism, it turns out that they have, albeit unwittingly, given it succour, as the next two sections explain.

Cycles of racism in orthodox international relations theory

The core point is that racism is a shapeshifter in that its outward expression or modality changes over time while its underlying structure remains the same. Before 1945 both scientific racism and ‘manifest’ cultural racism focused explicitly on race as a core category, while after 1945 race disappears from international relations theory’s gaze and its conceptual repertoire. In particular, 1945 is conventionally viewed as the watershed moment when international relations jettisoned scientific and manifest cultural racism. In this narrative, the West’s ensuing ‘colonial racist guilt syndrome’ prompted the social sciences to ‘make amends’ by replacing the dark old racist Weltanschauung with a bright new non-racist worldview in which the post-1945 international relations discipline came to embrace a value-free, positivistic posture through which the pernicious phenomena of racial hatred and imperialism are thought to have been finally and mercifully exorcized. But the reality saw the creation of a brave new worldview in which explicit racism (scientific and manifest cultural racism) indeed died out in the halls of the academy and were replaced not by ‘non-racist cultural pluralism’ but by subliminal cultural-racist monism that appears on first blush as socially acceptable given that it no longer talks about race and its associated tropes (Hobson, 2012: 185–186, 319–322). Thus, in subliminal cultural racism, Western academics did indeed distance themselves from the old explicit racist tropes but reaffirmed them in whitewashed terms that dare not speak their name.

Thus, ‘white supremacism’ was replaced by the core modus operandi of Western universalism (a.k.a. ‘Western superiority’) and, albeit implicitly, white normality; racial hierarchy alongside the racial standard of civilization were replaced by the proxies of cultural-institutional hierarchy and the Western market standard of civilization; ‘civilization versus barbarism/savagery’ was replaced by ‘tradition versus modernity’ or ‘developed versus undeveloped economies’; ‘barbaric Oriental despotisms’ morphed into the tropes of ‘rogue states’ and the ‘axis of evil’ on the basis that such states would not reciprocate according to the ‘civilized norms’ of (Western) international law and (Western-based) ‘international society’, while ‘savage anarchies’ morphed into ‘failed states’ on the basis that they could not reciprocate. And last, but not least, the old colonial denial of non-Western state sovereignty was replaced by the construct of ‘conditional sovereignty’ in the postcolonial era, while imperial intervention was replaced by (the ‘civilizing mission’ of) US hegemony, intervention by international financial institutions and humanitarian intervention.

Accordingly, orthodox international relations scholars have mistaken the shift from explicit racism to subliminal cultural racism for one that marks the transition from racism to non-racist, value-free ‘scientific positivism’. Critical race theorists view this transition as one in which cultural difference masquerades as tolerant cultural pluralism but that, in reality, is ‘racism in disguise’ (Balibar, 1991; Barker, 1981; Bonilla-Silva, 2018; Henderson, 2013; Hunt, 1987; McCarthy, 2009; Miles, 1993; Omi and Winant, 2014; Perry, 2007; Salter, 2002; Vitalis, 2000, 2015). Thus, speaking of the post-1945 substitution of cultural difference for racial difference, Richard Perry (2007: 216) concludes that ‘the terms may change, perhaps giving the impression that the old [racial] problems have disappeared, when in fact they have merely acquired protective coloration through semantic camouflage’. Or, again, ‘the demise of scientific racism in its evolutionary-biological form did not mean the end of racist thinking in scholarly discourse altogether. A new, post-biological modality of neo-racism is now widespread in social science’ (McCarthy, 2009: 91). This cultural modality has also been termed ‘racism lite’ or ‘colour-blind racism’ (Bonilla-Silva, 2018).

Thus, the evolution of international relations theory has mirrored the generic shifts in the practice of racism in everyday life and in world politics given that the discipline’s racism has been hidden behind a non-racist mask after 1945. Unmasking modern international relations theory reveals its emphasis on cultural difference as a proxy for non-white racial inferiority and white Western superiority. Thus, white international relations theorists often wear a ‘non-racist mask’ in order to make their cultural-racist theories appear socially palatable in the so-called cultural-pluralist postcolonial era. Accordingly, all that has really changed since 1945 is that the old racist Jim Crow laws that international theory originally conceptualized became sublimated or ‘hidden in plain sight’ (Henderson, 2013; Rutazibwa, 2020; Vitalis, 2000), having morphed into the ‘New (subliminal) Jim Crow laws’ of modern analyses of the global economy/interstate system. Uncovering this long-temporal passage that links the past with the present means that the discipline has a fabricated detachment with the racist ghosts of its past (as Bryony Vince put it to me in private conversation). What, then, of the racist double move that modern orthodox international relations theories perform when analysing world politics/global political economy?

