Race in International Relations

Author(s): Tilden J. Le Melle

Source: International Studies Perspectives , February 2009, Vol. 10, No. 1 (February
2009), pp. 77-83
Published by: Oxford University Press

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/44218580

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International Studies Perspectives (2009) 10, 77-83.

ISP FORUM: RACE AND INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS

Race in International Relations

Tilden J. Le Melle
University of Denver

Any discussion of race, whether in intranational or international relation

requires a clear definition of the term race and its derived concepts of racism
and racial discrimination. The term must also be distinguished from those word
that too often are used indiscriminately to mean race but have a distincdy diff
ent meaning and obfuscate any serious attempt at understanding intra-nation
and international race relations. Primary among such terms are a person's eth
nicity and/or nationality to designate race. Examples of the former are use of
the terms African-Ameńcan or Jewish. Examples of the latter, though used l
frequently, are such terms as Chinese race or Russian race. Distinctions must al
be made to understand the difference between racism and the terms ethnocen-
trism and nationalism. The former posits the inherent superiority of one's
ture over all others. The latter posits the nation-state as the ultimate and f
boundary for a citizen's allegiance. Additionally, with the end of Europ
colonialism around the world, the elimination of legal anti-Black racial
crimination in the United States and the defeat of Apartheid in South Afric
seemingly race-neutral terms have emerged in domestic and international le
cons to designate race. Examples such as inner-city , Western , the West , North-Sou
sub-Saharan Africa , and so on, all have racial undertones beyond the superfic
obvious geographical designation. As a matter of fact, the almost universal u
of the terms Western/ Non-Western and the West not only have racial undert
but posit Europe as the geographic center of the international system. Henc
even in the present-day "global" international system, western Asia is s
defined from a European perspective, and northeasten Africa as well as Arab
speaking states of the Maghreb are referred to as part of the Middle E
The case of Israel as a "Middle East" state is interesting in that because o
Ashkenazi citizens and the European origin of political Zionism, it is not alw
immediately perceived as a part of southwestern Asia but as European despit
its citizens' historical and cultural connection to the other Semitic peopl
the region. It is comparable to Australia and New Zealand being count
countries of the North in the discussions of North/South issues as also in the
establishment of the ANZUS treaty group (Brandt 1981).
Race has meaning only as a social phenomenon. The pseudoscience of
European and U.S. physical anthropologists and other "scholars" has b
totally discredited and rejected. In that regard, the term race refers not
species of humankind but to a group of people who are socially defined on the basi
phenotypically similar (and dissimilar) characteristics. Members of the group
are phenotypically dissimilar are usually self-identified or are known t
descended from a phenotypidly similar family inspite of their own phenotyp
dissimilarity. Through that biological connection phenotypically dissim

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78 Race in International Relations

blacks are still socially defined as black. Although

blond, Walter White, who headed the NAACP, was identified as a black man.
Additionally, depending on the somatic norm image (the generally identified
phenotypical characteristics of the majority of the members of the group) an
individual who is identified as a member of one racial group in one environ-
ment may be identified in another environment as a member of a different
racial group. That is, a "white" person in Brazil may be perceived to be a
' 'black' ' person in the United States. The existence of two or more racial groups
in a society presumes the existence of racism since without racism there would
be no social basis for differentiation. As Pierre L. van den Berghe states in his
seminal work, Race and Racism (Van Den Berghe 1967), "It is not the presence
of objective physical differences between groups that creates races, but the social
recognition of such differences as socially significant or relevant/ '

Racism - Origin
Racism is the ascription of assumed superior/inferior status to members of physi-
cally identifiable groups solely on the basis of their biologically inherited physi-
cal differences or, if phenotypically dissimilar, on their known descent from a
group so identified (Le Melle 1971 in Burkey). The corollary of this assumed
inherent superiority is the a priori right of the superior race to access to society's
rights and privileges and to dominate the inferior to maximize the racists' values
and interests. As such racism is a relatively modern phenomenon and unlike eth-
nocentrism is not and has not been a universal value in all societies. While it has
appeared in some physically distinguishable multiethnic small societies, racism
as a worldwide ideological and mythological phenomenon impacting the lives of
millions of peoples and shaping the structure and function of the international
system is the creation of 18th and 19th century Europeans. Many are the mythol-
ogies spawned by racism about non-Europeans - the indigenous peoples domi-
nated by Europeans. Those mythologies reinforced racist stereotypes created to
support historical, theological, and pseudoscientific theories about race and are
best left for the reader interested in sick humor. They are reflective of the igno-
rance, prejudice and fears of the myth makers and not the true qualities of the
targets of their racist ridicule and aversion. The myths, however, did serve to
support racism as an ideology giving legitimacy to racist domestic and interna-
tional policies (Le Melle in Shepherd and Le Melle 1970, x-xiv).

