Vitalis 2000

The Graceful and Generous Liberal
Gesture: Making Racism Invisible in

American International Relations
Robert Vitalis
The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line, the
question as to how far differences of race, which show themselves chiefly in
the color of the skin and the texture of the hair, are going to be made,
hereafter, the basis of denying to over half the world the right of sharing to
their utmost ability the opportunities and privileges of modern civilization.1
—W.E.B. Du Bois
The task is indeed urgent, for the white man’s prestige in the old sense of the
word, has become greatly weakened...Well do I remember, as though it were
yesterday, the impression made upon my mind when, as a young lecturer in
Ancient History at Oxford, I read of the first great victory of the Japanese over
the Russians. I went into my class and told them I was going to lay aside
Greek history for that morning, ‘because’, I said, ‘I feel I must speak to you
about the most important historical event which has happened, or is likely to
happen, in our lifetime, the victory of a non-white people over a white
people’.2
—Alfred Zimmern
What happened to race?3
—Oscar Handlin
I would like to thank Mia Bay, Chris Brown, Maggie Browning, Pat Conge, Neta Crawford, Cynthia
Enloe, Kevin Gaines, Janette Greenwood, Robert Gregg, Vicky Hattam, Bradley Klein, Audie Klotz,
Paul Kramer, Tim LeDoux, Ari Levy, Charles Mills, Anne Norton, Nell Painter, Adolph Reed Jr., Brian
Schmidt, Eileen Scully, Gay Seidman, Peter Trubowitz, Paul Wapner, and Howard Winant for their
help with this project. Thanks, too, to the Millennium editorial board and referees.
1. William Edward Burghardt Du Bois, ‘Address to the Nations of the World’ in W.E.B Du Bois
Speaks: Speeches and Addresses 1890-1919, ed. Philip S. Foner (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1970),
125.
2. Alfred Zimmern, The Third British Empire (London: Oxford University Press, 1926), 82.
3. Oscar Handlin, Race and Nationality in American Life (Boston: Little Brown, 1957), 188.
© Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 2000. ISSN 0305-8298. Vol. 29, No. 2, pp. 331-356
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Millennium
In one of the most famous and reproduced quotations of the twentieth century, the
theorist and activist William Edward Burghardt Du Bois, a founder of the Niagara
Movement, the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People, and
the Pan-African Congress used the idea of the global ‘colour line’ to analyse what
scholars of International Relations (IR) today might describe as the institution of
racism. Certainly, no other American thinker struggled longer or more
courageously against white supremacy and the injustice licensed by this deeply
held norm of world order. It is no discredit to Du Bois that the institution proved
resilient in the face of decades of resistance and despite the reasoned arguments of
countless would-be ‘norm entrepreneurs’.
This article follows Du Bois’ lead in treating white supremacy as a global norm
and analysing its role in constituting the world order that he and many others
struggled to overturn. By inquiring into the ‘role of norms, identities, and social
realities’, it appears to take what a perplexed Jeffrey Checkel calls the
‘constructivist turn’ inside professional IR.4 Indeed, its method and sensibility
share something in common with the self-described dissident current that began
what is now known within the International Studies Association as the ‘third
debate’. It is also the case that a social science project which turns to the field of
African American studies for insight can easily elicit the unease or, worse,
‘academic xenophobia’ that ‘postpositivist’ theorists routinely encounter.5 The
boundaries, traditions, and identities of central concern here, nonetheless, do not
correspond precisely with those learned in graduate programs in IR nor with the
vocational knowledge that circulates most widely in American academic circles.
In ‘An American Social Science: International Relations’, Stanley Hoffman
urged colleagues in a country and a discipline where behaviouralism ruled to make
room for a more historically-oriented research program: to ‘move away from the
contemporary, toward the past’.6 Almost twenty-five years later, an American neo-
historicist tradition has developed but not precisely in the direction that Hoffman
suggested. A tiny cosmopolitan caucus focuses on the history of (mostly Western)
social movements, feminism, human rights, and environmentalism. But the second
part of Hoffman’s appeal: to move away ‘from the perspective of a
superpower...toward that of the weak and the revolutionary’,7 has gone largely
unheeded and most neo-historicist IR takes the popular national exceptionalist
paradigm as its starting point.
In this essay I subject both cosmopolitan and nationalist strands of American
neo-historicist IR to critique and revision in two idioms: in one case, theoretical,
and in the other, empirically-oriented, in the course of revealing some of the ‘struts
4. Jeffrey Checkel, ‘The Constructivist Turn in International Relations Theory’, World Politics 50, no.
2 (1998): 324-48.
5. David Campbell, Writing Security: United States Foreign Policy and the Politics of Identity, rev. ed.
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), 192.
6. Stanley Hoffmann, ‘An American Social Science: International Relations’, Daedalus 106, no. 4
(1977): 59.
7. Ibid.
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The Graceful and Generous Liberal Gesture
and bolts’ of racism as an international institution. I draw attention to three kinds

of historical practices in particular. The first is the caste distinctions on which so
called humanitarian interventions historically depended and still depend. The
second is the ‘strategic’ white supremacist rationales on which opposition to US
expansionism rested. And the third is the system of American apartheid (Jim
Crow) which was exported from the United States to the Caribbean, Latin
America, the Middle East, and Asia as expansionism gained new ground at the
turn-of-the-century. The last two practices have since given way to others, and a
post-1960s global hierarchy is constituted in part on different grounds. Suffice it to
say that IR theory, although increasingly concerned with the origins of
international institutions, the power of norms, and the origins and course of
American empire and hegemony has had virtually nothing to say about any aspect
of racism. I introduce some likely reasons for this ‘silence and evasion’ in the
American case below.
In the Underground of our Unwritten History8
Contemporary writing about international relations in the US shares with all other
domains of American culture a powerful tendency, in Toni Morrison’s words,
toward ‘silence and evasion’ about the ‘Afro-American presence’.9 Intellectual life
is governed by the ‘norm against noticing’. Writing during and about the Cold
War, Ralph Ellison argued that American life is a ‘drama acted out upon the body
of a Negro giant, who, lying trussed up like Gulliver, forms the stage and the scene
upon which and within which the action unfolds’.10 Both writers have inspired
recent work in American studies intent on overturning this ‘norm against noticing’:
first, by examining how white supremacy (or ‘whiteness’) shapes culture and
history, for instance, in the centrality of ideas about race in the canons of literature,
criticism, and history writing; second, by criticising the ‘segregation of theory’
today with its still operative assumptions about an Anglo-European cultural ‘core’
and a set of black texts located on the distant ‘periphery’; and third, by
documenting the centrality of Afro-American influences on American life and the
constant interplay of intellectual traditions. These critical tendencies are gradually
contributing to a—at least slightly—‘remapped’ American cultural terrain.11
Against these countercurrents, then, the borders of the independent white republic
of IR theory have proved so far redoubtable.
8. From Ralph Ellison, ‘Going to the Territory’, in Going to the Territory (New York: Random House,
1986), 126. The full quote reads ‘Thus, in the underground of our unwritten history much of that which
is ignored defies our inattention by continuing to grow and have consequences’.
9. Morrison, Playing in the Dark, 9.
10. Ralph Ellison, ‘Twentieth-Century Fiction and the Black Mask of Humanity’, in Shadow and Act
(New York: Quality Paperback Book Club, 1994), 28.
11. See Shelly Fisher Fiskhkin, ‘Interrogating “Whiteness”, Complicating “Blackness”: Remapping
American Culture’, in Criticism and the Color Line: Desegregating American Literary Studies, ed.
Henry B. Wonham (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1996).
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Why might this be the case? One could argue that the social sciences are not in
fact just like the other regional cultures—Literary Criticism, Cultural Studies,
Popular Culture, Philosophy, Linguistics, and Folklore—where white supremacy’s
legacy needs to be re-evaluated and overcome. The problem is that the history of
other social science disciplines shows that historians, sociologists, psychologists,
and anthropologists were all shaped in the crucible of race.12 Political scientists
have hinted that the same is true about their own ‘area’ of knowledge without ever
being able to confront the reality of this legacy head on.13 It is as if this truth can
only be expressed plainly by specialists in African-American politics: ‘it was there
at its birth’, meaning the issue of race, at the birth of Political Science.14 As
Morrison argues, ‘certain absences are so stressed, so ornate, so planned, they call
attention to themselves’.15 Her critical questions would thus seem to apply with
special force to Political Science and the subfield of IR in the US:
What intellectual feats had to be performed by the author or his critics to erase
me from a society seething with my presence, and what effect has that
performance had on the work? What are the strategies of escape from
knowledge? Of wilful oblivion?16
IR theorists have often hidden behind realism’s wings to face these kinds of
criticism; they have argued that the distinctiveness of their subject matter sets them
apart and makes the ‘norm against noticing’ irrelevant in this case. In relations
among states, where material power and interest govern the behaviour of actors
bent on survival in a violence-prone environment, an overarching logic of security
and the national interest prevails. Even a ‘domestic politics’ of white supremacy, to
use a familiar adage, stops at ‘the water’s edge’. Pursuit of this particular line of
12. Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The ‘Objectivity Question’ and the American Historical
Profession (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988); Dorothy Ross, The Origins of American
Social Science (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991); and Micaela di Leonardo, Exotics at
Home: Anthropologies, Others, American Modernity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998).
13. ‘[T]he archaeology of political science sometimes indicates that what we might find upon close
inspection is that it resembles ‘hose other products which we are warned not to look too closely at in
their makings (sausages and legislation), if we do not wish to become disillusioned about our
enterprise’. John Gunnell quoting an unpublished paper by Gene Poschman in ‘The Historiography of
American Political Science’, in The Development of Political Science: A Comparative Survey, eds.
David Easton, John G. Gunnell, and Luigi Graziano (London: Routledge, 1991), 15. Ralph Ellison said
the same thing in 1970 about American history: ‘so it is well that we keep in mind the fact that not all of
American history is recorded, and in some ways we are fortunate that it isn’t, for if it were, we might
become so chagrined by the discrepancies which exist between our democratic ideals and our social
reality that we’d soon lose heart’. See ‘Going to the Territory’, 123.
14. Hanes Walton Jr., Cheryl Miller, and Joseph McCormick II, ‘Race and Political Science’, in
Political Science in History, eds. James Farr, John Dryzek, and Stephen Leonard (Cambridge:
Cambridge Uni
versity Press, 1995), 145.
15. Toni Morrison, ‘Unspeakable Things Unspoken: The Afro-American Presences in American
Literature’, in Criticism and the Color Line, 24.
16. Ibid.
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thought, however, would quickly take the naïve defender of an American-invented

