Conclusion

The High Plane of Dignity and Discipline

The amnesia about a discipline’s (and thus a society’s) long entanglement with race and empire extends beyond the work of the Howard school theorists, obviously. To dismiss the scholarship of whites as a catalog of errors and wrong turns on the way to our illustrious present is to succumb to one more illusion. As Charles Lindblom, a former president of the American Political Science Association, concluded, while some political scientists believe themselves to be engaged in “scientific inquiry” the enterprise is better understood as an “endless debate.”¹

A Better Tomorrow, Tomorrow

Consider the case of Leonard Woolf, the influential member of the Bloomsbury group, founder of the Hogarth Press, and husband of Virginia. He also mattered to the course of international relations theory in the 1920s through his works on war, international government, the mandates, and imperialism. Writing in the Journal of International Relations in 1921, Harry Elmer Barnes judged Woolf’s Empire and Commerce in Africa: A Study of Economic Imperialism (1920) as “a contribution to the literature of cardinal importance.”² Woolf’s sharp questioning of the mercantilist underpinnings of imperialism and of the high-minded, self-denying principles in which such policies came wrapped has lost none of its force. “The State, enthroned in its impersonality and a glamour of patriotism, can always make a wilderness and call it peace, or make a conquest and call it civilization.”

Another of his important contributions has gone unrecognized until now. Decades before the post–World War II realists began to identify the ancient Greek historian Thucydides as one of their own, Woolf introduced a discussion of the Melian dialogue in Thucydides’s History of the Peloponnesian War (“the strong do what they can”) for the first time in an international relations journal in order to lay bare the struts and bolts of hierarchy. That is, the Athenians described a world divided in two. In one, principles, rights, and ethics applied. In the other, people were ruled through coercion. The full quotation matters:

In Empire and Commerce, Woolf advanced the idea that trusteeship was a means by which the right and law that governed one-quarter of the world might be extended in the face of the weakness of subject races and the relentless press of investors competing to control raw materials, utilities, and so forth in the colonies and dependencies. The “European state,” he hoped, would be “changed from an instrument of economic exploitation into an instrument of good government and progress, not for a few hundred white men but for the millions of Africans.”⁴

The rhetorical power of that dream of a “better tomorrow, tomorrow” (in Stephen Colbert’s words) has lost none of its force a century later. Barack Obama insisted on as much to those assembled for the first U.S.-Africa Leaders Summit in the summer of 2014:

While Woolf had high hopes 100 years ago for the new League of Nations’ mandate system, historian Rayford Logan posed some sharp questions, as we saw. The vaunted new thinking about “sacred trusts” at Versailles in 1919 and all such institutions intended to redress the wrongs of colonialism reflected the same principles that were advanced while European powers were carving up Africa at the Berlin Conference in 1884–1885.⁶ Evictions, forced labor, peonage, and political disfranchisement continued in the African (and Pacific) mandates, as Logan, Buell, and others showed, with only slight differences (if any) from what was happening in other colonies.⁷ In 1929, a British Labour government passed a Colonial Development Act, with much fanfare, to end the exploitation and neglect of so-called colored races after a first postwar decade fixated on the increased exploitation of raw materials. Unfortunately, the 1929 act served primarily to encourage increased British exports and reduce unemployment at home.⁸ “Reform” turned out to mean “more of the same.”

Widespread labor unrest in the Caribbean on the eve of World War II led to the addition of “Welfare” to the title of the old act and the creation of a joint Anglo-American Caribbean Commission for which Howard’s Eric Williams served as consultant and, later, director of research. With each emendation and extension beyond Trinidad in 1945, 1950, and after, there was, as we saw, an intellectual middlewoman, in this case, Margery Perham, who was ready to work up an article for Foreign Affairs that acknowledged past failures. Despite such missteps, the postwar Labour Party government would guide the empire’s “partners” safely on their long, steep climb toward self-government and away from the cliff edge the “doctrinaire emancipator” would lead the colonized to.⁹

Logan’s solution to the problem of the ever receding horizon of self-determination entailed mobilizing the NAACP and kindred organizations behind the transfer of authority over all existing colonies and dependencies to a new, upgraded mandate administration. He also insisted that commission members include actual subject peoples. Instead, the UN Trusteeship Council created at San Francisco in 1945, where Ralph Bunche relaunched his career, would “supervise” only eleven B class and C class mandates-turned-trusts out of the eighty or so colonies and dependencies around the world. The members of the council were the administering powers—the UK, France, Belgium, New Zealand, Australia, and the United States (the occupying power in Micronesia and a few other Pacific islands)—and an equal number of nonadministering UN members. Logan concluded that the darker races had been betrayed once more.

