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MIL0010.1177/0305829813516526Millennium: Journal of International StudiesLing

MILLENNIUM Journal of International Studies

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Millennium: Journal of

Hobson’s Eurocentric World

International Studies
2014, Vol. 42(2) 456­–463
© The Author(s) 2013
Politics: The Journey Begins Reprints and permissions:
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DOI: 10.1177/0305829813516526
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L.H.M. Ling
The New School University, New York, USA

Abstract
Hobson gives us a definitive accounting of Eurocentrism in IR. The only missing element is gender.
Race needs gender to work, I argue. Otherwise, race serves as a mere descriptor.

Keywords
Daoist dialectics, gender, race

John Hobson’s latest work finally explains why and how International Relations (IR) has
long been an exclusive, Western club for posh boys and some girls. The Eurocentric
Conception of World Politics (2012) details almost three centuries of IR theorising from
the perspective of the propertied white male. Anti- and postcolonial writers have made
similar arguments but they came from other areas of knowledge and expertise: for exam-
ple, psychoanalysis (Fanon, Nandy), literature (Memmi, Césaire, Said, Bhabha, Spivak),
history (Chatterjee, Chakrabarty, Achille), economics (Rodney, Prebisch, Amin). Only
Hobson has examined the texts, speeches, treatises and strategies that comprise the IR
canon, from scientific racism in the 18th century to its mutations today in world systems
theory, neoliberal globalisation, and democratic peace theory. One no longer needs to
recite this canon in order to refute it. Nor must one explain ad nauseam why mainstream
IR offends the majority of humankind. ‘Here,’ one could simply say, ‘read this.’ For this
reason alone, we who are interested in a progressive, more democratic IR owe John
Hobson a debt of gratitude.
Still, I cannot help but notice an incompleteness to Hobson’s story about IR. By
incompleteness, I mean specifically a lack of gender to his analysis of race. Without
gender to animate the concept of race, the latter becomes a descriptor only. (More on this

Corresponding author:
L.H.M. Ling, The New School, 66 W. 12th St., New York, NY 10011, USA.
Email: LingL@newschool.edu
Ling 457

below.) This lack, I further submit, indicates another kind of incompleteness: an episte-
mological one-sidedness that overlooks the complicity of what Hobson calls the ‘East’ in
allowing the ‘West’ to hegemonise IR. Without this recognition, Hobson enacts a
Eurocentric move of his own, albeit unintended. That is, in failing to acknowledge that
the ‘East’ has the agency to – and the responsibility for – constructing IR into what and
how it is, the tale of Eurocentric IR becomes another narrative of victimisation laced
with an implicit judgement: why did you, the silenced and the oppressed, let it happen?
To be clear, I am not charging Hobson with Eurocentrically victimising the Other. His
earlier work The Eastern Origins of Western Civilisation (2004) testifies to his voicing of
those not recognised by Eurocentric IR but who nonetheless contributed centrally to the
making of world politics (WP). What I seek, instead, is to extend Hobson’s analysis to
gender-and-race to account for Eurocentrism’s staying power. That is, where Hobson has
shown how the ‘East’ contributed intimately to the development of the ‘West’, but was
denied recognition of its talents and power, I seek to draw the same analogy between gen-
der-race and a hypermasculinised, Eurocentric IR/WP.1 It has long exploited yet denies a
feminised ‘East’ (e.g., land, labour, resources including women, servants, slaves, the colo-
nised, memory, sociality and so on) to serve not only a hypermasculinised ‘West’ (e.g. the
national security state) but also a hypermasculinised ‘East’ (e.g. the postcolonial state). This
omission omits another: the feminised ‘West’ (e.g. the cultural West). Theoretical erasures of
these substantive connections protect a public secret: patriarchal collusion between the
‘West’ and the ‘East’, despite avowals of autonomy from both. Collusion across patriarchal
orders enables what we have today: the hegemony of Eurocentric IR. How does it work?