tradition down a slippery slope. The empirical quandary remains. ‘Until recently,
race was a central category in international relations’ for statesmen, intellectuals,
and the white working classes of the colonial powers and the industrialising
colonial-settler states.17 More crucially still, realism’s own proximate indigenous
roots in the US may be found in part in the ‘rising tide of colour’ theory in the
1920s and related strains of Anglo-Saxon declinism.18 Realism was not so much
‘founded’ in the 1940s by a wave of émigré continental European scholars, but
recast in line with Cold War imperatives, which included the jettisoning of what
was coming to be recognised as overt racist doctrines by whites who ruled the
‘kingdom of culture’ and the writing of a more useable past for their adopted
discipline.19
What needs to be explained is not how a particular domain of intellectual life
somehow escaped the bounds of ascriptive Americanism—it didn’t—but why the
‘norm against noticing’ appears to work so much more powerfully there than
elsewhere inside the academy until now? The question, I believe, involves
‘domestic institutions’. Few signs remain of the academy’s insurgent moment
inside professional IR in the US. 20 The oppositional and anti-imperialist values that
constituted the original identity of political economy in the 1960s and 1970s are
reflected more powerfully today in parts of Anthropology, Cultural Studies,
17. See Frank Füredi, The Silent War: Imperialism and the Changing Perception of Race (London:
Pluto Press, 1998), 1 emphasis added. As he notes, it is the ‘silence’ about the centrality of racist
discourse and the mythology of ‘color-blind’ tradition of interpreting international relations that needs
explicating.
18. As Fred Halliday recognises, realism had to ‘detach itself from its cousins—social Darwinism,
racism, and Machpolitik’. See Rethinking International Relations (London: Macmillan, 1994), 48.
19. Miles Kahler, following Brian Schmidt, has argued that the story conventionally told about the
‘first’ field-defining debate is a myth or invented tradition. He does not explain nearly as well why the
field required one. See ‘Inventing International Relations: International Relations Theory After 1945’,
in New Thinking in I
nternational Relations Theory, eds. Michael Doyle and John Ikenberry (Boulder, CO: Westview Press,
1997). For the Cold War context and the end of white supremacy, see Mary Louise Dudziak,
‘Desegregation as a Cold War Imperative’, Stanford Law Review 41, no. 1 (1988): 61-120; Brenda
Plummer, Rising Wind: Black Americans and U.S. Foreign Affairs, 1935-1960 (Chapel Hill, NC:
University of North Carolina Press, 1996); Füredi, Silent War; Anthony Marx, Making Race and
Nation: A Comparison of the United States, South Africa, and Brazil (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1997); and Azza Salama Layton, International Politics and Civil Rights Policies in the
United States 1941-1960 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). Du Bois’ account of Black
Americans’ strivings, ‘to be a co-worker in the kingdom of culture’, is found in his Souls of Black Folk,
reprinted in full in The Oxford W.E.B. Du Bois Reader, ed. Eric J. Sundquist (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1996), 102.
20. ‘The Vietnam experience, thus, can be said to have channelled the discipline into the mode in
which it finds itself today...in which political scientists neither speak truth to power (they rarely have in
the past) nor attempt to serve power in a way that may do some good...It is a mode in which theory is
valued for the sake of theory, and empirical analysis is valued merely for the sake of filling knowledge
gap(s). Regrettably, it might take another major international conflict to awaken the discipline from the
intellectual torpor and the irrelevance that characterize it today’. See Ido Oren, Our Enemies and US:
America’s Rivalries and the Making of Political Science, unpublished book ms., 1998, 22.
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Gender Studies, Literature, and History than in Political Science, and more in
British Political Science than in the American Political Science Association. This
might be gauged by comparing the renaissance in the study of the culture of empire
and American expansionism with the paucity of work by political scientists. One
might look at the index of the New Left Review over the past two decades for a
sense of what is ‘left’ in Political Science and who in American IR might be
publishing there, aside from Richard Falk (answer: no one). Last, and undoubtedly
most important, one might look around the room at the next seminar, conference
plenary, or talk for insight into the culture of American IR and the operation of the
‘norm against noticing’. The absence of virtually any, let alone a critical mass of,
black thinkers and writers in the field today goes a long way toward explaining
why white supremacy remains an unexposed foundation of the field and why the
Black Atlantic remains an unrecognised source (for mostly white IR scholars that
is) of the emancipatory counter-currents that we know today as imperialism theory,
‘underdevelopment’ ‘postcolonial theory’, dependencia, world systems analysis,
and so on.21
In the following pages, I develop a few of the likely directions the neo-historicist
IR project would take were the ‘norm against noticing’ overturned; were Africana
Philosophy, African-American History and Social Criticism, and Afro-Caribbean
theory taught in graduate seminars; were black scholars working in the field; and
were US scholars seriously to come to grips with the legacy of white supremacism
(and empire) in the invention of international relations. In the next section, I
consider the story constructivists tell about humanitarianism and humanitarian
norms and counterpoise it to one that deals with the rise, spread, and
institutionalisation of an alternative set of modern constitutive and regulative
norms that I define collectively as racism.22 I argue that to take racism as an
institution seriously would require us both to reject Martha Finnemore’s recent
history of humanitarianism as false and to see it as an example of the silence and
evasion that characterises much of post-World War II white liberal thought and
practice. I propose, instead, as a better starting point for understanding the role of
norms in the age of the great white empires a model akin to Rogers Smith’s
‘multiple traditions’.23
In order to capture the temporal and spatial dimensions of racism as an
international institution, the discussion in section two shifts perspective from
constructivist histories of ideas to historicist analysis of US imperialism. It
presumes a familiarity with recent debates about the domestic versus systemic
sources of expansion that, for better or worse, have been American Political
Science’s alternative to the postcolonial turn in the humanities. I will argue that the
21. Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1993).
22. Martha Finnemore, ‘Constructing Norms of Humanitarian Intervention’, in The Culture of
National Security, ed. Peter J. Katzenstein (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996).
23. Rogers Smith, Civic Ideals: Conflicting Visions of Citizenship in U.S. History (New Haven, CT:
Yale University Press, 1997).
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norm of white supremacy provided the terms of reference for strategic debate in
cases of both failed and successful efforts of American expansion from 1865 to
1930. White supremacy was also one of the most distinctive American cultural
exports in the early decades of the twentieth century, but IR theory has had literally
nothing to say about the course of US racism-building in the periphery.
The final section discusses some remainders of the story of American
expansionism, historical events that the ‘norm against noticing’ has seldom
permitted to come into light. It considers two cases where Jim Crow rule was
established as the means to order social relations in American colonies and
dependencies. The first case is the Canal Zone in Panama (1904), a project
undertaken by agencies of the US state. The second case is the oil enclave of
Dhahran in eastern Saudi Arabia (1944), where the primary agents were firms
rather than Federal agencies. This late example of a model with roots in the post-
reconstruction era reveals the durability of these supremacist norms and institutions
of ascriptive hierarchy.
‘Race’: An American Constructivists’ Dilemma
We have a pretty good idea about what a norm is, according to constructivists: a
collective or intersubjective understanding about appropriate action for actors (or a
collective actor) with a particular identity. A norm typically has a taken-for-granted
quality. And a norm’s effects can go beyond governing behaviour or telling people
what to do, to shaping how people understand who they are: ‘[n]orms thus either
define (or constitute) identities or prescribe (or regulate) behavior, or they do
both’.24 Accordingly, Audie Klotz writes about the ‘norm of racial equality’,
Finnemore and others refer to ‘humanitarian norms’, and in International
Organization, Finnemore and Katherine Sikkink write about norms of ‘women’s
suffrage’ and ‘women’s rights’.
White supremacy is, in this same sense, a norm that constitutes the identities and
regulates the behaviour of states and people. As historian George Fredrickson
argues, white supremacy entails ‘making invidious distinctions of a socially crucial
kind that are based primarily, if not exclusively, on physical characteristics and
ancestry’.25 Within an IR framework, white supremacy is constitutive of a set of
racist practices undertaken by states and individuals. Various accounts exist of
America’s ‘racial dictatorship’, of the US and South Africa as a particular kind of
‘herrenvolk democracy’, of transnational supremacist social movements, and of
what the New Republic’s onetime editor Michael Lind has called the successive
Anglo-American and Euro-American republics.26 All these writings are attempts to
24. Peter J. Katzenstein, ‘Introduction’, in Cultures of National Security, 5.

