Introduction: racist-imperial conceptions of world politics

While conventional IR historiography assumes that realist international theory emerged initially in its classical form via the works of E. H. Carr and Hans Morgenthau round about the time of World War II, this obscures a range of thinkers writing in the post-1889 era who developed what I shall call racist-realism. In this chapter I shall explore some of the key exponents – notably the geopoliticians, Alfred Mahan and Halford Mackinder – and, albeit indirectly, the German racist-realists, Ludwig Gumplowicz and Gustav Ratzenhofer (via my discussion of Ward, given that his vision of imperialism drew directly from their work). Note that I shall reserve for Chapter 7 the discussion of the other racist-realists who wrote in the pre-1914 era, including Friedrich Ratzel, Rudolf Kjellén, Heinrich von Treitschke and Friedrich von Bernhardi. One of the main themes of my discussion of racist realism is that it was a multivalent approach that exhibited many different facets. In Chapter 7 I shall differentiate the German geopolitikers from Hitler and others according to their different brands of racism that in turn yield various conceptions of imperialism. Here it is noteworthy that Mahan and Mackinder differed not only to the likes of von Treitschke and von Bernhardi, Hitler and others, but also to the American racist-realists such as Theodore Roosevelt (1894/1897, 1905), Whitelaw Reid (1900) and Henry Cabot Lodge (1899). For these latter three thinkers embraced an optimistic white triumphalist sensibility, believing that the manifest destiny of the white race to expand and conquer the globe was at hand. Although Mahan and Mackinder did not express the extreme levels of anxiety associated with the likes of Stoddard, Charles Pearson and Hitler, nevertheless they were gripped by an imaginary discourse of the ‘coming yellow barbarians’.