Did the new trusteeship administration make a difference? We can’t say with any certainty. The reality is that Somaliland, Togoland, Tanganyika, Ruanda-Urundi, Samoa, and other trusts opted for “premature” independence around 1960 in lock step with national liberation movements and other agents of what Harold Isaacs called “the great continental rearrangement” and the “end of white supremacy in the world.”¹⁰ To my knowledge, no one has since gone back to compare the administration of trust and nontrust territories in the decade or so before the passage of UN’s Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples in December 1960.

The precise date matters because with the rush to decolonize thereafter and the passage of time, not to mention the kinds of prejudices we have been exploring throughout this book, it is conventional now to imagine the Trusteeship Council’s mission as that of guiding the “transition to independence.” Yet as we have seen, the council’s founding officials considered such a future extremely unlikely.¹¹ The debate, to the extent that there was one, was still between those who explained the unfolding catastrophe as a result of the limited capacities of black peoples and those who emphasized empire’s raison d’être: maximum exploitation at minimal cost.

If anything, Bunche, who headed the UN’s Trusteeship Division that was the precursor to the UN Trusteeship Council, grew more, not less, pessimistic about the prospects for independence for much of Africa. The trustee powers themselves, with the exception of New Zealand, all abstained from the 1960 declaration with South Africa, which had refused to transfer its own mandate over what is now Namibia. Fifty years later, a handful of scholars began to agitate for the resurrection of the only recently mothballed UN trusteeship apparatus. Palau gained its independence in 1994 although the U.S. Department of Interior still oversees federal programs there. For some, refitting the trusteeship system is the answer to the problem of “rogue states” and “state failures” in Cambodia, East Timor, Kosovo, Sierra Leone, and elsewhere. For others, it is a humane alternative to the destruction the United States wrought in Iraq in 2003. All these advocates of “neotrusteeship,” though, conjure a past that never actually existed.¹²

The subsequent waves of Cold War and post–Cold War history writing, theory building, and identity crafting have contributed to making that imagined past seem plausible to otherwise smart people today. We saw Ed Earle, the Institute of Advanced Studies’ resident “re-imagineer,” make the case for Wilson as a true balance-of-power realist, although his revisionism never gained traction. Instead, today, Wilson is cast as the dreamer of self-determination and inspirer of independence movements in Africa and Asia.¹³ These “liberal internationalist” fables assume that the meaning of the concept of self-determination between then and now is fixed. They exaggerate its place at the Paris Peace Conference. They ignore the fundamentals of the political science of the day that were advanced by Wilson himself, Princeton’s most famous political scientist, concerning the differing capacity of races to comprehend or move toward “self-government.” Today’s liberal internationalists plug in a ready-made story instead of seriously interrogating indigenous ideas of freedom circulating in Cairo, Delhi, Shanghai, and Mecca. That tale always assumes faith in the transparent and honest sentiments of one or another U.S. visionary (Wilson in 1919, Roosevelt in 1942 with the Atlantic Charter, Truman in 1948 during the run-up to the partitioning of Palestine, Eisenhower in 1956 after the Suez Crisis, Kennedy in 1961 with his “embrace” of “non-alignment,” and so on). The tale inevitably ends with disenchantment. That story reflects deeply held prejudices in western international relations theory about what John Hobson calls the “derivative” or defective agency of so-called nonwhite or nonwestern peoples.¹⁴