25. George Fredrickson, White Supremacy: A Comparative Study in American and South African
History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981), xi
26. Kwame Anthony Appiah, In My Father’s House: Africa in the Philosophy of Culture (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1992), 13-20; Etienne Balibar and Immanuel Wallerstein, Race, Nation, Class:
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grapple analytically with a moment in time when, for instance, President Woodrow
Wilson was imagining the reconstruction and extension of an Anglo-Saxon-
dominated world order.27
Finnemore and Sikkink offer a particularly helpful distinction between any
particular ‘single’ norm or standard of behaviour, and institutions which are
relatively stable collection of norms and a ‘mix of rules and practices’.28 It is in this
sense that I describe racism as an institution: a set of practices and rules that
sustain a particular kind of ascriptive hierarchy or system of privilege and
inequality. Pass laws, Jim Crow rules, segregation, the espousal of hatred, social
science theories of superior and inferior moral qualities, antimiscegenation statutes,
and denial of citizenship rights are some of its hallmarks. Racism, in contrast to
other forms of hierarchical, inegalitarian institutions or structures of domination, is
built upon what Michael Omi and Howard Winant call ‘essentialist’
understandings of race, where folk sciences of blood, ancestry, nature, and culture
still dominate discourse in ways that echo white supremacy’s heyday.29
Du Bois’ idea of the colour line represents an early attempt at theorising racism
as an international institution. His views on the ‘race concept’ expressed, over
time, a growing understanding of what we now mean when we say that the idea of
race itself is a social construction.30 Racism and the meanings attached to race, like
a trade regime or any other social institution, may as well change over time.
Humanitarian Norms and Racism
‘Humanitarian’ norms, which proscribe appropriate actions (charity, protection,

uplift) on the grounds of obligation to others, as a kind of sacred trust, were a part
of racism as an international institution just like practices of apartheid and Jim
Crow. Thus, what is common to the otherwise bewildering array of customs that
have been justified, if not motivated, on such grounds—colonialism, mission, race
development, armed intervention—is the bedrock assumption (and reproduction)
Ambiguous Identities (London: Verso, 1991); and Michael Lind, The Next American Nation (New York:
The Free Press, 1995).
27. Wilson’s pronouncements are evidence in support of Roxanne Doty’s key point about how
‘practitioners of statecraft are ardently and continuously involved in the construction of the nation’. See
Roxanne Doty, ‘Sovereignty and the Nation: Constructing the Boundaries of National Identity’, in State
Sovereignty as Social Construct, eds. Thomas Biersteker and Cynthia Weber (Cambridge: Cambridge
28. ‘For example, political scientists tend to slip into discussions of “sovereignty” or “slavery” as
norms when in fact they are (or were) collections of norms and the mix of rules and practices that
structure the institutions and varied significantly over time’. See Martha Finnemore and Katherine
Sikkink, ‘International Norm Dynamics and Political Change’ (paper presented at the SSRC/MacArthur
Conference on Ideas, Culture, and Political Analysis, Princeton University, 15-16 May 1998, 7.
29. Michael Omi and Howard Winant, Racial Formation in the United States: From the 1960s to the
1990s, 2d ed. (New York: Routledge, 1994). See also Adolph Reed Jr., ‘The New Victorians’, The
Progressive 58, no. 2 (1994): 20.
30. William Edward Burghardt Du Bois, Dusk of Dawn: An Essay Toward and Autobiography of a
Race Concept (New York: Schocken, 1968), 152-53.
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of ascriptive hierarchy. Humanitarian action historically always involved

intervention by white Western states and directed at places not identified as white
and Western. It is a logic appropriate only to those not sufficiently ‘like us’:
The whole phenomenon of intervention up to the period of the First World

War underscored and dramatised the fact that the society of nations was not a
society of equals—that there were in fact two castes of states. To be a target of
intervention—indeed, even of humanitarian intervention—was to be
stigmatized as of inferior status.31
Finnemore has nonetheless managed to turn this logic of humanitarianism on its

head, reimagining it as a behavioural rule that depends on identifying a target
people as being just ‘like us’ before it is invoked. Her influential analysis goes
terribly wrong and the logic thus needs to be critically examined.
Finnemore attempts to show that, during the last 150 years, collective
understandings about the moral imperative of certain kinds of armed interventions
have moved in a progressive direction as a reflection of an increasingly expansive
definition of ‘humanity’. By humanity and the evolution of humanitarian norms
she alludes to ‘human beings’ who are thus deserving of protection, and the
process of coming to be defined as human. Finnemore starts with a putative
original class of cases—Greece in the 1820s, Lebanon in the 1860s, Bulgaria in the
1870s—and then tries to explain post-Cold War humanitarian interventions in
relation to the elaboration and deepening of the norm which was evoked in these
instances. Thus, she argues, if Western states once used force to right humanitarian
wrong only in a few cases involving Christian ‘minorities’ in the Ottoman
domains, since then Western understandings of who is human have evolved
steadily in the direction of a more universal or cosmopolitan ideal encompassing,
for instance, Muslims in Bosnia and Somalia, and Kurds in Northern Iraq.
Much of the ensuing analysis is essentially her attempt to salvage a mistaken
argument about a kind of proto-cosmopolitan trend from the cascade of
contradictions to which it immediately gives rise. True, Finnemore, admits, most
cases of military intervention in the colonies and semi-colonies of Europe and the
US called ‘humanitarian’ were those designed to protect citizens of the intervening
state or other European residents abroad, not subject populations. Rather than
considering what these cases tell us about the ‘intersubjective understanding’ of the
norm, she excludes all these instances from consideration on the ground that they
do ‘not present the same intellectual puzzles about interests, since protecting one’s
own nationals is clearly connected to conventional understandings of national
interest’.32 True, also, that British military might had been deployed in a
31. Marc Trachtenberg, ‘Intervention in Historical Perspective’, in Emerging Norms of Justified

Intervention, eds. Laura Reed and Carl Kaysen (Cambridge, MA: American Academy of Arts and
Sciences, 1993), 24.
32. I do not meant to endorse this particular claim. The work of Jeffry Frieden, Simon Bromley, Greg
Nowell and many other historians and political economists underscore the degree to which the equation
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humanitarian project to suppress the slave trade, but Africans, she insists, as way of
keeping this leaky theory afloat, were still not being protected in the same way as
were Christians, since protection was accorded them only on the high seas and not
in slave-holding territories. And, it is true as well that late colonialism (and she
may have added neo-colonialism) was increasingly understood to be a form of
humanitarianism, but she excludes this vast field of endeavour because, well, it
was...just...different: ‘the core of the colonial humanitarian mission was to create
humanity where none had previously existed’.33
The point is that by qualifying, hair-splitting, and selectively reading history
Finnemore constructs a mythical genealogy for a purported international norm: an
ever-expanding standard of humanity. The reasons for the misreading are easy to
discern. Most basically, Finnemore never actually attempts an exegesis of what she
believes to be an important intellectual tradition in the nineteenth century. ‘These
processes are obviously complex and cannot be treated adequately here’, she tells
us.34 The best she apparently can do is argue by way of metaphor. The terms that
are loosely referenced by her—‘barbarian’, ‘infidel’, and ‘civilisation’—are all the
proof offered to ground her argument about an understanding of who was and was
not human, slipping often into treating ‘humanity’ as synonymous with ‘civilised
humanity’. She never inquires into nineteenth century accounts of genetics,
biology, evolution, race, and anthropology to understand the specific idea of
humanity and its scope. To do so would have sunk the theory at once. That is,
Finnemore imagines that notions of biological and moral inferiority are proxies for
a counter-norm of ‘lack-of-humanity’ or ‘distance’ from humanity or ‘something
less than human’. A particular instance of humanitarian military intervention is
proof that the distance was substantially overcome, as in the case of intervention on
behalf of the Greek insurrection in the 1820s. The argument is in fact a tautology.
In the course of this deficient theorisation, lacking philosophical, historical, and
scientific accounts of race (or, for that matter, gender), Finnemore reproduces a
familiar set of analytical errors. The first mistake is the assumption of a stark
dichotomy; either one is seen as human, in which case, following from certain
unexamined liberal tenets, equality must surely follow, or, given the reality of
entrenched patterns of hierarchy and inequality, it must be that blacks and others
were viewed as a kind of inhuman species. Finnemore does not understand
racism’s doctrine of inferior and superior castes within a common humanity that,
according to one astute observer, was based on
the routine restriction of full personhood [in Kantian terms] to whites, and the
consignment of nonwhites to a subordinate moral status...This is the social
of ‘national interest’ with the fate of particular investors, firms, and settler communities became less
obvious to policymakers over time in the era of anti-interventionist mass publics, regions, and sectoral
competitors.
33. Finnemore, ‘Constructing Norms of Humanitarian Intervention’, 172.
34. Ibid., 170.
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ontology of the world of slavery, colonialism, and segregation, where concrete