Revealing the racist double move of orthodox international relations theory

The giveaway concerning the racist foundations of modern international relations theory lies not simply in what it does say but as much in what it does not. Thus, to postcolonialism’s rhetorical question as to whether racism has played an important role in structuring world politics past and present, the orthodox reply is simply ‘nothing to see here’. This first racist move, which evacuates and whitewashes the presence of racism in world politics past and present, is complemented by the second, in which international relations theory advances a racist analysis of world politics/global political economy but in subliminal cultural language that appears as value-free and ‘racially neutral’. To illustrate this double move, I shall draw on examples from my current research (Hobson and Odijie, forthcoming) and from elsewhere.

The neorealist vision of the Cold War comprises a Western zone of relative peace and stability that ensues from bipolarity or US hegemony or the logic of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD). But such ‘peace and stability’ was only rendered possible because of the racist decision by the superpowers to outsource war to the ‘inferior’ and expendable ‘wastelands’ of the Global South, which constituted a safety valve that could prevent direct nuclear conflict from erupting between the USA and the USSR. Thus, ‘it appears that cold war history has a concentric conceptual organization, consisting of a “formal” history of relative peace in the center and “informal” violence in the periphery’ (Kwon, 2010: 155; see also Persaud, 2016). Moreover, ‘in a historical sense – and especially when seen from the South – the Cold War was a continuation of colonialism through slightly different means. . . For the Third World, the continuum of which the Cold War forms a part did not start in 1945, or even 1917, but in 1878 – with the [Congress] of Berlin that divided Africa between European imperialist powers’ (Westad, 2007: 396). This Western neo-imperialism also takes us back to the future of America’s racist-colonial drive in the 19th and early 20th centuries (see Go, 2011; Hunt, 1987). But all of this necessarily flies under neorealism’s ontological radar scanner given its evacuation of social process through its reification of the structural logic of anarchy that is coupled with the deployment of the Eurocentric/racist method of ‘analytical bifurcation’, wherein racist-imperial processes are bracketed out and silenced in favour of focusing solely on intra-Western white activities (Go, 2016: 89–92, 104–110).

This first move is complemented by neorealism’s second, wherein a subliminal cultural-racist theory is applied to analysing world politics. Notable here is that European empires constituted subsystems hierarchies in which the dominant hyper-sovereign colonial power stood atop of the colonies that were denied sovereignty. But Waltz’s reification of international anarchy is triply problematic, first because this conception replicates the old scientific-racist conception of ‘tropical anarchy’ (Henderson, 2013; Sampson, 2002; compare Lynch, 2019: 277); second, because Waltz sanitizes or evacuates hierarchy from world politics, thereby conjuring Western colonialism and its practices of genocide, the Atlantic slave trade, land appropriation and labour exploitation together with its neo-imperialist successor into thin air (Hobson, 2012: 203–208; Sabaratnam, 2020); and, third, Waltz’s claim that sovereign states are the dominant form of polity under modern anarchy is undermined by the presence of colonial hierarchy before the very recent era of decolonization wherein the only sovereign states that existed were Western. Accordingly, Waltz’s move serves to let Western imperialism off the moral hook, thereby reflecting an ‘epistemology of ignorance’ (Sabaratnam, 2020: 20–21; see also Mills, 2007). Interestingly, we find an evacuation and naturalization of Western empire in the classical realist work of Hans Morgenthau (Hobson, 2012: 188–190; Salter, 2002: 117) and other realists, which leads Nicolas Guilhot (2014) to talk of ‘imperial realism’.

By contrast, Robert Gilpin’s neorealist hegemonic stability theory embraces a normative (direct) imperialism that is dressed up in terms that dare not speak its name (Hobson, 2012: 193–203). Gilpin (1987) differentiates hegemons from empires, where the latter exploit non-Western states while the former help them through the hegemon’s self-sacrificial provision of global public goods. But the paternalist sign of US hierarchical hegemony is that it supposedly uplifts states around the world, with East Asian states singled out as the most egregious and ungrateful free riders that benefit most from hegemonic largesse. Thus, what Gilpin misses is that the conception of uplift reconvenes Britain’s paternalist-imperial civilizing mission of the 19th century, though this elision is inevitable given that he re-visions the British Empire as a benign liberal hegemon. Significantly, Niall Ferguson (2004) effectively reconvenes Gilpin’s argument, though he talks explicitly about the benign liberal imperialism of Britain and America. Moreover, this benign conception that reflects an epistemology of ignorance effectively boils off the coercive side of empire in the subliminal cultural-racist distillation process, thereby providing an apologia for Anglo-Saxon imperialism.