Gender-Race
Analysis can only critique, not transform, when gender is truncated from race. Hobson
notes, for example, the distinction between Eurocentric institutionalists in IR today and
yesterday’s scientific racists. ‘[U]nlike the vast majority of scientific racists,’ he writes,
‘Eurocentric institutionalists have no problem with blood-mixing.’2 From this, he con-
cludes that the latter cannot be racists. Yet Hobson puzzles over an apparent paradox:
‘While the discursive form of scientific racism has not re-appeared in international the-
ory, it is nevertheless striking how much of its content finds its contemporary voice in
offensive and defensive Eurocentric institutionalism’.3 Paraphrased, Hobson’s paradox
could be read as follows: current scholars may no longer tout that ‘whites know best’ but,

  1. ‘Hypermasculinity’ exaggerates social norms regarding masculinity, ‘hyperfemininity’ femi-

ninity. A critique of hypermasculinity/hyperfemininity aims not to disparage differences
between men and women, masculinity and femininity; rather, it targets mainstream IR’s
assignment of their disproportional significance in both theory-building and practical action.
L.H.M. Ling, ‘Hypermasculinity’, in Routledge International Encyclopedia of Women’s
Studies (London: Routledge, 2001), 1089–91.
  2. John Hobson, The Eurocentric Conception of World Politics: Western International Relations
Theory, 1760–2010 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 324.
  3. Ibid., original emphases.
458 Millennium: Journal of International Studies 42(2)

somehow, they still insist, ‘West knows best’. And, we all know, ‘West’ codes for ‘objec-
tivity’ and ‘rationality’ as much as ‘white’ and ‘male.’4
Had Hobson included gender in his analysis, he would have unravelled the mystery.
Feminists have long noted that the category of gender need not pertain to ‘women’ or
‘sexuality’ only. Nor does gender refer exclusively to ‘social constructions of sexual dif-
ferences’.5 Rather, gender makes race meaningful.6
For instance, a gender analytical lens reframes Hobson’s Eurocentric institutionalists.
They cannot deflect racism simply by not disdaining, or even actively approving of,
blood-mixing. Plenty of governments in the US, Europe and Australia have mixed blood
to ‘blanch’ indigenous populations, both at home and overseas.7 Blanching extended
beyond genetics to culture. Ann Stoler documents a case in colonial Indochina where a
French father tried to reduce a sentence for his bi-racial son by convincing the presiding
French judge and jury of the son’s ‘Frenchness’. (The father lost. The judge and jury
could not discount the boy’s Vietnamese mother.) Subsequently, French colonial admin-
istrations decided that ‘Frenchness’ should be measured expressly in terms of alienation
from ‘native’ culture.8 These examples demonstrate the intimacies between race and gen-
der in upholding Eurocentric IR. A masculinised, white order for IR/WP ‘outside’ cannot
proceed without internalising these systems of gender-race violence ‘inside’.
Asian capitalism provides another example. Asian leaders who tout superlative ‘Asian
values’ in contrast to a ‘lazy’ and ‘decadent’ West9 nonetheless collude in hypermascu-
line capitalism to compete in Eurocentric world politics.10 This integration of Western

  4. L.H.M. Ling, ‘Global Passions within Global Interests: Race, Gender, and Culture in Our
Postcolonial Order’, in Global Political Economy: Contemporary Theories, ed. Ronen Palan
(London: Routledge, 2000), 242–55; Robert Vitalis, ‘Birth of a Discipline’, in Imperialism
and Internationalism in the Discipline of International Relations, eds David Long and Brian
C. Schmidt (Albany: State University of New York, 2005), 159–82; Yumiko Mikanagi,
Masculinity and Japan’s Foreign Relations (Boulder, CO: First Forum Press, 2011).
  5. Robert O. Keohane, ‘Beyond Dichotomies: Conversations between International Relations
and Feminist Theory’, International Studies Quarterly 42 (1998): 194.
  6. For a history/genealogy of race-gender analytical interventions in IR and how it disrupts
Eurocentric hegemony, see Geeta Chowdhry and L.H.M. Ling, ‘Race(ing) Feminist IR: A
Critical Overview of Postcolonial Feminism’, in The International Studies Encyclopedia, ed.
Robert A. Denemark (London: Blackwell Publishing, 2010), 6038–57.
  7. See, for example, Gregory W. Rutecki, MD, ‘Forced Sterilizations of Native Americans: Late
Twentieth Century Physician Cooperation with National Eugenic Policies’, Center for Bioethics
and Human Dignity, 10 October 2010, http://cbhd.org/content/forced-sterilization-native-amer-
icans-late-twentieth-century-physician-cooperation-national- (accessed 4 July 2012).
  8. Ann Laura Stoler, Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault’s History of Sexuality and the
Colonial Order of Things (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995).
  9. Mark T. Berger, ‘Yellow Mythologies: The East Asian Miracle and Post-Cold War Capitalism’,
positions: east asia cultures critique 4, no. 1 (Spring 1996): 90–126.
10. Jongwoo Han and L.H.M. Ling, ‘Authoritarianism in the Hypermasculinized State: Hybridity,
Patriarchy, and Capitalism in Korea’, International Studies Quarterly 42, no. 1 (March 1998):
53–78; Thanh-Dam Truong, ‘The Underbelly of the Tiger: Gender and the Demystification
of the Asian Miracle’, Review of International Political Economy 6, no. 2 (Summer 1999):
Ling 459