When U.S. identity was “recoded” in international relations theory during World War II, the discipline turned its back on the analyses of the “new imperialism” of the 1920s. The turn was akin to the hastened recoding of Germany during World War I from exemplary “Teutonic constitutional” democracy to corrupt autocracy at home and from reformist liberal imperial power to brutish exploiters abroad, in Africa. Scholarship on imperialism in the interwar years propelled the careers of young white international relations scholars, including Harry Barnes, Leslie Buell, Ed Earle, Leland Jenks, Parker Moon, and Quincy Wright.¹⁵ By the 1940s, the study of American imperialism had been abandoned and the Cold War’s leading international relations theorist, Hans Morgenthau, limited his discussion of the Caribbean in Politics among Nations (1948) to a paragraph or two on the U.S. acquisition of the Virgin Islands from Denmark in 1917.¹⁶

The record since that time affords many opportunities to gauge the seeming impossibility of reconciling the theory with the practice of the civilizing mission or of its cognate, race development that J. A. Hobson, the advocate for enlightened imperialism, first identified in 1902. I have discussed two such cases. (In any such effort, it’s important to keep in mind that after 1950 or so, the modifier “race” was dropped in favor of “economic” or “political” development and that “development” has since given way to “modern nation-building.”¹⁷) The first case is that of Harold Isaacs, who compared the lofty ideals of the Truman administration and Point IV aid with the brutal record of U.S. imperialism in Asia. This was the last time Isaacs deployed the imperialism concept. After that, he began a political twelve-step program at the Hoover Institution and from there, he joined MIT’s Center for International Studies. The incoming Kennedy administration tacitly acknowledged the reactionary nature of U.S. foreign policy in the 1950s. The new president called for recalibrating relationships, recognizing nationalism and not confusing it with communism, and embracing guided independence in Africa.

The second case is the brutal escalation of the war in Vietnam that key Center for International Studies mandarins and Harvard Kennedy School builders championed. As Bruce Kuklick shows in Blind Oracles, even those who began to rethink their support for the war kept their doubts to themselves, particularly with the growth of the New Left on campuses across the country. Kuklick details how Ernest May and others identified the radical revisionist historians and sociologists of the Cold War and their studies of economic imperialism as a threat to the “professional authority” of mainstream international relations scholars and argued that the danger needed to be contained.¹⁸ Leaders of the stillborn insurgency in political science have a hard time recalling a single young international relations scholar in the forefront of their movement that backed the failed bid of the 66-year-old Hans Morgenthau for the presidency of the American Political Science Association in 1970. International relations scholars are conspicuous by their absence, too, from the compendia and other artifacts of the era, such as The End of Political Science (1970), the San Francisco Marxist collectivist journal Kapitalstate, and so on.

The decades since the early 1970s are littered with the promises by one U.S. administration (and its scholarly auxiliaries) after another that American policy would empower democrats and indigenous entrepreneurs instead of the dictators, oligarchs, and crony capitalist allies of the preceding administration.¹⁹ In the region I know best, the Middle East, the George W. Bush administration spoke of the failures of his forerunners to advance the democratic nation building that was finally under way in Iraq under U.S. tutelage after 2003.²⁰ Nonetheless, in Cairo in May 2011, President Obama ostensibly opened a “new chapter” in U.S. diplomacy in support of “self-determination” after “decades of accepting the world as it is in the region.”²¹ You get the picture.

Across the White Meridian

It is hard for readers today to accept the idea that race or the color line is where academic ancestors located the “international” in international relations. It shouldn’t be. After all, the first U.S. Christian missionary association, the American Board of Commissioners of Foreign Missions, sent its agents to India, Hawaii, China, and Tennessee, among the Cherokee in the 1820s and 1830s. However, missionaries couldn’t settle in the Black Belt; it was illegal for slaves to read and write.²² Nonetheless, as we saw, Aframerica was in essence just one more “case” for assessing the laws of race development and their limits in an era when white supremacy began to encounter sustained challenges to its preferred world order in the 1920s Thus I suggested some grounds for rethinking the genealogy of the idea of the “internal colony,” a mainstay of 1960s and 1970s theory that critics of black separatist thought blamed on a misguided despair and problematic readings of Lenin.²³

