Robert Vitalis: White World Order, Black Power Politics

Robert Vitalis (2015), White World Order, Black Power Politics: The Birth of American International Relations 

Robert Vitalis's new book White World Order, Black Power Politics is worth the read and - I would say - for anyone not comfortably familiar with the past two centuries of US history, even worth multiple reads. It is a thoughtful and rich account of 20th century American International Relations' history that profoundly challenges our mainstream understanding of the discipline's origins in power and anarchy. Instead, Vitalis convincingly describes the first decades of International Relations as rooted in domestic and international race relations. Ideas, intellectuals, and institutions that constituted (and still constitute) the discipline can be understood to be shaped by and respond to strategies developed to preserve and extend white supremacy. The "international" in IR originally corresponds to race or color lines as a response to the question of how to efficiently manage inferior subjects (both at home and in the territories abroad) that increasingly sought liberation.

Vitalis puts forward two main claims. First, he shows that the discipline of IR in the US is founded on the imperial enterprise in the late 19th century that assumed a natural racial hierarchy. The development of important IR institutions, such as APSA and the Journal of Race Development (later Foreign Affairs) illustrate this foundation. What is important - and (collectively as well as individually) surprising - about this well-supported claim, is that this origin of racism and imperialism remains largely ignored among scholars of international relations to this day. Second, Vitalis claims that we - as a community of scholars and practitioners - cannot understand the history of our own discipline without understanding the 20th century freedom movements that stand at the core of its intellectual and institutional development. His book focuses on recovering the ideas of the "Howard school of international relations theory," - a heterogeneous group of African American thinkers affiliated with Howard University, whose work on white world supremacy from the standpoint of its victims has not only been suppressed but also forgotten by the dominant account of IR history.

White World Order, Black Power Politics introduces several ideas that deserve further discussion.

First, Vitalis puts forward the idea of "race development" as an instrument to promote peace and stability. Drawing from important "Howard'ian" thinkers such as Bunche, Locke and DuBois, he argues that fear of so called "race war" based on the notion of insurmountable differences  (in different shapes and forms over the decades) enabled the imperialists and white supremacists to perpetuate their own hegemonic standing. Over time, terms such as "superiority and inferiority" have been replaced (and maybe obscured?) with "difference," the word "race" is now hidden in plain sight in discussions about "civilization" and "political and economic development." Reading about this in Vitalis's book is not surprising. Implicitly, we know about the hegemony of American or "Western" ideas and its underlying racial politics. What is surprising, however, is - at least my own realization - the lack of this awareness in even obvious fields of study such as International Aid and Development or Human Rights Politics. If the ideas and readings are out there, why do we not use them?

This brings me to a second interesting point in Vitalis's book: the role of ideas and institutions in the history of IR. He provides an explicit discussion of institutions in chapters 1 and 4 demonstrating the power these institutions - as well as individuals attached to them - exercise in terms of agenda setting and access. Chapter 2 focuses on the role of ideas in shaping the path of race development. What I think is missing from this account is a deeper exploration of the relationship between institutions, ideas, intellectuals and, most important, power. For example, the description of "race development" in chapter 2 as well as the excellent account of  Du Bois' and Boas critique on the natural hierarchy of races is interesting but - in my opinion - would benefit from a stronger focus on, what I could call, "idea lineage." How did white supremacy make use of institutions and ideas (or vice versa) to ensure its continuing dominance?  This question of the relationship of ideas, institutions, and power would also be interesting to explore further the heterogeneous strands of though within the Howard school (chapter 5).

Third, one of the most insightful ideas Vitalis introduces in his book is that history looks different if you look at it through the rear-view mirror. From the perspective of a post-WWII world, the origins and developments of IR are seemingly the consequences of an anarchically structured world order. Stories of domination and dependence - even though obviously present in the struggle for decolonization and liberation - are suspiciously absent from scholarship in the 1950s and 1960s even though questions of imperialism (tied to war of race as already discussed above) were considered fundamental problems of IR prior to the second world war. Today, even though - as Vitali successfully illustrates - deep-seated fear of potential race wars are still driving the tight grip of white supremacy, the story of the origins of International Relations had changed from one of race relations to one of an anarchic self-help system, in which the exercise of power is a law-like necessity. This development went parallel to the systematic and successful exclusion of African American thinkers, with the Howard school at the center, from most institutions of IR at the discipline.

Last, I want to point toward the timeliness (or maybe timeless-ness) of Vitalis's contribution. The "so what"-question seems easily answered but should most definitely be further discussed. To illustrate this point, I would like to end with a small quiz. "The idea is if we don't look out the white race will be - will be utterly submerged. It's all scientific stuff; it's been proved." (p. 62) Who said it? Tom Buchanan or Donald Trump?  

