Racial IR K - Michigan 2024 CFMP

NEG---Racial IR K
Notes
This is a Kritik about the Eurocentric based logics that demonstrate the way we interact with international relations in our modern world. This is a framework kritik which means that the alternative does not solve the case. The mathur card is the best card to framework that you should go for in the 2NR. Most of the 2NR links should be not contextualized to reps as much but rather to the fiated implications.
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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.
Hobson ’22 [Professor of Politics and International Relations at the University of Sheffield, PhD from the LSE John, “Unmasking the racism of orthodox international relations/international political economy theory,” Security Dialogue 2022, Vol. 53(1) 3 –20, Security Dialogue 2022, Vol. 53(1) 3 –20]
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

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