and Asian patriarchy turns ‘economic development’ into a national burden borne on the
backs, sometimes literally, of those considered most expendable and exploitable: women
and other feminised subjects like peasants, workers and the underclass. Tourism/airline/
hotel ads have long hawked the services of the ‘Singapore/Thai/Malaysia Girl’, factories
enticed investors with the ‘nimble fingers’ and ‘docility’ of their women workers, and
states exported female migrants to ‘save’ the national economy with their remittances,
including profits made from the sex industry.11
Race needs gender to work. IR/WP requires a more sophisticated understanding of
agency to grapple with how hegemony functions internally, not just externally.

East and West

A hypermasculinised ‘East,’ in short, complies with a hypermasculinised ‘West’. Such
complicity involves all sorts of racial and sexual mixing. For example, Russian and Sri
Lankan prostitutes in Cyprus may offer similar services at comparable rates of availabil-
ity.12 Russian prostitutes may even outnumber those from elsewhere.13 But local men still
pay a higher price for Russian prostitutes because they are white.
Frantz Fanon explained why half a century ago:

Now – and this is a form of recognition that Hegel had not envisaged – who but a white woman
can do this for me? By loving me she proves that I am worthy of white love. I am loved like a
white man. I am a white man.14

Put differently, gender in colonial desire can elevate the subaltern male. Malcolm X
knew the score even at age 16 when, in 1940s America, he found himself with ‘the best-
looking white woman who ever walked in’. Other black men sought to befriend him but
Malcolm saw through the ruse: ‘Of course I knew their reason [for being nice and
friendly] like I knew my own name: they wanted to steal my fine white woman away
from me’.15
Here, critical race theory for domestic politics has much to offer theorists of the inter-
national. ‘Racist love’, argue Frank Chin and Jeffrey Paul Chan, can de-racinate the

133–65; Bina D’Costa and Katrina Lee-Koo, eds, Gender and Global Politics in the Asia
Pacific (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009).
11. Anna M. Agathangelou and L.H.M. Ling, ‘Desire Industries: Sex Trafficking, UN
Peacekeeping, and the Neo-liberal World Order’, Brown Journal of World Affairs 10, no. 1
(Summer/Fall 2003): 133–48.
12. Anna M. Agathangelou, The Global Political Economy of Sex: Desire, Violence, and
Insecurity in the Mediterranean Nation-States (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004).
13. Luke Harding, ‘Russian Expat Invasion of Cyprus Also Has Sinister Overtones’, Guardian,
26 January 2012, http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/jan/26/cyprus-russian-invasion
(accessed 3 July 2012).
14. Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (London: Pluto Press, 2008[1952]), 45, my emphasis.
15. Malcolm X, The Autobiography of Malcolm X, with the assistance of Alex Haley (New York:
Ballantine Books, 1964), 70–1.
460 Millennium: Journal of International Studies 42(2)