Similar cultural racist logics play out in liberalism (see Hobson, 2012: 216–222, 285–310). While the normative (direct) imperialist posture that is found in John Rawls’s (1999) The Law of Peoples is a very obvious example (Hobson, 2012: 292–295), nevertheless the hard test-case here is that of neoliberal institutionalism. The received wisdom is that neoliberal institutionalism presents a genuinely ‘universal’ picture or flattened ontology of all states learning to cooperate in order to enhance their gains. But it turns out that, in After Hegemony, Keohane (1984) confines this process to Western states (as did Norman Angell before him). Moreover, absent here is a historical-sociological analysis that would reveal the hierarchical-imperial contexts that have driven both Western unity (Sabaratnam, 2020: 25) and the global process by which unequal gains accrue to the West at the expense of the non-West. Paradoxically, constructivists critique neoliberal institutionalism for its rational actor model by asserting that interests are not a priori but are formed through socialization. However, a close reading of Keohane’s book reveals that it is Western norms and identity that socialize Western states into cooperating (Keohane, 1984: 5–7, 43, 182). Accordingly, Keohane not only looks specifically at Western states as the successful actors, but argues that they take specifically Western cultural values such as democracy and liberal capitalism to the table before they enter iterated prisoner’s dilemma games (Keohane, 1984: 182).

One of several (direct) neo-imperialist cues in Keohane’s work emerges from his approval of US hegemonic intervention and intervention by international financial institutions in the Global South as a means of extending complex interdependence across the world. But here the international financial institutions act as paternalist neo-imperial vehicles for the cultural conversion of non-Western states along Western neoliberal capitalist lines via the imposition of neoliberal conditionality and structural adjustment programmes. Moreover, the notorious resentment that these programmes have invoked in many non-Western states, all of which disappears in Keohane’s analysis, takes us back to the future of the ‘unequal treaties’ that emerged under Britain’s informal imperialism in the 19th century, much as the paternalist role of the international financial institutions finds its historical parallel with the League of Nations Mandate System (Anghie, 2005: 245–272). And, finally, Keohane’s approval of Anglo-Saxon hegemony in the 19th and 20th centuries returns us to the problems that I discussed above vis-a-vis hegemonic stability theory (see also Sabaratnam, 2020: 18–19).

A notable example of an indirect imperialist approach is found in the neoliberal theory of globalization, which rehabilitates the classical liberalism of Adam Smith and his aversion to empire (e.g. Friedman, 2000). But there are three subliminal neo-imperialist cues here, the first comprising Friedman’s (2000: 101–111) argument that non-Western states have no choice but to ‘don the golden straitjacket’, which requires them to adopt Western neoliberal-capitalist architectures. Having to become Western means that the theory smuggles informal imperialism in through the backdoor of its Western universalism. Second, by subscribing to the ontological proposition that ‘the world is flat’ (Friedman, 2007), the neoliberal theory of globalization conjures Western imperial/neo-imperial hierarchy and racial capitalism into thin air, thereby naturalizing rather than problematizing these phenomena via the epistemology of white ignorance. And, third, because Friedman focuses on rational individuals whose interests are a priori and whose social identity is irrelevant to individual behaviour, racism and racialized capitalism are whitewashed from the global economy.

Surely constructivism fares much better given its ability to highlight international racial norms? Not only has much of it ignored racism in world politics but the few constructivists who have considered it argue that racism was left behind in world politics after 1945 (Finnemore, 2003; Klotz, 1995), much as imperialism was supposedly outlawed by the UN in 1960. This whitewashing of racism and imperialism from modern world politics not only reflects the illusion that subliminal cultural racism projects but is also a vital move because it allows liberal constructivists to portray Western humanitarian interventionism and liberal peacebuilding/state-building as a non-racist/non-imperial project that saves oppressed non-Western peoples. It is here that we encounter a subliminal cultural-racist paternalism that presents the West as the white saviour of the inferior non-Western societies – thereby rehabilitating the 19th-century conception of the white man’s burden and the civilizing mission – and where the West is (re)presented as the altruistic paternalist father of the non-West (Hobson, 2012: 302–305). Moreover, in this liberal imaginary of ignorance, the notion that peacebuilding/state-building is initiated as a means of eradicating the threat of the deviant non-Western Other disappears from view, as does the legacy of Western empire that created some of the core problems in non-Western states that prompted intervention in the first place (for further postcolonial critiques of liberal constructivism, see Sabaratnam, 2020; Sampson, 2002; Vitalis, 2000).