IR and the Problem of Difference, Inayatullah and Blaney

International Relations and the Problem of Difference offers an insightful perspective on difference and the role it plays in sustaining dominant conceptualizations of sovereignty, economics, and International Relations (IR).


Inayatullah and Blaney’s engagement with the intellectual origins of IR shows how the Peace of Westphalia solidified a post-Christendom European outlook. Rather than viewing Westphalia and its accompanying principle of sovereignty as precursors to international society and a potential solution to the problem of difference (as the old story goes), the authors argue that this moment produced the opposite effect by essentially trapping IR in a perpetual state of deferral. That is, sovereignty, by securing internal sameness and an “empire of uniformity” within, encourages insiders to refrain from facing difference without (203).


European thinkers struggled to make sense of their newly-discovered others in the Amerindians at precisely this moment. Intellectual output was imbued with a “purifying hatred,” as  Europeans saw in the Amerindians themselves—albeit temporally prior, childish versions of themselves (28). By viewing Amerindians in this way, Europeans  essentially purified themselves of the horrors of the Thirty Years' War.


By denying Amerindians coevalness, European thinkers and commentators transformed the “ontic-horizontal separation” between the two groups into “temporal/historical distance." (90) A teleological account of human progress emerged in the “civilizing” ethos of liberal idealism and later, in modernization theory. The authors suggest that IR is, at heart, "a theory of modernization" (87).


The authors draw on sixteenth and seventeenth century political theorists, colonial commentators, and modern literature from a variety of disciplines, relying heavily on Benjamin’s notion of “splitting” (53), Todorov’s “double movement” (101), and Polanyi’s “countermovement” (184).  The authors piece these themes together and tie them to IR.


Unfortunately, the connection with the discipline remains underdeveloped due in part to the authors’ heavy focus on political economy. The authors clearly register their dissatisfaction with global capitalism and its failure to allow humans the ability to develop socially-embedded economics, and “bounty” driven relationships with nature (193, 216).


Inayatullah and Blaney’s use of case analyses in the final chapter is rather unexpected. Connecting such lofty concepts as an “empire of uniformity” (31) and a “reign of straight lines” (190) to concrete “real world” examples, such as peace negotiations between Israel and Palestine introduces assumptions of applicability and causality into what is an otherwise abstract picture. Plausibility quickly becomes a pertinent concern and the reader has no choice but to evaluate the "evidence."


The British recalcitrance in India discussion is insufficient considering the gravity of the authors’ claims. It is unclear what role the authors’ relatively brief survey of this case plays in their rather significant formulations. Does this case demonstrate that “attempting to produce purity creates violence that, while aiming at erasing the other, necessarily redounds also to the self” (187)?


The authors’ analysis of Beilin/ Abu-Mazen negotiations over the partition of Jerusalem is meant to demonstrate the tenability of the authors’ proposed “overlapping sovereignties” scheme (190). Unfortunately, the authors' call for open dialogue feels empty as they fail to explain how, exactly, negotiations would occur. How are negotiators selected? Would local customs and traditional practices produce negotiators? Should they be representative of a population. Dialogue is itself a European value. Perhaps the other prefers not to speak.


Consider women’s positions. Local customs, traditions, and religious practices often expressly forbid women from speaking. As Martha Nussbaum reminds us in Women and Cultural Universals, many traditional customs “are important causes of women’s misery and death” (32). If the inclusion of women’s voices in open dialogue violates local custom, how can open dialogue occur? Can we find space for transformation through dialogue if the other remains silent?       


Inayatullah and Blaney do address this concern, asking: “Can we create a context that errs neither on the side of ad hoc particularism and hierarchical injustice nor on the side of insensitive and intolerant universality?” (203). However, the authors’ near complete failure to engage with gender in any meaningful way—in a study of difference and othering—is perhaps the work’s greatest flaw. The book’s extensive bibliography is almost exclusively male.


The discussion of the “contact zone” further highlights the authors’ vacillation between abstract theorizing and concrete applicability.  They discuss “multilayered social, economic and political terrains” and “overlapping visions” of sovereignty with “complex jurisdictional arrangements involving settlements which must be continuously navigated by dialogue” (213). They note that scholars cite the EU as an example of this notion in practice. They are basically proposing good old-fashioned federalism.


Though some gaps and questions remain, the authors ultimately prompt us to reflect upon our experiences with others and to learn about ourselves from these encounters. When we experience cosuffering and coevalness with others, we are bound to improve our relations—and thus, IR (183).