The book is a “counter-history” of international relations, as Professor Vitalis describes it. It departs from the idea of US “exceptionalism” and examines two basic assumptions that are concurrent in the discipline of American international relations. First, there is the publicly stated idea that the United States (US) was never an empire, and thus, American international relations as a discipline need not be concerned with imperialism. Second, a more implicit claim, made truer by its absence, is that African Americans had no role to play in international relations. The book challenges both these notions and uncovers how they are actually linked: the discipline was born in the crucible of imperialism, which in turn was accompanied by inherent racism. In the early twentieth century, racism for most white scholars meant just the “truth”, backed by “scientifically” proven facts of the inferiority and superiority of different peoples, and the management of people according to these differences could lead to a more peaceful or a more violent world. 

Contrary to this, Professor Vitalis’s book finds that African American scholars were theorising a criticism of that tradition. In 1916, one scholar went as far as to call “race” a “pseudo-science” and, more significantly, recognised and suggested that it was the excuse for permitting imperialism to take place, which brings to the fore the legitimisation of strategies of domination and dependency, an issue still largely ignored in international relations. Thus, contrary to the assumption that African Americans were not part of the birth of international relations, the book finds that they were rather central to it.

The research also finds evidence to puncture the myth of the proposed “origin” of American international relations, thought to date back to 1922 with the foundation of the think-tank called Council on Foreign Relations and its flagship journal, Foreign Affairs. Professor Vitalis pushes back the intellectual origin of the discipline at least by about a decade to 1911 when the Journal of Race Development was founded in Clark University, Massachusetts, which he considers to be the first journal of international relations – but is currently not recognised as such. It may sound like a eugenics journal from today’s perspective, and while there were some theorists who did discuss “race development” as a biological and scientific idea, more broadly, the term was an umbrella to discuss a wide spectrum of relations of domination and dependency. There were debates, for instance, on whether the “inferior races” could be uplifted by means such as education towards a greater socio-economic standing in order to minimise conflict, or if there would have to be continued domination and subjugation. Professor Vitalis came to the realisation that basically the term “international relations”, at that time and seen from the perspective of these theorists, really meant “race relations”. The journal changed its name to Journal of International Relations, was bought by the Council on Foreign Relations, and eventually became Foreign Affairs.

Another discovery Professor Vitalis makes during this research is that one of the editors of the journal was William Edward Burghardt Du Bois (W.E.B.) Du Bois, an American sociologist and historian and a civil rights activist who advocated for the rights of African Americans. Du Bois is usually not seen as a key figure in international relations, which prompted Professor Vitalis to look deeper in the archives and personal papers of scholars and professors of the time in order to solve the puzzle. This led him to a whole range of scholars and theorists who thought about imperialism, race and world politics from a different perspective than what was the trend. 

This points towards significant implications for the outcomes of the book, whose primary audience comprises contemporary historians and international relations scholars. Even today, the latter in the US are quite narrowly defined, perhaps best summarised as aspiring to be “little economists” whose claim to being “scientific” comes from the use of methodological technique (mostly quantitative analysis). This arguably allows a claim for science to be able to locate “laws” that apply across time and space, irrespective of social conditions and, more importantly, hierarchies such as race. The most important message of the book is to think about stepping back and taking a moment to recognise the diverse influences and tensions that have gone into the making of the discipline, including what remained invisible, if not absent. Professor Vitalis reveals that international relations scholars frequently criticise his book for not having a “hypothesis” to either verify or falsify. This is quite telling about the difference between scholars who stop and think about what they do as scholars, and the adherents of the discipline who are likely to harbour fantasies such as a “scientific approach” to world politics that policymakers will take seriously as an objective doctrine. 

Another important implication is that while disciplines such as history or comparative literature have had to be rethought in American universities, especially after African Americans began asking for changes in curricula so that they would reflect the participation of the community in the intellectual histories of these disciplines, international relations has remained resistant. This is partly founded upon the claim that there were no black people in this discipline, which the book shows to be incorrect. Moreover, the raging question about relations of supremacy and domination is whitewashed and ignored in the discipline, which instead understands the world as “anarchic”, and politics as occurring under conditions of anarchy, where the strong dominate the weak.

All this led to the realisation for Professor Vitalis that what constitutes world politics for many international relation scholars actually pertains to a rather small part of the world, usually focussing on a few powerful states and neglecting weak powers as they do not matter. This approach has repeatedly ignored the hierarchies of imperial domination, which has been inherent in conceptualising world politics. International relations in the US remains highly conservative, and has resisted efforts to reform the discipline from within. 

Another important conclusion, and a direction for further research, is to take into view the fact that racism, which had become largely less visible, is out in the open in today’s time. This is evident in the political rhetoric of immigration, which requires us to reconsider the conditions that enable the return of these ideas. In the discipline itself, where are such views coming from and, even more starkly, still being upheld? A narrow view of the discipline tends to blind the crevices in which such “militant conservatism”, often coupled with ideas of White Supremacy, can thrive. Since the 1960s, militant conservatism had arguably become invisible because of its relative exclusion from top liberal arts universities and professional associations. So, where did these ideas continue to develop and propagate? The answer may well lie in looking into certain parallel institutions like universities or think-tanks where ultraconservative and racially founded ideas are maintained and disseminated. 

Full citation of Professor Vitalis’s book:
Vitalis, Robert. White World Order, Black Power Politics: The Birth of American International Relations. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2015.

Read also a conversation between Robert Vitalis and Mohammad-Mahmoud Ould Mohamedou.

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By Aditya Kiran Kakati, doctor in International History and Anthropology and Sociology; edited by Nathalie Tanner, Research Office.
Banner picture: excerpt from an image by Everett Historical/Shutterstock.com.