Realism is bad. It overlooks the internal racial dynamics of the nation-state and it’s relationship to international relations. This means that the aff’s framework can’t solve the K

The amorphous presence of race in international relations might be traced to four sources. The first has to do with the genealogy of the discipline. International relations was founded largely in response to war and, as a result, the proper subjects of the field were defined largely in terms of war and peace. 6 The problems of war and peace, as Barry Buzan has pointed out, have crystallized into a subfield (after World War II), namely strategic studies, and this subfield according to Buzan has been privileged by the discipline as a whole – with the consequence that other significant entities have been ignored (Buzan 1991; Klein 1994). War studies did not necessarily have to ignore the problems of race, since a large number of wars were conducted along racial and cultural lines (Drinnon 1997; Horsman 1981; Dower 1986; Tinker 1977). For example, the expansion of European imperial power overseas, and particularly empire building, was largely justified on the basis of racial and cultural superiority. Tzvetan Todorov, for example, has shown through his “exemplary history” the ways in which the subjugation and eventual annihilation of the indigenous populations of the Americas were legitimated through pre-experiential notions of “spiritual expansion” and conquest (Todorov 1984). Wars were also racialized in the imperialist fight to beat back decolonization, and even some wars of liberation were explicitly racio-civilizational in nature (Fanon 1965; Doty 1996b). Yet the discipline ignored these racialized dimensions of international relations. Part of the reason why was neatly captured by P. Darby and A.J. Paolini: The root of the problem was that Asia, Africa, and other nonEuropean territories were seen to be outside the civilized world. The European states acquired title and ruled in their own right. Hence, imperial relations were not international relations and they fell outside the proper concerns of the discipline. It was thus left to other fields of study to grapple with the processes that played such a large part in determining the future of the peoples, societies, and states that now constitute more than two-thirds of the world. (Darby and Paolini 1994: 380) The second reason is directly related to the first. Given the overwhelming stress on security and strategy, and given that states have a monopoly of violence, the field has concentrated very much on state-to-state relations. The latter itself was theoretically legitimized by the near hegemonic position of realism in the discipline up to only a few years ago. Realism’s stress on inter-state relations, however, does not in and of itself lead to the exclusion of race. The problem is less a matter of emphasis and more one of ontology – the definitive objects of investigation that are deemed to be capable of revealing relevant and useful knowledge. As Robert Cox put it: ‘Ontology lies at the beginning of any enquiry. We cannot define a problem in global politics without presupposing a certain basic structure consisting of the significant kinds of entities involved and the form of significant relationships among them’ (Cox 1992: 132). For realist and neorealist theorists, states are containers of identities. There is an assumption that national identity is a privileged site that absorbs all other competing identity dynamics. As a result, the extra-national elements that go into the production of an overdetermined identity configuration such as race, gender, ethnicity, and class, are subsumed under a supposedly universal equivalent. The reconciliation of the multiplicity of elements is in fact a conscious strategy in nation-state formation, since the legitimacy of state power is directly related to domestic political support. The end product of the interpellative process is a political subject represented in purely national (if not nationalist) terms, viz., American, Canadian, Indian, etc. Having secured identity as national identity, the state retrieves its political subjects, that is its citizens, as resources in global competition. Given the definitive place of inter-state conflict in realist and neorealist problematizations, the state-produced notion of the domestic population as a single people whose identity is fixed in the national imaginary is accepted. The identity of citizens, therefore, is seen as mirroring the identity of the nation, which is assumed to have an essentialist essence. The internal differentiation of identities is thus displaced by the general category. Third, because the principal focus in the field has been understanding and managing the balance of power (and the balance of terror), only the relations among the Great Powers have been considered valuable in making general statements in the field as a whole. The neglect of the discipline actually mirrors the level of neglect in policy. The balance of power preoccupation by the Great Powers has meant that even when race (and even genocide) is directly part of war, unless it upsets the global balance it is ignored altogether or incorporated only tangentially. To the extent that race has figured in theorizing global politics, therefore, it has done so in the form of what Foucault has called “subjugated knowledge” or “disqualified knowledge” (Foucault 1980: 78– 84). Finally, the East– West superpower conflict was as much an intellectual and ideological war (of position) as it was a geostrategic confrontation with the threat of nuclear annihilation. On account of this, a good deal of the literature on international relations during this period was suffused with ideology. As used here ideology refers not merely to justification, but also to a set of constitutive practices that defined the contents as well as the parameters of common sense. For policymakers in the West, race was given some attention because it pointed to a major weakness in liberal democracies, and there was concern that the denial of civil rights (especially in the United States) might give the Soviets ammunition in their ideological campaign against racism and colonialism. 7 The Soviets saw a natural front between themselves and the Third World against racism and neocolonialism, and despite the Non-Aligned Movement, as late as 1975, Cuba was pushing this thesis. Ironically, Robert Gardiner has also pointed out that the Chinese used racial arguments against the Russians in their attempt to gain influence in the Non-Aligned Movement (Gardiner 1968).