individuals are seen as raced and colored and treated accordingly.35
Racism’s ethics and practices are, in effect, constituted through the application of
different norms for humanity’s different ruling and subject races.
A second and related error is to imagine that a norm of humanity has slowly but
inexorably expanded its hold, beginning with its restrictive application to
embattled Christian Ottoman ‘minorities’, in greatly diluted form to slaves and
colonial subject races, and ending with its universalisation after 1945. Such a
teleology leads Finnemore to misrepresent the complexities of racialisation. The
Greeks, for instance, were no less subject following humanitarian intervention in
the 1820s to the same biological and sociocultural definitions of inferiority in the
nineteenth century than were peoples—Africans, native Americans, Jews—that
Finnemore declares to epitomise the less-than-human. At the same time, the tropes
of savagery and the like often coexisted with more paternalistic conceptions of
‘noble’ and ‘feminine’ races. Whether the implicit underlying conception is a
threshold that a race crosses in making the leap from non-human to human, or a
continuum of humanity along which races make their way, Finnemore’s thinking
essentialises or caricatures multiple and contradictory eighteenth, nineteenth, and
early twentieth century worldviews.
A sociology of international relations that recognises both the systemic reality of
multiple and competing ideological currents, and concurrently, the reality of
individuals holding contradictory beliefs is a better starting point for analysis.36 By
employing such a framework, we might accurately describe matters Finnemore
gets wrong and the complexities that she cannot account for. In contrast to her
view, we know that new and more virulent strains of supremacist ideology
followed suppression of the slave trade and abolition. The franchise was gained by
African Americans—proof of a deepening norm of ‘humanity’?—and then lost
during the creation of the Jim Crow regime. As Smith notes, ‘the very success of
liberalizing and democratizing reforms is likely to unsettle many, creating
constituencies for rebuilding ascriptive inequalities in new forms’.37 In a parallel
fashion, ideas about sovereignty and humanity were simply not yoked together in
history in the way that Finnemore imagines. Theorists in the seventeenth century
could admit to the sovereignty of non-western, non-Christian, savage races or
nations. The nineteenth century empire-building wave by the US republic across
North America and by Europeans in Africa—a process of subjugating Cherokees,
Berbers, Arabs, Hausas, and countless others that-once-were-states-but-now-were-
tribes—coincided with the invention of theories about the distinction between
states and other kinds of polities.
35. Charles Mills, ‘Dark Ontologies: Blacks, Jews and White Supremacy’, in Blackness Visible:
Essays on Philosophy and Race (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998), 70-71.
36. My debt to Smith, Civic Ideals, in this formulation is obvious.
37. Ibid., 9.
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Individuals are at least as complex as institutions, and therefore, cannot be made

sense of using Finnemore as guide. For instance through much of his life Du Bois
upheld the distinction between ‘civilised’ and ‘semi-civilised’ or ‘backward’
peoples. Indeed, at the time of the Versailles treaty and in the resolutions of the
pan-African conference, Du Bois had objected to the application of the right of
independence for the German-African possessions until subject people could
govern a modern national state. He envisioned a development effort by educated
‘negroes among the twelve and one-half million natives of German Africa [and
the] twelve million civilized Negroes of the United States’, during a period of rule
by an international commission comprising Western governments and ‘modern
culture—science, commerce, social reform and religious philanthropy’.38 At the
same time, he was deeply involved in a ‘vindicationist’ historical project that
studied the vital contribution of various African cultures to world civilisation and
that refuted ideologies of racial inferiority.39 It is hard, therefore, to argue that
somehow Du Bois had not yet come to universalise his understanding of humanity
and its entailments. In contrast, we might consider the case of E.D. Morel who, for
constructivists, represents a classic humanitarian ‘norm entrepreneur’. Morel
founded in 1906 the Congo Reform Association in a campaign against the brutality
of the Belgian King Leopold II’s African colonisation scheme. This ‘stalwart
defender of African rights’ was, nonetheless, a white supremacist who opposed
race mixing and France’s use of African troops—‘oversexed syphilitic rapists’,
‘primitive African barbarians who terrorized the countryside’—in occupied
Germany after World War I.40
The colour line is the key missing piece in the study of the history of
humanitarian intervention, which resolves the most glaring contradiction in
Finnemore’s account. If, as she believes, intervention follows on identifying with
the victims of natural or human disaster or oppression, an affinity that both
expands to include more diverse peoples over time and deepens as people come to
be seem ‘more’ human-like, then why didn’t white Western states ever intervene,
let alone with increasing frequency, in each other’s humanitarian crises?
Finnemore even implies that had Europeans viewed African Americans or native
Americans more nearly like themselves or recognised this essential humanity more
quickly, intervention in American genocide and apartheid would have been
38. From Du Bois, ‘The Future of Africa—A Platform’ quoted in Adolph Reed Jr., W.E.B. Du Bois
and American Political Thought (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 79.
39. Lee D. Baker, From Savage to Negro: Anthropology and the Construction of Race, 1896-1954
(Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1998), 111-19.
40. See Elazar Barkan, The Retreat of Scientific Racism: Changing Concepts of Race in Britain and
the United States Between the World Wars (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 24; Paul
Rich, Race and Empire in British Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 35-37, 41-
42; and for the positive description of Morel see Victor Kiernan, The Lords of Human Kind: European
Attitudes to Other Cultures in the Imperial Age (London: Serif, 1995), 234. For white supremacist
conceptions of ‘native rights’ in the interwar period, more generally, see Füredi, Silent War, 88-100.
342
likely.41 The colour line instead underscores the productive power of norms of
hierarchy, the collective identity of white states, and the uneven costs and benefits
of exploitation of inferior castes in the world system.
Finnemore’s account has unselfconsciously reproduced the logic of older
theories in the liberal tradition. Louis Hartz in The Founding of New Societies,
insists on the same fundamental link between equality and humanity, and so argues
that it is the ‘the denial of humanity that solves the paradox of illiberal institutions
in enlightenment American culture’.42 The extension of this less sophisticated, but
still recognisable Hartzian model to international society gains us little in the way
of analytical value, while strengthening the critics case that constructivist research,
NGO scholarship, and other forms of neo-interventionist thought are insufficiently
dispassionate in their historical judgements.43 Finnemore’s approach may recognise
(in terms that are problematical in and of themselves) the operation of ‘ethically
reprehensible’ norms, and the clash of contradictory values, but nowhere does she
attempt to provide a coherent account of the world order (‘institutional structures’)
as constituted by intersubjective norms.44
Racism, Realism, Hierarchy, and Empire
Analyses of empire are, by contrast, often explicitly about the imposition of global
institutional structures.45 Finnemore’s account of humanitarian norms and
intervention is a failure in part because it does not consider how empire matters to
the history she wants to tell or how American hegemony today might matter to an
understanding of post-Cold War interventionist norms. The truth is that for decades
now professional Political Science and IR theory have had little to say about
imperialism, and that still a powerful strain in American intellectual culture insists
41. On the one hand, the ‘abolition of slavery and the slave trade...was an essential part of the
universalization of “humanity”...Human beings previously viewed as beyond the edge of humanity—as,
in fact, property—came to be viewed as human, and with that status came certain, albeit minimal,
privileges and protections’. On the other hand, ‘[s]lavery and slaveholding themselves did not provoke
the same reaction as Ottoman abuse of Christians did. This may be because the perpetrators of the
humanitarian violations were “civilized” Christian nations...Another reason was probably that the
targets of these humanitarian violations were black Africans, not “fellow Christians” or “brother
Slavs”...Abuse of Africans did not merit military intervention inside another state’. See Finnemore,
‘Constructing Norms’, 170-72.
42. See Louis Hartz, The Founding of New Societies: Studies in the History of the United States, Latin
America, South Africa, Canada, and Australia (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1964), 49-50.
43. ‘There is a tendency in the recent work to consider only ethically good norms...Some
constructivists are aware of this problem but future work must address it. It will not only protect these
scholars from getting caricatured as peaceniks by theoretical opponents, but it will also direct their
attention to important unexplored issues such as the role of social construction in ethnic conflict and
war’. See Checkel, ‘Constructivist Turn’, 339.
44. See Paul Kowert and Jeffery Legro, ‘Norms, Identities, and their Limits’, in Culture of National
Security, 486-87.
45. ‘[E]mpire turns on their heads the central insights of international relations theorists. Imperialism’s
foundation is not anarchy, but order, albeit an order imposed and strained’. See Michael Doyle, Empires
(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1986), 11.
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that America has never been an imperial power in the conventional understanding
of the term.
Jack Snyder’s Myths of Empire is the rare exception to this convention.46 Myths
explicitly and unequivocally depicts the United States in the 1960s as the centre of
a world-spanning imperium comparable to the Soviet Union, or, France, Germany,
Japan, and Great Britain in the past. The book is equally explicit about why states
take on the burden of empire: usually ‘because it pays’. As Snyder proceeds to fill
in the details, through a theory of how parochial or narrow coalitions of interests
‘hijack the state’, he takes 1980s historicist IR theory down a road travelled before
by generations of critics like Charles Beard in the 1940s, William Appleman
Williams in the 60s and Thomas Ferguson in the 70s. Snyder’s contribution to this
tradition is one of updating the conceptual language used to explain how the state
apparatus can be captured, through ‘coalition-building’ processes, specifically ‘log-
rolling’.
Snyder turns to a domestic politics explanation in order to solve a purported
anomaly in realism.47 The problem is imperial ‘overextension’; realism fails when
it comes to explaining why imperial states frequently undertake policies that seem
contrary to their fundamental security interests. Expansionist states may pursue
‘irrational’ policies that lead rival powers to form effective counter-balancing
coalitions, or, as in the case of the US in Vietnam, that cost more than they return
in benefits. For Snyder, realism as a theory/doctrine of statecraft predicts/counsels
that states act cautiously, not recklessly. But the rules of realpolitik are often
overridden because expansionism is, fundamentally, a domestic interest group-
driven process.
Realist counsel goes unheeded because ideas that are generated in the political
arena to justify expansion take on a life of their own. In the course of building and
sustaining pro-expansionist coalitions, rationales have to be put forward that
disguise the narrow interests inordinately benefiting from expansion and that
persuade others to bear the brunt of the costs. These rationales are what Snyder
calls the ‘myths’ of empire, for instance, ideas about military preparedness, domino
theories, and other ‘strategic concepts that function as ideology’ in the
contemporary era. These myths come to be believed over time by some of those
groups that benefit from them, as well as by politicians and wider segments of the
public, leading states down roads they otherwise might not go.48
Any attempt to apply Snyder’s argument about strategic justifications to the
history of nineteenth and early twentieth century American expansionism must
46. Jack Snyder, Myths of Empire: Domestic Politics and International Ambition (Ithaca, NY: Cornell
University Press, 1991).
47. See Fareed Zakaria, ‘Realism and Domestic Politics’, International Security 17, no. 1 (1992): 177-
98. Zakaria argues, compellingly, that Snyder cannot logically explain ‘failure’ or ‘success’ of an
expansionist project—a ‘systemic outcome’—through an analysis focused primarily on domestic
politics. It is sufficient for our purposes to note that Zakaria concedes that domestic politics matters in
any adequate explanation of where and how states ‘attempt’ to expand.
48. For more on this aspect of Snyder, see Katzenstein, ‘Introduction’, in Culture of National Security,
27.
344
begin with a recognition that public debate turned most centrally on questions of
race: race purity, miscegenation, white right and duty, and the threat posed to
fundamental institutions of state and society. The sources (‘germs’) of these same
institutions were, a founding generation of self-identified political scientists told
us, race-based. To be sure, it is commonly acknowledged that expansionists often
appealed to scientific racism, social Darwinism, and conceptions of race mission or
the white man’s burden to justify imperialist policies.49 Much of the scholarship
that brought this dimension of imperialism to light was clearly critical and broadly
‘anti-imperialist’ in orientation. As a result, there may well have been a tendency
to romanticise the ‘other side’ in the turn-of-the-century domestic debates on
imperialism, as even more recent work seems to highlight.
We now have a better sense of the role that ascriptive norms played in
constituting and empowering those who opposed overseas colonial expansion. In
‘Race Over Empire’, the historian Eric Love develops the most comprehensive
account to date of the racist structures and supremacist norms that animated anti-
imperialist protest, and he argues, frustrated most efforts to build an overseas
empire in the decades before 1898:
Between 1865 and 1900 the United States tried to acquire Alaska, the Midway
Islands, the Danish West Indies, the Dominican Republic, Hawaii, the
Philippines, Guam, Puerto Rico, and Samoa. Until 1898, every attempt to
purchase or annex territories populated by significant numbers of non-whites
failed.50
The causes of American ‘underextension’ in the Gilded Age—the defeat of

