Table Of ContentRacism, Diplomacy, and
International Relations
Unoki addresses the significance of racism in international relations by focusing
on its conception as a doctrine and its interrelationship with imperialism, its
doctrinal role in the development of the discipline of International Relations
(IR), and various episodes from Western and Asian history in which racism had
affected state behavior and the practice of diplomacy.
The creation of empires that oppressed indigenous peoples, the two World
Wars and the campaigns of ethnic “cleansing” and genocide that accompanied
these wars and other conflicts, and international movements calling for the
elimination of racial discrimination, attest to the impact racial prejudice,
or racism, has had on international relations. Despite this history, racism’s
relevance is seldom mentioned in IR courses offered in universities or IR
textbooks. Instead, IR scholars have often explained the behavior of states using
the framework of theories that highlight variables and themes such as power,
fear, and the search for security in an anarchic world. Unoki demonstrates that
racism has not only substantially influenced the course of international relations
but that it continues to do so in the 21st century, making it imperative that
policymakers are aware of racism’s deleterious legacy.
A vital resource for students, policymakers, and those who are interested in
building a more tolerant and just world.
Ko Unoki has worked in the electronics and healthcare industries for several
decades and was a Senior Fellow at the 21st Century Public Policy Institute of
the Japan Business Federation (Keidanren). In addition to having a doctorate in
business administration and a master’s degree in business law from Hitotsubashi
University, he received a master’s degree in international relations from the
Fletcher School, Tufts University, and an MBA degree in international
management from Royal Holloway, University of London. He completed
his undergraduate studies at the School of Foreign Service, Georgetown
University. While having an extensive career in international business, he
has written several books on history, business, international relations, and law
including Mergers, Acquisitions, and Global Empires (2012), International Relations
and the Origins of the Pacific War (2016), and Competition Laws, National Interests
and International Relations (2020).
Racism, Diplomacy, and
International Relations
Ko Unoki
Cover image credit: ©Getty Images
First published 2022
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© 2022 Ko Unoki
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without intent to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
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ISBN: 9781032188706 (hbk)
ISBN: 9781032188690 (pbk)
ISBN: 9781003256700 (ebk)
DOI: 10.4324/9781003256700
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Contents
Preface vi
Acknowledgments xxiii
1 Introduction: Definitions of “race” and racism 1
2 The development of racism as a doctrine 19
3 Racism in international relations 46
4 Racism and the discipline of International Relations (IR) 70
5 White supremacy and the rise of Japan 95
6 The segregation and immigration crisis of 1905–1907 124
7 The 1919 Paris Peace Conference racial equality proposal 179
8 Conclusion: Racism and international relations in the
21st century 226
Selected bibliography 251
Index 255
Preface
On April 30, 2019, the Washington D.C.-based newsmagazine Washington
Examiner reported that Kiron Skinner, Policy Planning Director of the United
States (US) State Department, was heading an effort to develop a concept of
US–China relations that was part of an initiative (led by Secretary of State
Mike Pompeo) to create an American strategy on managing US–China rela-
tions. According to Skinner, the magnitude and content of the endeavor were
comparable to “Letter X,” the unsigned article by American diplomat and his-
torian George Kennan published in the international relations magazine Foreign
Affairs in July 1947 that assessed “the sources of Soviet conduct” and outlined
the containment strategy that guided American policy strategists for the dura-
tion of the Cold War.1
Skinner, who received her PhD degree in the academic discipline of
International Relations (IR) and political science from Harvard University and
had taught IR courses at Carnegie-Mellon University,2 gave a preview of the
21st-century post-Cold War edition of “Letter X” at a security forum held in
Washington D.C. According to Skinner, the growing competition with China
was a “fight with a really different civilization and different ideology.” That
is, unlike the Cold War with the Eastern bloc countries led by Russia that
constituted a struggle “within the Western family,” China presented to the
US an experience it never had – competition against another Great Power that
was not “a child of Western philosophy and history” and, furthermore, was
“not Caucasian.”3 Comparing Russia and China, Skinner asserted that the two
rivals were not equivalent as Russia was a mere “global survivor” that paled
in comparison to China.4 In another interview with Anne Marie Slaughter, a
former head of policy planning in the State Department from 2009 to 2011 and
a political scientist, Skinner stated that the US saw China as “a more funda-
mental long-term threat” than Russia in the respect that “in China, we have an
economic competitor, we have an ideological competitor, one that really does
seek a global reach that many of us didn’t expect a couple of decades ago.”5
The preview statements from Skinner’s 21st-century version of “Letter X”
that unequivocally designated China as a “long-term threat” to the US was in
retrospect not surprising, given the growing concern the US has held since the
early 2000s toward what appeared to Americans as China’s growing attempt to
Preface vii
dominate or reshape the US-led international order and its increasing assertions
over what it perceived to be its national interests in East Asia and the Pacific.
Indeed, in its Summary of the 2018 Defense Strategy of the United States of America,
the US Department of Defense (DoD) called China (along with Russia) a
“revisionist power” seeking to undermine the “resilient but weakening” post-
World War II (WWII) international order with the intent of displacing the US
and achieving global leadership in the future.6 Echoing Skinner’s comment of
the US having to meet the challenge from a state with a “really different civi-
lization and different ideology,” the head of the DoD, Defense Secretary Jim
Mathis, contended that China is seeking to establish a “world consistent with”
its “authoritarian model.”7
In making the claim that the US had never competed in the past with
another Great Power that was not “a child of Western philosophy and his-
tory” and furthermore was “not Caucasian,” Skinner somehow overlooked
and somewhat incredibly – given her credentials as a Harvard educated IR
scholar – the experience the US has had fighting a merciless war against Japan
over the hegemony of China and East Asia in the Pacific theatre of WWII.
