Their theory of the world is wrong and racist---it relies on Western conceptions of sovereignty, racializes depictions of anarchy absent Western values, and assumes a White, rational neoliberal subject at the core of decision making.

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: 185186, 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: 245272). 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 nonWestern 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 nonWestern 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.