parochial interests in case after case of attempted expansionism—are, to adopt
Snyder’s term, found in the ‘strategic white supremacist’ doctrines in which much
of the country was invested.51 Arguments about the unrecuperable character of the
inhabitants of the peripheral zones, and thus of the folly of humanitarian uplift,
were joined by warnings that overseas expansionism threatened the defence of the
country, the devolution of the Anglo-Saxon stock, the breakdown of republican
institutions, and would increase the dangers of race war. Against these appeals to
49. For the foundational texts and arguments of the revisionist historiography school and the turn taken
since in the debate about ideas and interests in the process of expansionism, begin with Michael H.
Hunt, Ideology and U.S. Foreign Policy (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1987). For the
‘contextual’ account of the historiographical disputes of the 1960s, see Novick, Noble Dream, 445-57.
50. Eric Tyrone Lowrey Love, ‘Race Over Empire: Racism and United States Imperialism, 1865-
1900’ (Ph.D. diss., Princeton University, 1997), 7.
51. See Peter Trubowitz, Defining the National Interest: Conflict and Change in American Foreign
Policy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 68-75. Trubowitz underscores the degree to which
white supremacism set the terms for all sides in the ‘great debate’ over the direction of fin de siécle
America’s political economy. The argument about the racism of the agrarian, populist, democratic
party, and sectionalist-based oppositions that comprised the anti-imperialist coalition can be traced back
to Christopher Lasch, ‘The Antiimperialists, the Philippines and the Inequality of Man’, Journal of
Southern History 24, no. 3 (1958): 319-31.
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safeguard the national racial security, expansionists found racial imperialist

rationalisations a liability in the political arena.52
Ulysses S. Grant viewed his plan to annex the Dominican Republic in 1870 as a
means to engineer national reconciliation. Southern hard-liners, dependent on
black labour, would either make concessions to improve the conditions of the
freedmen under the threat that a refuge for them existed in the new Caribbean
possession or else Grant would bring about unity by exiling the freed slaves there.
Decades later, Grant’s son recalled his father’s prophetic vision and the price paid
for the failure to take the island:
[The time is] approaching when the Northern States will face a race problem
more serious than that of Reconstruction days...I think of San Domingo and of
father’s persistent efforts to bring about annexation...every time I ride upon the
Elevated or in the Subway, and see white women stand while negroes occupy
the seats.53
It is ironic that Grant avoided ever arguing for annexation on these grounds in the
public debate.54 The race issue was too easily exploitable by strategic supremacists
in the Nation and other like-minded quarters.
Strategic white supremacism proved a formidable force against those who
imagined America’s transformation from continental expansion to empire-building
in the Caribbean and Pacific. In finally overcoming the opposition in 1898,
annexationists had to all but abandon justifications about the ‘white man’s burden’
and civilising missions. Instead, they shifted to appeals to white solidarity and the
protection of settlers from the Asian menace, in effect, substituting one kind of
‘humanitarian’ norm for another. Others imagined a future course for the islands
following the total deportation of the Mongolian race. Even the question of
Hawaii’s environment emerged, as annexationists marshalled evidence to show
that it was a temperate and not tropic zone, hence a place where whites could in
fact prosper, according to racial science.55
While the cause of Hawaiian annexation, a significant reversal of policy, no
doubt benefited from American victory in Manila and the wave of patriotism that
swept the nation, strategic white supremacism and race fears reemerged in the
1899 debate on the peace treaty with Spain. Expansionists insisted that conquest of
the Philippines would never lead to incorporation of inferior races, and the
exclusionary policies actually pursued over the next decades preserved domestic
white privilege and exported Jim Crow abroad.56 Precisely in this same moment,
52. See Mattew Frye Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the
Alchemy of Race (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 205-13.
53. Jesse Grant, In the Days of My Father General Grant (New York: Harper Brothers, 1925), 138, as
cited in Love, ‘Race Over Empire’, 77.
54. See Love, ‘Race Over Empire’, 77.
55. Ibid.
56. Smith, Civic Ideals, 410-69.
346
the first courses, books, and journals dedicated to the study of world politics were
being produced in the US, and the foundational problems of empire, race war,
colonial administration and race development, strategic white supremacism and
Anglo-Saxon identity would occupy our intellectual forebears for decades to
come.57
Spreading the American Dream: ‘Separate and Unequal’
The histories of racist institution-building in America’s late colonies and