Racism as Ideology
It is as national ideology that racism has played its most important role in mod-
ern international relations. As a conscious ideology - as a means for justifying
national policies - racism developed hand in hand with the 18th and 19th cen-
tury expansionist thrust of Europe into other parts of the world. Whether
expressed as the civilizing mission or the Christianizing mission or simply as the
inherent right of a superior people, it provided the justification for the effort by
Europeans to extend and maintain their domination in those lands that fell sub-
ject to European imperialism. Paradoxically, this era of expansionism occurred
simultaneously with the period that produced western Europe's and the United
States' greatest and most noble pronouncements on the equality of man. Yet this
same period produced what some consider one of the darkest chapters in the
history of man's inhumanity to man.
It was not, however, until the latter part of the 19th century that the
arguments in support of the inequality of races were systematized into what
might be called an official ideology. In the United States, this occurred as a
result of the attempt to justify the enslavement of black skinned Africans and

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 Tilden J. Le Melle 79

of the post 1876 discriminatory Jim Crow

American to his former position of subservie
the black American was of a naturally inferi
A pseudoscientific base was sought in the
Darwinism equated the principle of survival o
fittest to rule. Naturally the white race was
conquest of non-white peoples was propagated
ority of white peoples. Governor J. H. Ham
the ideology to an extreme in his "mud sil
societies there must be a class to do the menial tasks. The class at the bottom
of the political, socioeconomic ladder wąs necessary for the progress
the upper classes. To him, of course, that class was the African American.
Civil War decided the issue of slavery, but racism remained as a part
the American ideology.
In Europe, as a means for justifying imperialism in Asia and Africa, racis
developed as an inherent part of national ideologies. Through the early effo
of ethnologists to classify peoples of the world according to biological charac
istics, there developed among social scientists (who were even then conc
about their lack of a scientific frame of reference) a tendency to view "rac
the all-pervasive explanation for social behavior and institutions. The r
implications of anthropological terms such as brachycephalic (broad skulled
dolichocephalic (narrow-skulled) or the attempt to attribute the assumed se
and athletic prowess of black women and men to racial traits are products of
attempt to systematize and intellectually legitimize racist ideology. The eff
of these efforts persist today in some of the popular literature of Eur
dominant societies and reflect psychocultural phenomena primarily unique
those societies (Kovel 1970; Marimba 1996).
Extremely influential in the modern development of racism as ideology w
Count Arthur de Gobineau (1853-1855), French aristocrat, litterateur, and d
lomat. It was he who first formulated the Aryan myth - the idea that all hu
characteristics were determined by race and that white people descended fr
superior race, the Aryas. The Aryas, he contended, were no longer pure
some of their miscegenated descendants still carried enough Aryan blo
claim the right to rule. These descendants were the aristocrats of the w
nations. Thus social superiority was to be determined in terms of whit
After classifying and grading shades and hues of white, there was not muc
value left to be attributed to the brown or yellow or the black races - the
being at the bottom of the color scale.
De Gobineau* s ideas were especially welcomed by such Nordic racis
Nietzsche and Schopenhauer and the composer Richard Wagner. It wa
Englishman Houston Stewart Chamberlain, however, who crystallized the id
for use in German nationalism. Since he and Hider were very close friends
he married Wagner's daughter, one can imagine the mutually satisfactory c
versations that must have taken place among them on the subject of race. T
culmination of racist ideology in Europe in the oral and written raving and
ing of Hider is common knowledge. Hider, however, was but the Frankenst
monster turned upon its creator (Le Melle in Shepherd and Le Melle 1970).

