International competition is ensnared in colonial conceptions of 'legitimate players'---that reinforces Eurocentric notions of 'civilization' and racial supremacy AND justifies violence against the 'non-legitimate' Other.

‘World Politics as Competition’: Norms and Structures This short conceptual history of competition as both a normative ideal and an analytical category shows that there is a much richer tradition of thinking about competition than the conventional IR literature assumes. Drawing on this brief account, we now turn to a more extended definition of what we understand to be a configuration of world politics in which competition is central. This, we argue, will possess both normative and structural features. A configuration of world politics in which competition is viewed to be central is in the first instance a world of notionally equal, sovereign states—even if, in practice, the key participants in international competition are a select group of “great powers” (Müller 2020).These share a common set of cultural expectations, and means of communication, that enable mutual observation and compari- son according to a shared goal on a sustained basis (Heintz/Werron 2011). As Simmel pointed out, competition is the manifestation of an antagonism not despite but through this mutual recognition and unity deriving from a shared object of desire. This structure of communications and expectation compels them to engage in an open-ended, dynamic competition for power, wealth and status: there is no stable state to be reached, but the continuing need to adapt to changing forms of competition—a capacity that comes to be discussed under the term ‘competitiveness’. This also implies a change in the objects states compete for, or rather, a change of what constitutes power, wealth, and status as scarce objects at different times. A strong sense of mutual recognition among a group of competing states is necessary in order to set limits to the possibilities for violence. All who compete are recognized as legitimate ‘players’ in the international arena. This legitimacy can be additionally conferred through diplomatic practices, or membership of international organizations. As our historical discussion of ideas of competition in eighteenth and nineteenth century Europe indicates, the idea of international competition is also strongly bound up with the history of European colonialism. It was the binding glue of an idea of European ‘civilization’, culturally and racially superior to non-European societies, that enabled eighteenth and nineteenth-century Europeans to conceive of one another as legitimate participants in the international. A conception of world politics based on competition is likely to assign a greater weight to the economic, cultural and technological attributes of states than it will to their raw military capacity. Because these ‘softer’ attributes are often validated by expert opinion, international media systems and (in the modern era) international organisations may become central arenas for competitive behavior. These “rationalized third-parties” (Werron 2013: 66; 2015) supply and collate the information—whether on military expenditure, public health preparedness, or cultural achievement—that makes “competitive comparisons” (Steinmetz 2019) possible. Yet competition is only ‘formally peaceful’: when world politics are organized in this way, existential threats and violent conflict is not eliminated. The modernization race of the mid-twentieth century and the neoliberal reforms of competitiveness since the 1980s had devastating consequences for significant parts of the global population. What is more, violence has frequently been visited on racialized others who are not viewed as legitimate participants in “the international” (Pitts 2018), through the competitive acquisition of colonies that characterized both the European imperialisms of the eigh- teenth and nineteenth centuries, and the ‘proxy wars’ that shaped US-Soviet confrontation of the twentieth (Westad 2005).