Other as much as racist hate.16 These scholars of Asian America point out that ruling
whites have always set up a racialised, gendered hierarchy, whereby a ‘good’ Other
checks its ‘bad’ counterpart: for example, Stepin Fetchit to the ‘hostile black stud’;
Hollywood’s Tonto and Cochise to ‘savage, kill-crazy Geronimo’; the Cisco Kid and
Pancho to ‘mad dog General Santa Ana’; Charlie Chan and his Number One Son to Fu
Manchu and the Yellow Peril.17 Chin and Chan fail to mention the female counterparts:
Mammy vs. ‘the angry black woman’, Pocahontas vs. ‘the squaw’, ‘the maid’ vs. the
Latina slut, and Lotus Blossom Baby vs. the Dragon Lady. In both cases, the goodness of
the ‘good’ Other comes from its sexually neutered, ‘rational’ assimilation into the white
colonial order in contrast to the uncontrollable, ‘bad’ Other motivated, in part, by its
insatiable sexual hunger for the white Self.18
Eurocentric IR makes the same distinctions for world politics: for example, ‘emerg-
ing’ or ‘transitional’ economies (good Other) vs ‘rogue’ or ‘failed’ states (bad Other).
Eurocentric IR recognises no alternatives to this dichotomy, nor, indeed, to itself. There
is only one world and it is Eurocentric, i.e. Western, white and hypermasculine. After all,
Eurocentric IR hails Thucydides, Machiavelli and Hobbes as its founding triumvirate.
No attention is given to the feminised Others within (e.g. slaves, workers, immigrants,
women) and their struggles in, as well as contributions to, world politics.19 When a new
approach like feminism or reflexivism arrives, Eurocentrics demand that these conform
to mainstream criteria like a ‘research programme’ and ‘testable hypotheses’.20 Evidence
of such gate-keeping abounds in the lack of citations given to postcolonial or feminist
scholars in mainstream and critical IR texts, despite the plethora of conferences, publica-
tions and reports that postcolonial feminists have produced.21 Still, Eurocentrics demand
that postcolonialists, feminists, post-positivists, or anyone who thinks outside the main-
stream, must abide by the Eurocentric canon at every turn.22
Many postcolonial brethren commit the same patriarchal collusion through omission –
even as they critique Westphalia’s hegemony. Thongchai Winichakul, for example, focuses
on the historical conjunctures between the coloniser and the colonised in ‘mapping’ Siam
to make contemporary Thailand.23 He recasts the conventional narrative of third-world

16. Frank Chin and Jeffrey Paul Chan, ‘Racist Love’, in Seeing through Shuck, ed. Richard
Kostelanetz (New York: Ballantine Books, 1972), 65–79.
17. Ibid., 65.
18. L.H.M Ling, Postcolonial International Relations: Conquest and Desire between Asia and
the West (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002).
19. For more on this, see Chapter 3 of L.H.M. Ling, The Dao of World Politics: Towards a Post-
Westphalian, Worldist International Relations (London: Routledge, 2014).
20. Annick T.R. Wibben, ‘Feminist International Relations: Old Debates and New Directions’,
Brown Journal of World Affairs 10, no. 2 (Winter/Spring 2004): 97–114.
21. This is one reason feminists in IR decided to form their own publication outlet in 1999 with
the International Feminist Journal of Politics.
22. Robert Keohane, ‘Feminist International Relations: Contributions of a Feminist Standpoint’,
Millennium: Journal of International Studies 18, no. 2 (1989): 245–53.
23. Thongchai Winichakul, Siam Mapped: A History of the Geo-body of a Nation (Honolulu:
Hawaii University Press, 1994).
Ling 461

nation-building as linear emulation of the West into a matter of unfolding and interactive
epistemologies. ‘What did Mongkut’s life mean,’ asks Winichakul, referring to one of
Thailand’s most illustrious sovereigns, ‘if not a tragic victory in an epistemological bat-
tle?’24 It was King Mongkut who negotiated with the West from a position that optimised
ambiguity, fluidity and multiplicity to prevent Siam’s colonisation by the West, the only
country in the region to do so. Yet Winichakul remains curiously silent on race and gender
when both defined the colonial encounter. The silence deafens, especially in light of
Hollywood’s filmic embalmment of King Mongkut in The King and I (1956). In it, an actor
of Russian ethnicity portrays the King as a primitively enlightened monarch who modern-
ised Siam through the gentle but clearly superior teachings of a white Englishwoman.

