Race in International Relations

Abstract

KE sex in Victorian England, it has been said, race is a taboo subject in contemporary polite society. Conflicts or attitudes that to the simpleminded might appear to be self-evidently racial are explained away as class-based, or as difficulties attending immigration, or as responses to special local circumstances. Certainly, race relations are not an area in which political reputations are easily made, and outspokenness on the subject seems to be the preserve of those who have little to lose, their having either departed the scene or not yet arrived at it. Yet beneath this wish to talk about something else, and perhaps in part explaining it, lurk the largest of claims for the factor of race in politics, and the direst of forebodings about the future of race relations. As early as 1903 W. E. B. Du Bois was already expressing the problem of the twentieth century as the problem of 'the colour-line', and this has been a theme of pan-African congresses to the present day. A recent British prime minister, not noted for his proneness to exaggerate, is reported as having said 'I believe the greatest danger ahead of us is that the world might be divided on racial lines. I see no danger, not even the nuclear bomb, which could be so catastrophic as that." These instincts of politicians are fortified by academic analysis. John Rex, one of the most prominent writers in Britain on race relations, has gone so far as to predict that 'for the next few centuries the problems which will preoccupy men politically more than any other will be problems which they subjectively define as problems of race'.2 Hugh Tinker, in one of the very few works on race in international politics, concludes that 'Today, transcending everything (including even the nuclear threat) there is the confrontation between the races .3 No doubt the rioting that took place in Britain in the summer of 1981 is taken by writers of this persuasion to be bitter evidence in support of their view of the place of race in society. This paper is confined to an assessment of the place of race in international relations, in so far as it is possible to distinguish, in this regard, domestic from international politics. In any event, it may be argued that it is to the history of international relations, during the imperial