Ralph Bunche opposed Garvyism and its “back to Africa” call. He also rejected the so-called Black Belt thesis, including the chimera of pursuing independence in some southern territory (where white international relations theorists and statesmen nonetheless proposed to apply lessons learned in the study of colonial rule in Africa). Let’s not confuse the Bunche of the “American Creed” and recipient of a Boy Scouts of America Silver Buffalo Award (1951) with the agitator and small “c” communist who joined the Howard faculty in 1929. For him and the other Howard radicals, worldwide black liberation would come only through a working-class alliance and anti-capitalist revolution. They got that one wrong. We should also acknowledge that Marcus Garvey, leader of the trans-Atlantic black mass movement that seemingly confirmed political scientists in their beliefs about races and world politics, got at least one argument right about what we might now call the “international decolonization regime” in U.S. domestic politics. African Americans would not be free unless and until Africans were free. Garvey first made this argument in the 1920s.²⁴ In the 1950s and 1960s it became a mainstay of policy analysis, by Isaacs most notably, and, two decades later, it was rediscovered by students of “Cold War civil rights.”

One of Bunche’s arguments in A World View of Race stands the test of time. He argued that racism served as a remarkably productive device for the imperialist. I have traced the idea back to Locke and Du Bois, identifying it as a central tenet of Howard school theory when most white international relations theorists clung to the seeming truths of the science of dominance and subjugation. At the same time, I was unable to find any white international relations scholar other than Fred Schuman who confronted this uncomfortable truth head on in his writings in the 1930s. The story is different after World War II, when the “biological myth” that races are real came under attack and, as we saw, scientific racists in the discipline took to conspiracy theories to explain the seeming eclipse of reason among liberals.

I also traced the lingering effects of the previous decades of theorizing about race and international relations in the renewed predictions of race war in the 1960s by politicians and pundits. We can also turn to memoirs, diaries, and biographies of the policymakers and grand strategists with which international relations theory is centrally concerned, to gauge the persistence of the belief in the biological basis of hierarchy through the last half of the twentieth century.²⁵ As President Richard Nixon reportedly told his chief of staff, the inferiority of the black race was real, and he and staff needed to keep abreast of the research that linked race and intelligence. But he felt that he would also have to “do everything possible to deny” these truths publicly lest he stir up “latent prejudice.”²⁶ Meanwhile, those who would trace the rationally deliberative character of the retreat of racism from international relations scholarship (or who believe in the “internal discursive” approach to the history of international relations theory) have their work cut out for them. The debate never happened.

The debate about the applicability of models of empire to the United States after World War II never happened either. What awaits sustained study is the conversion of a Cold War discipline to ideological anticommunism and to the vision of the U.S. state as a “liberal leviathan.” Racism and imperialism were among the chief sins committed by both the vanquished German and still-to-be-defeated Soviet totalitarian rivals (although conditions in the American South were a problem for the theory). The few holdouts such as Schuman were denounced and embargoed, suffering a repetition of John Burgess’s fate in 1898, when the discipline first took up the cause of U.S. imperialism.

The Resource Curse

The University of Sheffield’s John M. Hobson, the great-grandson of one of those progressive imperialists of the 1890s, has done crucial work in demonstrating not just ruptures but, more crucially, continuities in arguments in defense of hierarchy that were in play in the 1920s and remain in play today. One argument that Hobson doesn’t spend much time on is the right to secure the resources western civilization needs. We saw Robert Strausz-Hupé and Stefan Possony call for the United States to restore the colonial order in Africa and Asia to ensure western control over “strategic” raw materials. This is precisely the kind of “crackpot realism” that sociologist C, Wright Mills said in 1958 was the stock in trade of the new national security scholars.

The 1973 oil crisis spurred the creation of an entirely new field of alleged expertise in “energy and security,” represented by such stalwarts as Daniel Yergin, a Cambridge University PhD and the founder of Cambridge (Massachusetts) Energy Research Associates; Melvin Conant, who went from studying race in the 1950s to working for Exxon and then teaching at the National War College; and Stephen Krasner, a Stanford professor and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. The Foreign Policy Research Institute in Philadelphia keeps alive the memory of Possony’s chief patron, Robert Strausz-Hupé, who did more than anyone else to make geopolitics a respectable part of the Cold War intellectual arsenal. Self-taught “geostrategist” Robert Kaplan serves as one of its advisory board members now. As Hobson shows, the arguments in Kaplan’s The Coming Anarchy: Shattering the Dreams of the Post Cold War (2000) and The Revenge of Geography: What the Map Tells Us about Coming Conflicts and the Battle against Fate (2012) are unselfconscious updates of the ideas of the Journal of Race Development’s Ellsworth Huntington and others. Arguments about hierarchy and fears about resource scarcity remain difficult if not impossible to pry apart.