dependencies are still mostly unknown and unwritten.58 It is indeed hard to imagine
a field of knowledge more powerfully shaped by the ‘norm against noticing’ of the
Cold War era than the study (or better, non-study) of the institutions of the
‘elusive, disappearing American empire’.59 As I have already suggested,
professional Political Science and IR in the US are, in effect, two such institutions;
their past is subject to a ‘certain wilful forgetting’, such that Doyle can write that
‘[e]mpire and imperialism are indeed not “words” for scholars in these disciplinary
traditions’.60 In this section, however, the focus is on institutions that neo-
historicist IR scholars might more readily recognise as part of an imperial project,
‘on-the-ground’, were they willing to look.
At the turn of the century, it was commonly assumed that ‘the color line would
be drawn’ as Americans conquered and annexed the Philippines. A young idealist,
James LeRoy, the first military governor of the occupation, nonetheless could
imagine the new empire moving in a more tolerant, cosmopolitan direction.
Americans’ ‘race prejudice’ was, he claimed, a waning, residual provincialism that
‘must disappear’ with increasing responsibility.61 But he was wrong about racism
and empire. In the case of Panama, the US War Department oversaw the creation
and consolidation of a Jim Crow colony in the Canal Zone between 1904-1914,
which was then preserved intact, even while desegregation became an official
57. Robert Vitalis, ‘How American International Relations Became White’, forthcoming; Brian
Schmidt, The Political Discourse of Anarchy: A Disciplinary History of International Relations (New
York: State University of New York Press, 1998), 72; and N.G. Franklin, ‘Knowledge for Empire:
Academics and Universities in the Service of Imperialism’, in On Cultural Ground: Essays in
International History, ed. Robert David Johnson (Chicago: Imprint Publications, 1994), 123-46.
58. See Charles Lilley and Michael Hunt, ‘On Social History, the State, and Foreign Relations’,
Diplomatic History 11, no. 3 (1987): 243-50; Edward Crapol, ‘Coming to Terms with Empire: The
Historiography of Late-Nineteenth Century American Foreign Relations’, Diplomatic History 16, no. 4
(1992): 573-97; Robert Vitalis, ‘Crossing Exceptionalism’s Frontiers to Discover America’s Kingdom’,
Arab Studies Journal 6, no. 1 (1998): 10-31; Paul Kramer, ‘The Pragmatic Empire: U.S. Anthropology
and Colonial Politics in the Occupied Philippines, 1898-1916’, (Ph.D. diss., Princeton University, June
1998), 369-85.
59. Kramer, ‘Pragmatic Empire’, 370.
60. See Doyle, Empires, 11. For a broader view of where empire and world politics are being studied,
and an argument about the ‘reciprocal interanimations of US cultures and US imperialism’, see Donald
E. Pease, ‘New Perspectives on U.S. Culture and Imperialism’, in Cultures of United States
Imperialism, eds. Amy Kaplan and Donald E. Pease (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993), 23.
61. See James LeRoy, ‘Race Prejudice in the Philippines’, Atlantic Monthly 56 (July 1902): 100. My
discussion of LeRoy draws on Kramer, ‘Pragmatic Empire’, 151-55.
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policy of the military. Decades later, on the Persian Gulf coast in eastern Saudi
Arabia, US oil firms transformed the American-founded settlement of Dhahran
into the world’s largest overseas Jim Crow enclave after World War II.
The Happiest Body of Tropical Whites in the World
In Panama Canal the historian Walter LeFeber argues that the breakaway
Colombian province of Panama, although ‘legally sovereign and independent’, was
‘in reality...a United States colony’.62 It is this colonial relationship that explains
the conflicting perspectives, not least the supremacist currents of the American
right, on the infamous canal treaty debates of the 1970s. Formally, Panama was a
protectorate by treaty, having ceded to the US control of the new state’s finances,
communications, and foreign policy. Precedents for the exercise of this type of
imperial power over Panama dated back to the 1850s. There were thirteen US
military interventions in this period, including support in the conspiracy to take
Panama away from ‘those contemptible little creatures’ as Roosevelt described the
Colombians. The new, expanded treaty rights negotiated in 1903 were interpreted
expansively by Roosevelt and successive US administrations to include the right to
control electoral outcomes, occupy the country (1918-1920), preserve American
economic privilege, and govern the Canal Zone ‘as if it were the sovereign of the
territory’.63 Even Raymond Leslie Buell, by then the country’s leading specialist in
problems of colonialism, could compare the evolution of British imperialism in
Egypt in the 1920s to American domination over Panama.64
Nothing, however, in the British experience in Suez approached the American
routine claims, in the form of Supreme Court decisions and various legislative acts
through the 1920s, that the Panama Canal Zone was legally US territory. Decades
later it was still possible to claim that the Zone ‘is ours and we intend to keep it’, as
Ronald Reagan insisted during the campaign for the Republican nomination in
1976, ‘just the same as Alaska...Texas...and the states that were carved out of the
Louisiana Purchase’.65 The differences in the US and British cases extended to the
institutional arrangements inside the two zones. The Suez Canal Company was a
private concession backed originally by French capital, in existence before Britain
occupied Egypt in 1882. Ferdinand De Lessups, who excavated the Suez Canal,
organised a new French consortium for Panama, but the half dug canal was
abandoned in 1889. The completion of the canal was undertaken by the US state,
acting through an independent Isthmian Canal Commission (ICC), at the head of
which stood Roosevelt’s appointee Colonel George W. Goethals, of the Army
62. Walter LaFeber, The Panama Canal: The Crisis in Historical Perspective, (New York: Oxford
63. As stated in Article III of Hay-Bunau Varilla Convention, see LaFeber, Panama Canal, 29-39, 42-
46, 52-57, 66-79. See also Michael L. Conniff, Panama and the United States: The Forced Alliance
(Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1992), 19-40, 63-83.
64. Raymond Leslie Buell, ‘Panama and the United States’ as cited in LaFeber, Panama Canal, 68.
65. Reagan’s comments are cited in LaFeber, Panama Canal, 190.
348
Corp of Engineers. The ICC operated the canal. Governors appointed by

Washington from the Army engineers reigned unchallenged inside the Zone and
vied with Panamanian political forces for control of the wider isthmus. The Zone
police force and US military troops from a string of bases had the monopoly of
coercive power inside the new micro-state, operating alongside the Zone’s separate
judicial system. Panama itself was demilitarised. The social historian William
Conniff describes this system of rule as a ‘military-civilian hybrid’ under the
authority of the US Secretary of War.66
Two factors about the political economy of the Zone stand out above all others.
The first is that the American government owned all the vast assets of the micro-
state: the railroad, hotels, housing, warehouses, office buildings, restaurants,
commissaries, bowling alleys, gas stations, movie theatres, parks, and so on. Big
business operated outside the Zone in Panama, much as in other colonial and semi-
colonial dependencies, in supplying power, running tramways, in banking, export
agriculture, and land development, and some ‘zonians’ also began to invest in
business in Panama City. It is striking that virtually all extant accounts underscore
the ‘socialist’, ‘utopian’, or ‘paternalist’ features of life in the Canal Zone proper.67
The paternalism is only one of the reasons for the upbeat conclusion of a
Rockefeller Foundation-funded project to study ‘tropical acclimatisation’ of
different races: ‘There is every reason why the Americans at Panama should be the
happiest body of tropical whites in the world’.68
Contemporary and retrospective accounts alike describe the society of the Canal
Zone as a rigid caste system, in essence, Jim Crow under Federal auspices. Work
in the Zone was organised around a two-tier system of wages and benefits, which
divided white Americans from the vast pool of West Indian migrants imported
from Barbados, Jamaica, Martinique, and elsewhere to build the canal.69 Workers
were assigned to different gold (US coin) and silver (Panamanian peso) rolls. The
payroll became the means, according to a member of the canal commission staff,
‘for the Government to draw the color line—a practice it could not openly attempt
under the Constitution of the United States’.70 There is remarkable documentation
showing the way in which managers reordered relations based on job categories
66. Conniff, Panama and the United States, 71-72, 74-77, 80-81, 84-85. On the dismantling of the
Panamanian army, see William McCain, The United States and the Republic of Panama (Durham, NC:
Duke University Press, 1937), 48-61.
67. McCain, United States, 97-104; Paul Blanshard, Democracy and Empire in the Caribbean (New
York: Macmillan, 1947), 239; John and Mavis Biesanz, The People of Panama (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1955), 61-77; and Herbert and Mary Knapp, Red, White, and Blue Paradise: The
American Canal Zone in Panama (New York: Harcourt, 1984).
68. A. Grenfell Price, ‘White Settlement in the Panama Canal Zone’, Geographical Review 25, no. 1
(1935): 1-11.
69. My discussion in this paragraph depends on the remarkable archival work of Michael L. Conniff,
Black Labor on a White Canal: Panama, 1904-1981 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1985).
See as well Elizabeth McClean Petras, Jamaican Labor Migration: White Capital and Black Labor,
1850-1930 (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1988).
70. William R. Scott, The Americans In Panama (New York: Statler Publishing, 1912), 189. Wilson’s
program to enforce Jim Crow in the District of Columbia was still to come.
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and skill levels to conform to their supremacist visions: moving high-skilled blacks
to the silver rolls, prohibiting transfers from silver to gold rolls, and ultimately
removing virtually all non-whites from managerial and skilled positions. By 1908
the gold roll had become ‘an exclusively white American club’.71 More crucially
still, ‘gold’ and ‘silver’ (with facilities often labelled as such) became the basis for
organising virtually all domains of life inside the Zone: housing, stores, theatres,
the post office, water fountains, schools, toilets, and trains.
American authorities in Panama used migrant or ‘third national’ labour in ways
that other colonial companies had done, and built a progressive world of luxury for
their own nationals. Whites received free housing, sent their children to superior
schools, enjoyed free medical care, paid no taxes, and earned paid vacations to the
US. Blacks were discriminated against and denied most of these benefits: they paid
rent on substandard housing (‘from difficult to appalling’), sent their children to
inferior schools while being taxed to pay for ‘whites’ quality education’.72
As Conniff makes clear, there was nothing inevitable about the reproduction of a
Jim Crow system in Panama.73 A standard civil rights era argument—offered
during the long and protracted effort between the 1950s and 1970s to dismantle the
system of deeply entrenched white privilege—blaming the southerners living in the
colony is not credible, in fact, most of the original American employees were from
the north. The Republican administrations of Roosevelt and Taft, US military
agencies, and labour unions laid consciously and in an organised fashion the
grounds for an ascriptive order in Panama. This project was one more facet of the
‘many sided achievement’ of ‘white settlement’ that was as impressive, in its own
way, as the digging of the canal or the introduction of the celebrated ‘American
methods’ of health and sanitation.74
Black Gold, White Crude 75
The history of US expansion and Britain’s imperial retreat in the Middle East
during World War II makes the question of comparison with America’s empire in
the pre-World War I Caribbean a complicated one. ‘This is not Panama or San
Salvador’, the British minister in Saudi Arabia insisted in one memorable dispatch
to London in 1945.76 The exigencies of the war had obliged Churchill’s
government to accede to American ‘open door’ policies in the region in return for
71. Conniff, Black Labor, 31-34. Conniff found records of canal managers’ attempts at establishing
guidelines for assignments to the rolls, which, since they were based on race, could not be published.
72. LaFeber, Panama Canal, 65. See also Biesanz, People, 77-80.
73. Conniff, Black Labor, 4-5, 38-39.
74. Price, ‘White Settlement’, 1, 11.
75. Full documentation for the arguments made in this section can be found in Robert Vitalis, ‘Aramco
World: Business and Culture on the Arabian Oil Frontier’, in The Modern Worlds of Business and
Industry, ed. Karen Merrill (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 1998), 3-25, and ‘Crossing Exceptionalism’s
Frontiers’.
76. Cited in Wm. Roger Louis, The British Empire in the Middle East 1945-1951: Arab Nationalism,
the United States, and Postwar Imperialism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984), 183.
350
US support, and the administrators of empire, from Cairo to Teheran, were