Liberal constructivism buys into the cultural-racist idea that all progressive actions in the world are initiated by the universal West ‘on behalf of global humanity’. For example, it is the benign West that has single-handedly brought human rights to the world via the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Here international relations’ ‘non-racist mask’ slips conspicuously, given that the Western great powers did their utmost at the United Nations to keep human rights off the global agenda for fear of diluting white supremacy and white normality in world politics and within Western societies. For it was various non-Western delegates at the UN that pursued human rights most fervently while their Western counterparts mobilized the defensive prerogative of sovereign independence to insulate their states from future criticism given that human rights were denied to minorities within their constituent societies, particularly native Americans and black African Americans in the United States. Thus, Western racist motivations and the progressive role of non-Western agency in advancing the cause of human rights in world politics have been airbrushed out of the liberal-constructivist picture. And, in turn, this serves to retain the chimera of the purely progressive non-racist West and the regressive non-West. Equally as egregious is that the role of the West in the denial of human rights to non-Western peoples in the first place is somehow written out of the narrative. Still, much of this is perhaps unavoidable given that liberal-constructivist international relations tends ontologically to divorce power from norms in world politics and epistemologically segregates power from knowledge.

Are orthodox scholars intentionally racist? Racist impact over intention

The case for intentionality is that it is no coincidence that the shift from scientific racism to subliminal cultural racism in orthodox international relations/international political economy theory mirrored the trajectory of racism in everyday life and world politics. My hunch, though, is that international relations theory’s racism is unintentional given that the overwhelming majority of orthodox international relations scholars are most probably non-racist (but not anti-racist) in their private lives. But orthodox international relations scholars have mistaken a critique of their implication in structural racism for an allegation of interpersonal racism. This epistemology of, or move to, innocence links directly to the self-deluded heart of the orthodoxy. For there are all manner of built-in cloaking devices that mask the racism and whiteness of orthodox international relations theories from the eyes of their advocates. International relations’ ‘non-racist mask’ has at least four mystificatory layers.

The first layer (or cloaking device) is that racism in orthodox international relations/international political economy theory is manifested in cultural rather than biological terms, thereby appearing as outwardly non-racist (given the mistaken popular belief that racism is inherently biological). The second layer of mystification is that cultural racism takes on a hidden or subliminal guise (which exorcizes race as an ontological category from world politics), thereby making such racism much harder to detect. Aggregating these two layers together leads white international relations/international political economy scholars to buy into the self-deluded rhetoric that their theories are racist-free. Pertinent here is Blaut’s (1992: 296) characterization of the social sciences since 1950 as ‘so much [subliminal cultural] racism yet so few racists’ (see also Memmi, [1982] 2000: 3).

This mystification is ultimately secured by the third layer of the mask that constitutes the problem of blindness to white privilege. For not being on the end of racism’s pernicious effects means that, unlike non-whites, many white academics tend quite naturally to downplay its existence (see Lake, 2016). An obvious example of this lies with the everyday performance of driving from A to B. For the vast majority of white drivers are able to travel safe in the knowledge that they will not be stopped by the police unless they have been unlucky enough to have been caught breaking the speed limit. By contrast, many black drivers consider themselves lucky if they are not stopped by the police when they have respected the speed limit. Such blindness to white privilege feeds directly into the unreflexive propensity to deny the presence of whiteness and racism in both the theory and practice of orthodox international relations/international political economy (Peterson, 2021; Sabaratnam, 2020: 5). For the ingeniousness of white privilege is that it renders such privilege invisible. Thus, white people are effectively taught not to notice racism and their role in reproducing it (McIntosh, 2020). Which, in turn, fuels the tendency of the privileged to reject, if not protest vehemently, the accusation of racism in the social sciences – as in the aforementioned spat between Pankaj Mishra and Niall Ferguson (see Mishra, 2011). All of which undermines the prospect of addressing, let alone redressing, the problem at stake.

