Making the World Safe for White Democracy: Racialized Liberalism in the Post-War International Order
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Making the World Safe for White Democracy studies the role of race in the formation of the post-war international order. While there is a repository of scholarship on how race affects American politics at home, there is a relative dearth of scholarship on how the same racial ideologies affect American foreign policy. My dissertation shows that the same domestic racial ideologies shaped foreign policy abroad. A cursory look within “the West” in this period – Jim Crow America, European empires, and the White Australia policy – suggest that “the West” only valued White freedoms. I argue that the ideology of racialized liberalism – the belief that only White peoples were deserving and capable of democratic self-governance – characterized the kind of order that emerged after World War II. It caused White democracies to presume that liberal norms were shared by other White democracies, but not non-White democracies. Relying on archival materials and detailed historical analysis, I demonstrate how American commitments to democracies in Western Europe and Australia were naturalized as “sacred obligations” by exhortations to protect White freedoms – even when they were neither strategic nor particularly democratic. By contrast, I show how US commitments to East Asian democracies were merely instrumental: they were continually revised to reflect the US’s geostrategic interests over time, including undermining democratic governments.
The dissertation makes several contributions. First, the dissertation contributes to grand theoretical debates. I show that there really was a robust liberal peace between democracies, but it was restricted to White democracies. Hence, racialized liberalism accounts for why liberal IR theories accurately describe the relationship between White democracies, but realism better describes the relationship between White and non-White democracies. Second, the dissertation contributes to scholarship of race in international relations. While the extant literature has shown how non-White states are regarded as a threat, my dissertation suggests that who is regarded as a threat is not just the colour of the state, but the colour of its victims. Hence, the Soviet Union was understood as a threat, despite being racialized as White, because their victims were White. Likewise, while the extant literature has shown how race makes non-White states exploitable, this paper suggests that despite discomfort with European colonialism, the architects of the Marshall Plan nevertheless supported it in order to save White freedoms in Europe. Finally, the dissertation sheds light on how racism does not merely structure domestic politics, but the international order. |
The Defense of Western Civilization: Racialized Liberalism in the Making of the North Atlantic Security Community, 1947-1949
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Abstract: According to conventional accounts, the North Atlantic security community was born in the post-war period when the US overcame its “isolationism” and embraced a more “internationalist” role because of the need to balance against and defend “free people” from the menace of communism. However, why then was the defense of “free people” limited to European empires, and not extended to populations segregated at home or those colonized by those very “Western democracies?” I argue that the ideology of Racialized Liberalism can explain this discrepancy. Racialized Liberalism is an ideology that sees White people as the natural subjects of democracy. Thus, it was a sacred obligation to defend White democracies from external threats. I show: (1) while red scare tactics were used to win over the American public, what exactly was menacing about “communism” to Americans was that communism would subjugate White freedoms – couched as “western civilization.” Furthermore, racialized discourses (2) also justified the continued colonization of the third world for the defense of white democracy in Europe. As such, contrary to a race-neutral post-war liberal international order, racialized discourses of who were “liberal” enabled a security community to form between white democracies, while excluding and even undermining others.
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Four Logics of what is “Structural” about Structural Racism and How it is Embedded in the “Liberal” International Order"
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Abstract: Despite renewed interest in racism in international relations, IR has not caught up with developments in how the scholarship on race has conceptualized what is “race,” “racism” and what is structural about it. To address this, this paper unpacks what the all-encompassing term “structural racism” means and its implications for international order. It typologizes four ways in which racism is structural: colour-blind racism, neoracism, racial capitalism, and orientalism. The four logics are differentiated along two dimensions: an emphasis on material versus ideational structures; and an emphasis on what race structures versus what structures race. I break down each logic of structural racism and illustrate what it looks like in the Liberal International Order. The paper helps to make sense of the race scholarship and to alert scholars to the subtle and wide-ranging ways race persists in international politics, how we may know them when we see them. The typology also helps to explain why structural racism is hard to change: policy recommendations designed to address one form of structural racism can undermine other policy recommendations designed to address other forms of structural racism. The paper also promises to be of interest to race scholars seeking conceptual clarity on “structural racism."
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“The Colour of Entanglement: How the US’s Extended Deterrence over Western Empire led it to pushing Japan to preemptively striking Pearl Harbour”
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Abstract: It has been established that Japan was pushed into preemptively striking the US at the point that the US imposed an oil embargo on Japan, from whom Japan received 80% of its oil. This answers an old puzzle: why would Japan attack a country that it had no chance of defeating in the long-run. However, this leads to yet another puzzle unanswered: why did the US impose an oil embargo on Japan in the first place? While naked Japanese aggression had begun in China since 1937, the oil embargo would only be implemented in 1941. This paper argues that two events spurred the Roosevelt administration into action: A. the fall of France to Nazi Germany; and B. the invasion of French Indochina and the threat to the French, British, and Dutch empires in Southeast Asia – which the allied powers’ depended on to win the war in Europe. Far from a battle for universal freedom against tyranny, the oil embargo was imposed on Japan to keep Southeast Asia subordinated as European colonies in the defense of white freedoms. Ironically, as the paper demonstrates, it was the US's commitments and extended deterrence over western empires that precipitated the Pacific War.
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