In the wake of the September 11, 2001, attacks on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon, Kaplan held up Samuel Philips Huntington as a visionary of the world “as it really looks.”²⁷ Critiques of Huntington’s prophecy in his The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (1996) are legion. It is sufficient to note three points. Each generation of believers in the truth of the immutability of races (then) or civilizations (now) appear to think it is enough to repeat the mantra that racists such as Jan Smuts and T. Lothrop Stoddard taught their disciples in the 1920s. The mantras say that we aren’t talking “superiority and inferiority”; we are only talking “difference.” Here Huntington, who launched his career with the support of the Social Science Research Council’s successor committee, closely resembles both Stefan Possony and T. Lothrop Stoddard and is as unconvincing as they were. We saw Alain Locke take on these fictive ideas about races, cultures, and civilizations back in the 1920s, although no one appears to remember that now. Huntington would have appeared quite familiar to Locke in another respect: Locke dedicated much of his work to debunking the taken-for-granted idea that Africa had no real civilization. After divining the identity of the world’s seven civilizations (western, Confucian, Japanese, Islamic, Hindu, Slavic, and Latin American), Huntington famously hedged his bets by positing an eighth, “possibly African” one.²⁸

Beyond Ikenberry and toward the End of Hierarchy

Although he anticipated Gunnar Myrdal’s interpretation of the American creed by a decade or two, Locke would have a harder time with its recent, wholly unconvincing extension to the U.S.-dominated world order. Princeton’s G. John Ikenberry argues that the particular liberal characteristics of American hegemony best explain its durability. He describes the American Century as a restrained and penetrated order, in the senses that other states (Great Britain, France) have an unusual degree of voice in American domestic politics and that over time institutions (NATO, GATT) came to lock in the partners. He contrasts this liberal settlement—that is, the creation of a new order after World War II—with the containment order (or settlement) vis-à-vis the Soviet Union.

What is remarkable in this account of world politics is the complete disappearance of what were once known as the inferior races. Thinkers such as Mahan, Bryce, and Adams, whom Ikenberry describes as the original intellectual sources of American liberal hegemony, were, as we saw, among the country’s great racial supremacists, and his account rehabilitates—doubtless unselfconsciously—an ex-Herrenvolk U.S. democracy’s ruling ideas. It is probably unselfconscious too about its embrace of international inequality, the missing third “postcolonial” settlement. One has to read these works carefully to realize that the rules of liberal hegemony apply to industrialized states only. True, Ikenberry writes,

What is a paradox for Ikenberry, as it was for Louis Hartz before him when he surveyed the American liberal tradition to the “water’s edge,” is better understood as a constitutive feature of the contemporary world order. The fact of hierarchy doesn’t trouble a current generation that, like the ones before, sees it as natural or is unable or unwilling to see it at all. The more one emphasizes the essentially consensual dimensions of U.S. hegemony, the easier it is to see some of the basic and contrasting institutions and norms that apply outside what Karl Deutsch called the North Atlantic security community, which was bound, nonetheless, according to Stanley Hoffman, by its white racial identity. Decades later, others began to describe the league of alleged freedom-loving, English-speaking peoples without irony as the Anglosphere.³⁰

As we have seen, the archives reveal what amounts to a lost world of international relations scholarship buried under the “schools of strategy” built in the 1950s and 1960s. That history bears scant resemblance to the stories told in field seminars in seminar rooms every semester, where professional identities are continuously remade. These myths have a strong hold over the U.S. profession, and the U.S. profession was and arguably still is hegemonic across the “Anglosphere.”³¹

Drawing on the typology of intellectual fields produced in the 1980s by organizational sociologist Richard Whitley, Ido Oren says that for decades international relations typified a “polycentric oligarchy” in which leaders of the two competing schools, realist and liberal, exerted market power over scarce reputation-making resources. (He also believes that it is moving—funeral by funeral, retirement by retirement—in the direction of a less rigid, “fragmented adhocracy.”)³² Yet some of the characteristic forms of exclusion that mark the discipline in the United States today have little if anything to do with the so-called paradigm war. So, even if the so-called war is winding down, a more open and cosmopolitan profession is unlikely. Radical or Marxist thinkers, journals, and debates disappeared from reading lists and practitioner histories decades ago. The intellectual nationalism as revealed in survey courses, author lists, journal article rosters, and the birthplaces of the research faculty of the major departments reinforces the effect. I lack Oren’s confidence about the gradual process of generational change.