Epistemological Shift
Gender-race as an analytical category reflects an epistemological, not just political, shift.
It requires a philosophy whereby nothing stands alone and everything arises from a rela-
tionship.25 As such, relationships always engage in dynamic interactions that lead to
change and, possibly, transformation from inside and out.26
Daoist dialectics offers one means of doing so. The dialectics of yin and yang under-
score the co-creativity, co-responsibility and co-power of the male and female principles.
Both operate simultaneously and with equal impact. The Daodejing cites the dao as the
‘sire of the many’ (zhongfu) and the ‘mother of everything’ (wanwu zhi mu). ‘It should
be noted’, write Roger Ames and David Hall, ‘that mother is the impregnated female,
and father is the siring male. Each of them entails the other’.27 The dao attributes to yin
a ‘bottomless’ source of generative possibility that constitutes the ‘root of the world’
despite its ‘wispy and delicate’ appearance.28 ‘A great state’, the Daodejing advises, ‘is
like the lower reaches of water’s downward flow’. The text continues:

It is the female of the world.

In the intercourse of the world,
The female is always able to use her equilibrium (jing) to best the male.29
It is this equilibrium that places her properly underneath.30

Never underestimate an element, the dao instructs, simply because it appears soft and
weak:

24. Ibid., 61.

25. Ling, The Dao of World Politics.
26. L.H.M. Ling, ‘Worlds beyond Westphalia: Daoist Dialectics and the “China Threat”’, Review
of International Studies 39, no. 3 (July 2013): 549–68.
27. Roger T. Ames and David L. Hall, Daodejing, ‘Making This Life Significant’: A Philosophical
Translation (New York: Ballantine Books, 2003), 109.
28. Ibid., 85.
29. The phrase in Chinese is ‘yi jing sheng zhuang’ (ibid., 172). The word jing usually means still-
ness, sheng overcomes or wins over, and zhuang strength. So the phrase could be translated as
‘(female) stillness can win over (male) strength’.
30. Ibid., 172.
462 Millennium: Journal of International Studies 42(2)

Nothing in the world is as soft and weak as water

And yet in attacking what is hard and strong,
There is nothing that can surpass it.
This is because there is nothing that can be used in its stead.31

Put differently, the feminised harem, kitchen or brothel has as much to do with the
masculinised palace, church/mosque/temple, or citadel. Eurocentric IR may disparage
the former but these are the humble corners that give birth to babies and raise them,
feed households and indulge the masculinised’s most intimate acts. Daoist dialectics
help us recognise the complicities in colonial as well as everyday masculinist-patriar-
chal desire in upholding the white, imperialist order. Malcolm X was a yin subject in
pre-civil rights, segregated America but, by having a white girlfriend, he took on yang
status among his peers. In this way, he doubly discriminated against not just African-
American women but also all women of colour, thereby reifying the myth that power
belongs to men only.
I develop a Daoist model of dialogics in response.32 In acknowledging the intimate
entwinements of yin and yang in making world politics, it offers guidelines on how to
engage Eurocentric IR with Other ways of worlding Self with Other, West with Rest,
hypermasculinity with hyperfemininity. In this way, IR/WP can progress to a better
balance between contending forces rather than always undergoing conquest or
resistance.

Conclusion
John Hobson need not take a Daoist epistemology to complete his story of Eurocentric
world politics. Indeed, the point of yin–yang dialectics is to forgo the Eurocentric, hyper-
masculine conceit of having to do everything oneself. Creativity, the dao instructs,
emerges as both ‘self-creativity and co-creativity’.33 Rather, what my critique aims to
highlight, and what Daoist dialectics underscore, is that one never really reaches the
shore of completeness. One merely needs to begin the journey, so others could hop on
and join in along the way. And John Hobson has given us an excellent start.

Declaration of conflicting interest

The author declares that there is no conflict of interest.

Funding
This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or
not-for-profit sectors.

31. Ibid., 197.

32. It draws on Daoist dialectics to apply to IR a domain of interstitial ‘multiple worlds’ (Ling,
The Dao of World Politics).
33. Chung ying Cheng, ‘Toward Constructing a Dialectics of Harmonization: Harmony and Conflict
in Chinese Philosophy’, Journal of Chinese Philosophy 33, no. 1 (December 2006): 17.
Ling 463

Author Biography
L.H.M. Ling is Associate Dean for Faculty Affairs at the New School for Public Engagement
(NSPE) and Associate Professor of International Affairs, The New School. She is author of four
books: Postcolonial International Relations (2002), Transforming World Politics (co-authored
with A. Agathangelou, 2009), The Dao of World Politics (2014) and Imagining World Politics
(2014). Her articles have appeared in various journals and anthologies.