desperate to insulate and preserve residual political prerogatives. In this context,
the British administration pleaded to Whitehall to resist the surrender to American
power, which Britain’s minister believed was turning the Kingdom into a ‘virtual
protectorate’ of America.77 Nowhere else in the region were illusions of limiting
the US advance shattered so abruptly and thoroughly as in Saudi Arabia.
Similarly, Americans were prone at times to treat the blossoming ‘special
relationship’ with the ruling clan in Saudi Arabia via a set of updated imperial
norms (the ‘good neighbour’ approach) of paying for and expecting loyalty from
clients. So, according to a trusted Roosevelt advisor, the President had said in
private, ‘he could do anything that needed to be done with Ibn Saud with a few
million dollars’.78 Nonetheless, the US state never exercised the same degree of
control over, using Doyle’s term, its Saudi dependency as it had over places like
Panama and the Philippines. Nor had Britain in the years before ‘unification’ of the
kingdom in 1932, where its client Ibn Saud had led a conquest movement from his
homeland in the central province of Najd. The truth is that, prior to the oil era in
the Gulf, there was little that mattered to the world’s declining and ascending
hegemons ‘inside’ what in 1945 was essentially still a loose confederation of tribes
and towns. The war years mark the beginning of intense foreign involvement by
migrant workers, foreign investors, American administrations, and Arab states in
Saudi state-building79. This was also a time, however, when empire was giving
way globally to new forms of international inequality and hierarchy, familiar from
accounts of decolonisation and, in a more pessimistic vein, neo-colonialism.
Yet the more one emphasises change over continuity in the post-war era, the
autonomous role of ideas in the process of decolonisation, or the exceptionalism of
America abroad, the more remarkable becomes the fact that another Jim Crow
enclave emerged inside the eastern oil province after World War II.80 Norms of
separate and unequal rights and privileges governed life in Dhahran and the other
oil settlements. Workers and their supervisors lived in segregated ‘camps’: the
Saudi camp, Italian camp, American camp, etc. Inside the American camp, which
also served as Aramco’s administrative headquarters, dining halls, bathrooms, and
other facilities were designated for the different castes and the residential section
was off limits to Saudis after working hours. These spaces reproduced the order of
luxury for white Americans, squalor for all non-American employees that
77. Ibid.
78. David Niles, one of the president’s advisors on Palestine, in a conversation with Harry Truman as
quoted in Aaron David Miller, Search for Security: Saudi Arabian Oil and American Foreign Policy,
1939-1949 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980), 200.
79. For the political economy undergirding US-British rivalry in the region more generally see Robert
Vitalis, ‘The New Deal in Egypt: The Rise of Anglo-American Commercial Competition in World War
II and the Fall of Neocolonialism’, Diplomatic History 20, no. 2 (1996): 211-40.
80. On decolonisation, see Finnemore, ‘Constructing Norms’, 172-75; David Strang, ‘From
Dependency to Sovereignty: An Event History Analysis of Decolonization’, American Sociological
Review 55 (1990): 846-60; and Neta Crawford, ‘Decolonization as an International Norm: The
Evolution of Practices, Arguments, and Beliefs’, in Emerging Norms, 37-62.
351
Millennium
characterised life in the Canal Zone, and of more direct inspiration, the foreign
operations of US multinationals in Colombia, Venezuela, and elsewhere on the
world oil frontier. Company records show that from the start of the firm’s
expansion drive in 1944, managers had recognised the basic inequities in the
company’s labour regime.81
Managers in Dhahran and the Canal Zone also pursued similar strategies in
preserving the privileged enclave and resisting demands to end segregation, while
conceding ‘peripheral advantages’.82 Every strike organised in the 1940s and 50s in
Dhahran that I have been able to document attacked the Jim Crow system.
Collective action would lead the company nominally to commit to some specific
and small improvement in the wages and living conditions of the non-US
employees, for example, floors for the reed huts in Saudi camp, latrines for the
Italians, and so on, as the California-style bungalows, school, pool, oleander
hedges, dining halls, bowling alley, golf course, ball park, cinema, and other
landmarks rapidly took shape inside the American camp. At the time of these
events, the firm’s agents argued that it was the bottom line that drove the glacial
pace of change, and that Saudis did not want the amenities that Americans needed:
that it was simply ‘better’ if Arabs were kept out of the American camp. Years
later, and of course only in private correspondence, the reality of racism
acknowledged, as ‘the shameful days’ when workmen were called ‘rag heads’ and
‘coolies’, and a ‘Texas herrenvolk atmosphere’ reigned inside American camp.83
The rise of a new Jim Crow enclave in an important post-war US dependency
fits uneasily with the extant accounts of this same moment as the triumph of the
‘American creed’, in Gunner Myrdal’s phrase.84 Many others writers joined their
voices to Myrdal’s in the campaign being waged to reconstruct American identity
during and after the war; from Ruth Benedict, who had turned her antiracist classic,
Race: Science and Politics into pamphlets, a high school text, and finally, a
children’s book, to Wendell Willkie who attacked ‘our imperialisms at home’ in
the final chapter of One World, the account of his wartime tour of Latin America,
Africa, the Middle East, and Asia.85 Hollywood produced a version of its own,
starring Frank Sinatra, The House We Live In. One more of these Myrdalian
projects, by Wallace Stegner, the Pulitzer Prize-winning ‘Western’ writer and
81.‘[W]e are going to be faced, one of these days, with the question of why we furnish the Americans
with better free hosing than we do the Arabs’. See Aramco, Planning Committee, Meeting of January 5,
1944, ‘Government, Public and Employee Relations Problems’, 13, Box 3, Philip C. McConnell Papers,
1937-1963, Hoover Institution Archives, Stanford, CA.
82. Conniff, Black Labor, 6.
83. Aramco, Management Development Seminar, 6 March 1965, Dhahran, Folder 16, Box 5; and
‘Notes by Mulligan’, nd., Folder 57, Box 1, William E Mulligan Papers, Georgetown University
Library, Special Collections Division, Washington, DC.
84. On Gunnar Myrdal, see David Southern, Gunnar Myrdal and Black-White Relations: The Use and
Abuse of An American Dilemma, 1944-1969 (Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press,
1987).
85. Wendel Willkie, One World (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1943). On Ruth Benedict, see
Margaret Caffrey, Ruth Benedict: Stranger in This Land (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1989).
352
conservationist, deserves highlighting. Look magazine paid Stegner to collaborate