Thus, while a fifth great debate concerning the Eurocentric racism of orthodox international relations/international political economy is long overdue, unfortunately the chances of it occurring are slim to zero. This is partly because intradisciplinary dialogue between international relations’ orthodox and critical wings has completely broken down (De Carvalho et al., 2011), and partly because a simmering ‘white silence’ of denial is the most likely ‘response’ (see, Ryde, 2019; Saad, 2020). Strikingly, it is now some two decades since Robert Vitalis (2000) wrote his seminal article, but still the tumbleweed of white silence blows deafeningly past my window. However, were an explicit response to be forthcoming, two entwined paradoxes might emerge here, the first being that it would most likely accuse my argument of being angry, hysterical and outlandish, wherein ‘Eurocentrism’ is deemed to be the calm/rational ‘standard of common sense’ – the paradox being that rather than engaging with the substance of my critique, such a response would likely comprise an angry ad hominem attack on the accuser and the journal for publishing such an article. And the second paradox is that while most orthodox scholars abhor ‘cancel culture’, it turns out that engaging in an ad hominem attack serves merely to shut down debate on this vital issue. That is, an ad hominem attack on the accuser is merely another form of cancel culture. Still, both such ‘responses’ would reinforce my argument given that ‘white silence’, ‘white rage’ and ‘white denial’ are manifestations of white privilege (see Ryde, 2019; Saad, 2020: 40–45; Sabaratnam, 2020; Peterson, 2021).

A fourth cloaking device is that pre-1945 orthodox international theory has been put through an ahistorical deracination laundering process to reappear in whitewashed form, fit for consumption in the ‘cultural pluralist’ post-1945 era. And because post-1945 international relations theory is (re)presented as non-racist so the laundering of its pre-1945 predecessor means that international theory in the last three centuries is (re)presented as universally racist-free. In this sleight-of-hand manoeuvre, the racist underpinnings of pre-1945 liberal and realist theories are filtered out or conjured away, leaving only their claims about states or geopolitics or interdependence that are transmogrified into ‘objective universalist’ propositions. In the liberal pantheon, two examples are pertinent. First is Norman Angell, who is (re)presented as a key theorist of liberal interdependence and the peaceful benefits it provides rather than as the paternalist-Eurocentric/cultural racist that he was, given his fundamental belief in international hierarchy and the positive need for the British Empire to promote harmonious global interdependence by acting as the civilizer of the barbaric and savage East (see Hobson, 2012: 40–45). Second is the reconstruction of Woodrow Wilson, who is recast as the founding father of 20th-century progressive liberal internationalism, based as ‘it is’ on anti-imperialism, sovereignty and self-determination for all states rather than on what ‘it was’ – a Lamarckian racist vision comprising a pro-Western imperialist stance and a denial of non-Western state sovereignty that was coupled with strong racial immigration controls and anti-black initiatives at home (see Hobson, 2012: 167–175). Similarly, pre-1945 realists typically mentioned in international relations textbooks include Alfred Mahan and Halford Mackinder and occasionally Nicholas Spykman, all of whom are (re)presented as geopolitical-realist thinkers that analysed spatial conceptions of world power rather than as Lamarckian scientific racists who advocated Western imperialism to contain the marauding ‘barbaric’ non-Western peril and whose mentor was the scientific-racist thinker Friedrich Ratzel (see Hobson, 2012: 123–130, 156–158).

Critically, this laundering process extends across all aspects of pre-1945 international relations. Thus, it becomes (but should no longer be) a revelation to learn that early international relations was primarily concerned about inter-racial relations; that the claim that international relations emerged formally in 1919 with the noble desire to solve the problem of war elides its earlier origins, which revolved around maintaining white Western global supremacy and racist empire together with the normative study of ‘effective’ colonial administration; that the journal Foreign Affairs was originally called the Journal of Race Development; and that the International Studies Conference at the League of Nations, which set up the subject matter of international relations in the 1930s under the leadership of Alfred Zimmern, grounded its syllabi in normative Western imperialism and racism (see Acharya and Buzan, 2019; Ashworth, 2014; Bell, 2016; De Carvalho et al., 2011; Henderson, 2013; Hobson, 2012; Kristensen, 2021; Long and Schmidt, 2005; Lynch, 2019; Schmidt, 1998; Schmidt and Guilhot, 2019; Thakur and Vale, 2019; Vitalis, 2000, 2005, 2015). That orthodox international relations scholars persist in ignoring these arguments in the face of a now substantial body of literature that has emerged over the last two decades means that this pervading silence can no longer be excused as the product of an innocent ‘historical amnesia’. Rather, this silence points clearly to the white denial of international relations’ racist origins wherein the non-racist mask slips most conspicuously, thereby constituting an actual example of orthodox international relations’ version of cancel culture.

However, except for in the above context, ‘intentionality’ is not the issue that the racist charge hinges upon given that most international relations/international political economy theorists are unintentionally racist. What matters, therefore, is racist impact regardless of intention. And to conclude this article more generally, it would be folly to presume that if only the Eurocentric rather than the racist charge were levied against the orthodox mainstream then ‘all would not be lost’. For the E-word cannot be used as a ‘get out of racist jail free’ card.