Racism: Racial Discrimination as Foreign Policy

The enunciation of racist beliefs and ideologies was not by itself a suffi
cause for the implementation of the domestic and international racist polic
that informed the relationship between Europeans and the non-Europeans w
whom they came in contact. Nor were the European desire and perceived n
for the goods and services of non-Europeans a sufficient cause. Racism may

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80 Race in International Relations

to attitudes of dislike and distrust but not necess

ior reflective of those attitudes. It may lead to fe
for members of another racial group, but even th
racial discrimination. If a racist group is to tran
into racial discrimination (Jim-crow, code noir '
cally and economically dominant. Accordingly, i
centuries that European political and economic p
opment of European racist ideologies. Western
been left out of the world of the great ancient
and cut off for centuries from the direct influence of what remained of
Hellenistic and Roman civilizations of the central Mediterranean and western
Asia, emerged as dominant powers in the world. The beginning of the eme
gence of Western European power can be dated to the 16th and 17th centuries
as Europeans sought to find trade routes to Asia around the blockades set
by the Muslim powers to the East. The ability to dominate the fragment
traditional states of the non-European world, however, actually culminated in
the mid nineteenth century.
Buoyed up by their assumption of superior rights based upon their assump-
tion of racial superiority, Europeans set out to impose white rule over th
whole world. Although they were seeking primarily political and econom
gain, they justified their conquest of the nonwhite peoples of the world
terms of nature and religion. The result was what became known as the color
line in the colonial situation (Gardiner 1968). Many attempts have been ma
to distinguish between French and British colonial policies in particular, b
the facts do not support a significant difference on the question of race. Both
policies assumed the inherent racial inferiority of the nonwhite. The offic
French policy of assimilation or identity provided that the nonwhite colonize
peoples could become black, brown or yellow Frenchmen provided they ro
above their own racially spawned inferior culture and assimilated the univer-
sally superior civilization of the French. Among the British the same poli
was expressed through Cecil Rhodes's famous slogan: "Equal rights for a
civilized men ." Neither policy worked. The French, after a brief experiment
Senegal, could not bring themselves to accept the logic of practical assimi
tion-racial equality; the bloody consequences of racism in Cecil Rhodes's
southern African empire are all too well known. All European powers resorted
to what has been called the policy of association: the nonwhite could asso
ate with European as a "hewer of wood" but never as an equal. The con-
tradictions of actual and de facto segregation in the United States and o
South Africa's apartheid were that both systems were in fact nothing mo
than association on an unequal basis. The policies of Europeans in the Ne
World toward the indigenous peoples in many cases amounted to geno-
cide - the elimination of whole peoples and cultures and forceful taking of
land in the name of Christianity and country - the civilizing mission which was
equated with the Christianizing mission .
The same assumptions of the racial inferiority of nonwhites underlay the Lea-
gue of Nations Mandate system that gave formal international legitimacy to the
colonial situation. The ABC Mandate System legally established the white nations
of the world as the arbiters of when the nonwhite peoples were considered suffi-
ciently civilized to govern themselves. The irony, of course, is that those peoples
had governed themselves well before the European intrusion. The Mandate
System was interesting in that the categories of self-government readiness it
projected conformed to the colonialist and De Gobineauan assumptions of gra-
dations in racial inferiority. Representative of this was the statement of George
Hardy, one-time director of the French E cole Coloniale . Speaking of the need to
adjust colonial policy to the degree of backwardness of a country he said:

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 Tilden J. Le Melle 81

"Differences in (the colonial) situations dem

does not handle a literate Vietnamese or Moro
tral Africa or Australia.' ' That is, all nonwhit
African is even more inferior - at the bottom of the De Gobineauan human
scale (Le Melle in Shepherd and Le Melle 1970).
It is not difficult to understand the racist assumptions behind the Mandate
System when one considers the strong opposition to and eventual rejection of
Japan's proposal for unreserved acceptance by the European powers of the pr
ciple of racial equality. Great Britain and France especially regarded Japa
request as a challenge to the superiority of white people, and the U.S. Preside
Wilson, even though he supported Japan for a while, found that he could not
buck racism in the United States. He joined in rejecting Japan's proposal. Thu
not only in the Mandate System but in their refusal to support the principle
racial equality, the white European powers of the League of Nations and t
United States sanctioned racism in international relations. The principle of se
determination enunciated in the Fourteen Points meant that the white power
would decide when the nonwhite peoples of the world could be free to dir
their own lives.
It is no wonder, then, that Hitler's racial policies were so successful or that
South Africa could defy the world in pursuing racist policies not only at home
but in Mandated Southwest Africa (Namibia) or that Rhodesia's Unilateral
Declaration of Independence could openly defy the authority of Great Britain in
the name of white supremacy (Le Melle in Shepherd and Le Melle 1970).
Racism has manifested itself internationally not only through European
colonialism and in international organizations but also in immigration policies.
The 1870 U.S. immigration law discriminating against Chinese and Koreans, the
1906 Gentlemen's Agreement and the 1924 Johnson Immigration Act directed
against the Japanese, the general discrimination against the Mediterranean
darker-skinned European (Italians were classified as black in Mississippi) - all
represented the noisome poison of racism and color prejudice. One might also
cite Australia's 1901 law against those who could not write a European language
or Canada's 1908 law restricting Japanese immigration or South Africa's
Apartheid restriction against non-European immigration. The Japanese had to
be given, and accepted, the title of honorary white to be allowed into South
Africa for business activities.
One would think that fighting a war in the name of democracy and against
the evils of racial and ethnic bigotry of Hitler's Nazism would have dimin-
ished if not excluded racism from the foreign policies of states dominated by
Europeans and their descendents. The U.S. incarcerated Japanese Americans
and not white German Americans while continuing racial discrimination and
separation in the military. Europeans continued to try to maintain control
over their colonial subjects even to the point of using military force. The
establishment of NATO, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, for defense
against the threat of postwar Communism, only included north Atlantic states
controlled by whites. So-called associated states like Australia and New Zea-
land were in the South Pacific. The majority of states located in the North
Atlantic were and still are populated predominantly by black and brown
peoples and today are governed by those people. The Korean War, the
Vietnam War, and the initial decision to exclude a billion Chinese from
representation in the United Nations reflected more than anticommunism
The Soviet Union, after all was the bedrock of communism in the world.
U.S. Secretary of State Dean Rusk's preoccupation with the threat of "the
yellow perìl " during the Vietnam War was as much a representation of the
mind set of U.S. foreign policy makers and the U.S. soldiers' " gook " mentality
as was the concern with communism.