in an extended photoessay against intolerance and prejudice, One Nation. Ten
years later, Stegner left the US for Dhahran, hired by Aramco to write the
company’s official history of the pioneering years in Saudi Arabia, Discovery!86
The decade after World War II is a crucial one, certainly, for the challenges to
the reigning supremacist ideologies, the dismantling of Jim Crow, and the ‘break’
in the world racial order, but also for the rise and consolidation of the powerful
‘norm against noticing’.87 Stegner declared the Saudi frontier closed in February
1945 and paid homage to America’s mission:
they were building something new in the history of the world: not an empire
made for plundering by the intruding power, but a modern nation in which
American and Arab could work out fair contracts, produce in partnership, and
profit mutually by their association.88
Nonetheless he knew that a few months later the Arab ‘partners’ would strike
against the miserable terms being offered them. To this day, none of the hundreds
of accounts written in the US since Stegner returned home from Dhahran, has
contested this ‘norm against noticing’.
Conclusion: Normative Canons, Disciplinary Norms
Once, after I presented an account of the Saudi case, a colleague asked: ‘why do
you seem surprised by any of this, what did you expect?’ This question tells us
something about how the Cold War ‘norm against noticing’, the ‘graceful and
generous liberal gesture’ proceeds, what it presumes. Race is already known, banal
and commonplace, not worth noticing. Race is ‘really’ something else. Race is a
‘language that most would today find offensive and inappropriate’. This last
statement sums up how the best history we have to date of the discipline of IR,
Political Discourse of Anarchy, by Brian Schmidt, deals with the most significant
force in American politics and culture. Schmidt dismisses in a single sentence in a
self-styled discursive history what was known at the time to be basic to
understanding world politics, the ‘conflict of color’.89
More recently, a colleague politely pressed me to name a single work by the
towering intellect of the twentieth century that was significant for any aspect of IR.
86. See Wallace Stegner, Discovery! The Search for Arabian Oil (Beirut: Middle East Export Press,
1971), 173.
87. The phrase `break in the world racial order’ is the term sociologists Howard Winant and Gay
Seidman use to describe the postwar period in an unpublished book prospectus [n.d.], which they
allowed me to see.
88. Stegner, Discovery!, 173.
89. See Raymond Leslie Buell, International Relations, rev. ed. (New York: Henry Holt, 1929).
Schmidt and all other historians of IR have so far managed to avoid discussing what was the most
important US textbook of the key decade of the 1920s, which opens with the classic trope of the
discipline, a man on the moon looking down upon an earth divided ‘into different hues’.
353
Millennium
This form of question is a well known reflex that is triggered when canons of
seemingly timeless truths come under interrogation. But the truth is that ‘African
Roots of War’, Du Bois’ bold attempt to theorise on imperialism and global
conflict, which his biographer Levering Lewis calls ‘one of the analytical triumphs
of the early twentieth century’, has never been anthologised or discussed in any IR
theory text in the US. 90 While ‘African Roots’ was celebrated then, and Du Bois
lectured widely to black and white audiences at home and abroad on the topic, we
are much more likely now to reference white writers—E.D. Morel’s Africa and the
Peace of Europe, and especially, Lenin’s Imperialism: The Highest Stage of
Capitalism—when creating our genealogies and canons of anti-imperialism and
‘radical’ theory traditions in world politics.
Lord Zimmern, in contrast to Du Bois, is almost always included in one story IR
tells about World War I and its putative impact on the emerging discipline in Great
Britain and the US.91 But the transcripts of Lord Zimmern’s deeply rooted,
extended, and quite serious conversations with his many colleagues about race as a
fundamental part of world order, ‘the most urgent problem of our time’, inevitably
go unreported, and so the questions they raise for Zimmern’s successors remain
unresolved.
The first post-war generation of émigré theorists was equally successful in myth-
making of its own. They created a world where realist thought in its classic
geopolitical mode is a coherent and continuous tradition across space and time.
Today’s national security debates and self-serving ‘strategic justifications’ are
represented as the close echoes of earlier debates inside imperial states and
societies. At key moments, the promotion of civilisation, greatness, and modernity
(or, now, democracy and market economies), the preservation of a hegemon’s
credibility, and other expansionist credos trump the arguments of those who really
understand the true strategic or security value inhering in one course over that of
another. Old metaphors are compared with new ones, for instance, a row of falling
dominoes, a barrel contaminated by one rotten apple, and the like.92
90. David Levering Lewis, W.E.B. Du Bois–Biography of a Race, 1868-1919 (New York: Henry Holt,
1993), 503-4. In a similar way, Barrington Moore Jr. could ignore Du Bois study of reconstruction
when writing Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy, although it is now recognised as a
fundamental influence on the historiographical revolution in the field since the 1970s. I am grateful to
Howard Winant for the point about Moore. Winant is one of the handful of theorists today who take Du
Bois as a starting point for analysing contemporary problems of world order. See most recently his
‘Racial Dualism at Century’s End’, in The House That Race Built: Black Americans, U.S. Terrains, ed.
Wahneema Lubiano (New York: Pantheon, 1997), 87-115, ‘Constructing and Resisting the New World
(Racial) Order’, in Double Exposure: Poverty and Race in America, ed. Chester Hartman (Armonk:
M.E. Sharpe, 1997) and ‘Behind Blue Eyes: Whiteness and Contemporary US Racial Politics’, New Left
Review 225 (1997): 73-88.
91. Brian Porter, ed., The Abyerystwyth Papers: International Politics 1919-69 (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1972); Hoffmann, ‘An American Social Science’; William Olson and A.J.R. Groom
International Relations Then and Now: Origins and Trends in Interpretation (London: Harper Collins,
1991); and Schmidt, Political Discourse of Anarchy.
92. See Robert Jervis and Jack Snyder, eds., Dominoes and Bandwagons: Strategic Beliefs and Great
Power Competition in the Eurasian Rimland (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991).
354
Representatives of the American geopolitics tradition, such as Ellsworth

Huntington and Alfred Thayer Mahan, can be summoned and selectively quoted
without ever acknowledging their concern with the world racial balance of power
that launched the quest for a whitewater Navy as defence against the teeming
Asian multitudes who threatened from land and sea.93 It is in the forgotten, yet vast
literature and the terms of the ongoing public debate on ‘race war’ that we can
trace the roots of what is later recast as an American realist tradition in IR theory.
We have to acknowledge, nonetheless, that the collectivity that identifies itself as
‘the field of International Relations’ in the US is tightly, organically bound to a
particular place, history, and social formation.94 This inescapable fact, which
applies equally across ‘schools’ of thought and methodological ‘approaches’, goes
far to explain why IR today has little to say about racism as an international
institution or white supremacy as the identity of the American state that the field’s
founders embraced and elaborated. Certainly, this problematique would provide a
better explanation than one that would simply erase racism from the historical
record else deny its importance. It would place the post-Holocaust, post-World
War II invention of realism as a tradition that argues against the explanatory
significance of ideas (and morality) in world politics in a new and disturbing light.
Critical alternatives need to be elaborated in opposition to the ‘norm against
noticing’ and to the wider so-called ‘realist’ strains in American life (defined
against hopelessly utopian visions about ‘ending war’ or ‘transcending capitalism’)
that, without a hint of irony, insist that a ‘colour blind’ society is now within easy
reach.95 Such are the terms today in which privilege is defended and hierarchy
reconstituted. The embeddedness of writers and readers in a particular cultural
formation is inescapable. But so too is the work of ‘clearing intellectual and moral
space’ in this particular part of the increasingly globalised academy:
Racial constructs are being forced to reveal their struts and bolts, their
technology and their carapace, so that political action, legal and social thought,
and cultural production can be generated sans racist cant, explicit or in
disguise.96
Political Science, like other institutions, is constituted and regulated by a set of

norms and armoured by a repertoire of material awards and sanctions that can
affect the likelihood that members of the profession themselves will pursue the
work that Toni Morrison writes about in ‘Home’.97 My interest in writing on
93. Füredi, Silent War, 30-31.

94. ‘The notion that political science in the United States might be distinctly American receives
virtually no consideration’ in professional discourse. See Oren, Our Enemies and US, 3.
95. Derrick Bell, Faces at the Bottom of the Well: The Permanence of Racism (New York: Basic
Books, 1992).
96. Morrison, ‘Home’ in House That Race Built, 11.
97. For an account of how American political science manages unacceptable modes of thought and
action see Timothy W. Luke, ‘The Discipline as Disciplinary Normalization: Networks of Research’, in
355
Millennium
racism is the chance that it offers to imagine what can be done to make it less easy
and less safe for others to practice the politics of its denial.
A theory associated most prominently with Toni Morrison’s work on the
profound and complex effects of, America’s past ‘racial dictatorship’ enables a
critical interpretation of ‘American International Relations’ in both meanings of
this term.98 This article aspires to illuminate deep currents of organised American
thought and practice unknown to some and ignored, or, else denied by others.
Although many citations are outside what constitutes ‘the literature’ and its
margins for most IR scholars, the range should suffice to establish the work’s
rootedness in, as Checkel might put it, the ‘theoretical discourse’. Its point is,
nonetheless, to contribute to a truer account of the past and to make it harder for
the contemporary ‘norm against noticing’ to work as silently and efficiently in the
future. As for the question that a keen disciplinarian tends to ask about work such
as this: ‘what do we do with it’?99 Well, surely, the answer depends on an act of
conscience on the reader’s part.
Robert Vitalis is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of

Pennsylvania
Beyond Boundaries? Disciplines, Paradigms, and Theoretical Integration in International Studies , eds.
Rudra Sil and Eileen Doherty (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, in press).
98. Omi and Winant, Racial Formation, chap. 4; see as well, Smith, Civic Ideals, chap. 12 and
epilogue.
99. Checkel, ‘Constructivist Turn’, 348.
356

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The Graceful and Generous Liberal

Gesture: Making Racism Invisible in

What happened to race?3

and bolts’ of racism as an international institution. I draw attention to three kinds

In the Underground of our Unwritten History8

thought, however, would quickly take the naïve defender of an American-invented

‘Race’: An American Constructivists’ Dilemma

24. Peter J. Katzenstein, ‘Introduction’, in Cultures of National Security, 5.

Humanitarian Norms and Racism

‘Humanitarian’ norms, which proscribe appropriate actions (charity, protection,

of ascriptive hierarchy. Humanitarian action historically always involved

The whole phenomenon of intervention up to the period of the First World

Finnemore has nonetheless managed to turn this logic of humanitarianism on its

31. Marc Trachtenberg, ‘Intervention in Historical Perspective’, in Emerging Norms of Justified

ontology of the world of slavery, colonialism, and segregation, where concrete

Individuals are at least as complex as institutions, and therefore, cannot be made

Racism, Realism, Hierarchy, and Empire

The causes of American ‘underextension’ in the Gilded Age—the defeat of

safeguard the national racial security, expansionists found racial imperialist

Spreading the American Dream: ‘Separate and Unequal’

The histories of racist institution-building in America’s late colonies and

The Happiest Body of Tropical Whites in the World

Corp of Engineers. The ICC operated the canal. Governors appointed by

Black Gold, White Crude 75

US support, and the administrators of empire, from Cairo to Teheran, were

conservationist, deserves highlighting. Look magazine paid Stegner to collaborate

Conclusion: Normative Canons, Disciplinary Norms

Representatives of the American geopolitics tradition, such as Ellsworth

Political Science, like other institutions, is constituted and regulated by a set of

93. Füredi, Silent War, 30-31.

Robert Vitalis is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of

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