Making the World Safe for White Democracy: Racialized Liberalism and the Post-War International Order
Open AccessThe dissertation studies the role of race in the formation of the post-war international order. While there is a repository of scholarship on how race affects American politics at home, there is a relative dearth of scholarship on how the same racial ideologies affect American foreign policy. My dissertation shows that the same domestic racial ideologies shaped foreign policy abroad. A cursory look within “the West” in this period – Jim Crow America, European colonial empires, and the White Australia policy – suggest that “the West” only valued White freedoms. I argue that the ideology of racialized liberalism – the belief that only White peoples were deserving and capable of democratic self-governance – characterized the kind of U.S.-led order that emerged after World War II. It caused White democracies to presume that liberal norms were shared by other White democracies, but not non-White democracies. Relying on archival materials and detailed historical analysis, I demonstrate how American commitments to democracies in Western Europe and Australia were naturalized as “sacred obligations” by exhortations to protect White freedoms – even when they were neither strategic nor particularly democratic. By contrast, I show how U.S. commitments to East and Southeast Asian democracies were merely instrumental: they were continually revised to reflect the U.S.’s geostrategic interests over time, including undermining democratic governments.
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