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82 Race in International Relations

Racism: Dysfunctíonalism and Revolutiona

The function of European racism and racial discr
tion of white dominant racially stratified societi
lands they dominated (Halpern 1969). The analysis
of European domination reveal that the "new ord
maximize the values and interests of the colonize
ever, are inherently dysfunctional in all respe
groups and, hence, include the seeds of their own
ideology of white supremacy and the practice of
functioned as a centripetal force holding white d
Melle and Shepherd 1971). Those same forces, how
awakening of race consciousness among people
never existed before. That race consciousness (pro
from the realization that becoming an assimilé , a
brown Englishman did not bring the expected rew
nate native. The race barrier remained intact. Equ
own terms. Winning meant struggle against the c
eventually in the establishment of new states in
world reaction to racialism. It meant the devel
terms of race. The concepts of Negritude, African
ity, Pan-Arabism, Pan-Africanism - all were in la
response to the ideology of white supremacy and
mainland China could speak to a receptive audienc
in 1955 in terms of the colored peoples of the wo
and imperialistic minority in a predominantly non
United States in the Vietnam War was often portr
avenge the defeat of a white European colonial po
little yellow nation. It meant the ultimate revolt
against white domination throughout the entire c
States leading to political independence, demo
Africa, and civil rights legislation in the United St
Needless to say, just as racism without power do
nation, the race consciousness that informed the
nonwhite peoples was not sufficient in itself to b
tionship between white dominant rulers and thei
race consciousness had to be and was supporte
(power) of subordinate groups to increase the
However, given the nature of a racially stratif
inherently co-terminous, the change in the re
subordinates and their former colonizers was but
their subordinate position-not a change in their posit
Burkey 1971). The domestic struggle for equality
international system and continues today. Exce
political and economic power capabilities have i
dominant role in international affairs, the non-w
occupy a subordinate position in world affairs. Th
had existed domestically in colonial times conti
system. The Security Council of the United Natio
Fund, the World Bank, the World Trade Organiza
the world hard currencies controlling world tr
white dominant powers and function to maint
international system as had existed in the domesti
At the beginning of the 20th century, W. E. B. Dubois enunciated his
prophetic pronouncement: "The problem of the 20th century is the problem of

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 Tilden J. Le Melle 83

the color line - the relation of the darker to

Africa, in America and the islands of the
has passed into the 21st century and the
international relations still remains. Colonialism has been defeated; fascism and
communism have come and gone except for nominal remnants of the latter
in Cuba, China, and Vietnam. Nineteenth and early 20th century nationalistic
capitalism is being replaced with transnational global capitalism; China, a non-
white state, is on its way to becoming the number one world power; India is on
its way. The international system remains still a white dominant racially stratified
system. Will economic globalism and the imperative of transnational interdepen-
dency break down the barriers of racial stratification? Will the white dominant
powers peacefully accept a diminution of their position in the international
system? Will the non-white emerging powers be content to accept only a change
in the condition of their subordinate position? Or will the transformation of
the international system be achieved through violence as the case was in the
transformation of the national racially stratified systems?

References

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