Indeed, international relations research faculty across the United States are not likely to introduce graduate students to the arguments and thinkers of what MIT professor Lincoln Bloomfield once referred to as the “militant right” in foreign policy, political economy, and national security studies, and its historical influence within and beyond the discipline goes unrecognized.³³ Orbis, originally the militant right’s answer to Foreign Affairs and World Politics, has little standing today, if the routinely cited surveys of the profession are to be believed. Ideological blinders of this kind, together with the effects of time on memory generally, might lead someone reading my discussion of Possony’s The Geography of Intellect to respond that this particular Washington and specifically Pentagon insider and director of research at the Hoover Institution “was not a major figure in the discipline.” Think again. It is also important to note that the militant right leveled a double critique at a discipline-in-reformation: that it was insufficiently aggressive in the face of the communist threat and that the scientists’ self-styled “behavioral revolution” in international relations theory was intellectually irresponsible. That attack ultimately led to the creation of rival networks of think tanks, strategic studies associations, and the like. That history also has yet to be written.

The lingering effects of the racism in America that the profession of international relations both reflected and helped advance in the decades when empire was still “a word for scholars” can be gauged in today’s departments and schools of international relations. No critical mass of intellectuals of color exists in this sector of the U.S. academy. The work of the Howard school thinkers are not taught. Prejudice can continue to operate unopposed; when a faculty member proposes a next project on regional economic organizations in Africa and the Caribbean, his colleagues will criticize it for a lack of theoretical ambition in comparison to the study of “important places or problems.”

The condition is quite possibly permanent. The 1960s, when the black studies revolution broke out on college campuses, was a “critical juncture.” Although the insurgency resulted in the partial decolonization of some regions of the humanities and human sciences, international relations today remains a white, mainly male rampart that exhibits routine anxieties about the various threats beyond the walls.

This book is a brief for deepening engagement across the paradoxical interdisciplinary divides in the humanities and social sciences. If I have identified a weak point or two in the intellectual bulwark of the practitioners, exploiting that weakness will depend on the cooperative efforts of critics on the periphery of the discipline and potential allies among scholars within the humanities. The hope is that historians, historical sociologists, and professors of literature, culture, and theory will engage with critical international relations scholarship, beginning with John Hobson’s brilliant post-Said genealogy of the varieties of Eurocentrism that haunt international thought in the twenty-first century. His work applies, for instance, to the histories of Anglophone internationalism that nonetheless tend to stop at the edge of the Black Atlantic (and the Black Pacific).³⁴ Similarly, international theorists in American studies and beyond have much to teach dissidents.³⁵ Critical scholars in all these fields are well positioned to continue the kind of analysis begun here. The boundaries of international relations theory and in particular work in security studies, “grand strategy,” and the study of U.S. foreign policy remain open and ripe for infiltration. Colleagues there should lead their students across the borders of inquiry and, as Louis Menand advises, “take no hostages.”³⁶

There is no mystery about why the barbarians of cultural studies and the critics of scientific expertise are seen as threats to disciplinary order and subject to embargo as far as possible. Some may accept the revisionist account of the discipline’s past presented here but argue that it is an anomaly or exception, as Americans often do about the nation’s less-than-perfect past. The founders have been forgotten for good reason. They seemingly had not yet discovered how to inoculate themselves against the ravages of culture. Needless to say, no such vaccine exists. The history of ideas, institutions, and practices has a constitutive role in their present forms and functions. Just so, critics have exposed the many ways in which deep-rooted commitments to hierarchy continue to inform the discipline and its allied intellectual networks even now.³⁷ Meanwhile, in the “real world,” the subjection continues through new-old policies of intervention, tutelage, and targeted killings in new-old zones of anarchy and civilization deficit. It leads one to ask what other unselfconscious factors of the day distort scholars’ understandings, given that so many in the American academy were hypnotized so long by the seeming truths of racism.