Japan was one of the so-called pre-WWII Great Powers that had at one point
one of the three largest navies in the world, and before the outbreak of the
Pacific War (1941~1945) it was a major commercial and military rival of
the US with extensive colonial interests on the Asian mainland and in the
western Pacific. As with China which Skinner had mentioned, Japan too was
arguably not “a child of Western philosophy and history” and certainly not
“Caucasian.”
Be that as it may, the suggestion made by Skinner in the context of a policy
discourse that the rise of China represented a unique challenge because the
Chinese do not belong to the same race of “Caucasians” as do most of the people
of the West, or that they do not share Western cultural and historical traditions,
brings to mind a report commissioned by the US Central Intelligence Agency
(CIA) more than two decades earlier and compiled by scholars participating
at a closed academic seminar held at the Rochester Institute of Technology.
According to the report titled Japan 2000, which was released in June 1991, the
Japanese were “creatures of an ageless, amoral, manipulative and controlling
culture” who were not to be emulated.8 Japan’s role in the world economy
posed a grave threat to the West “because of the absence of any absolutes or
moral imperatives in the Japanese paradigm,” which were unlike the “Western
paradigm” that was anchored on the Judaic-Christian principles of ethics.9 The
contributors of the report also labeled the Japanese “racist” since the latter were
alleged to discriminate against or be suspicious of foreigners.10 And in an allu-
sion to a possible clash of civilizations, the report warned that “the Japanese
paradigm” was likely to eclipse “the Western paradigm” and expressed par-
ticular concern about the future of Western values. “The values that shape the
Japanese paradigm are not, by definition, designed to benefit the rest of the
world,” the report stated. “Japan is an economic superpower,” and unless there
was some “dramatic unified reassertion of Western intent,” coupled “with an
viii Preface
equally dramatic and focused economic resurgence,” world dominance by the
Japanese appeared to be “inescapable and incontrovertible.”11
What is a notable aspect of the report is that while at the time it was writ-
ten Japan had (and continues to have as of this writing) a stable military alli-
ance with the US guided by the Treaty of Mutual Cooperation and Security
Between Japan and the United States of America (a.k.a. Japan–US Security
Treaty), there were nevertheless fears within the US stemming from the late
1980s that the continuing rise of the Japanese economy would be a threat
to US national interests or that Japan would replace the US as the leader of
the international order as the Japan 2000 report had warned. That is, in a
tone similar to that expressed toward China by Skinner, the Japan 2000 report
described Japan more as an implacable foe set to take over the US-led world
order rather than simply a formidable economic competitor, let alone a trust-
worthy ally or friend. And it is difficult not to notice the common thread or
to feel a sensation of déjà vu coming from the Japan 2000 report and Skinner’s
intended comments for the “Letter X” regarding China. In both Skinner’s take
on China and the Japan 2000 report, the differences in the cultural traditions
held by the ascending two Asian and non-Caucasian nations of China and
Japan with those of the Judaic-Christian West are emphasized and highlighted
as threats to the supremacy of the West and a potential source for a possible
clash over who will command the international order.
Skinner’s views on China also remind us of the “clash of civilizations” the-
sis espoused in the 1990s by one of Skinner’s Harvard forebears, the political
scientist and scholar Samuel Huntington. In his book The Clash of Civilizations
and the Remaking of World Order published in 1996, Huntington argued that
after the collapse of the Soviet Union, “the most important distinctions among
people” are not going to be ideological, political, or economic. Rather, they
are going to be cultural, with “peoples and nations … attempting to answer the
most basic questions” including “who are we?” and leading them to “define
themselves in terms of ancestry, religion, language, history, values, customs,
and institutions.”12 In his tome, Huntington weaved a historical narrative on
civilizations that in the past clashed and produced wars of religion and cul-
turally fueled wars. With the end of the Cold War and the demise of the
Communist regimes in the Eastern Bloc, Huntington viewed the new threat to
Western civilization as coming from the East. As he put it, for almost 50 years
the Iron Curtain established by the Soviet Union as a political, ideological, and
military non-physical barrier separating Europe into two blocs was the “central
dividing line” of Europe. With its fall, however, the line has moved several
hundred miles east, making it “now the line separating the peoples of Western
Christianity, on the one hand, from Muslim and Orthodox people on the
other.”13 To Huntington, although the West will remain “the most powerful
civilization” for some time to come, its power relative to other civilizations
is on the decline. “Confucian and Islamic societies” will eventually “attempt
to expand their own economic and military power to resist and to ‘balance’
against the West.” Huntington observes that this process is already underway
Preface ix
and that “power is shifting from the long predominant West to non-Western
civilizations.”14
Huntington did not use the lexicon of race when describing the coming
clash between the West and non-Western civilizations as did Skinner when
she pointed out that the US was facing a competitor, China, whose people
were not “Caucasian.” Yet he asserted that one of the elements that people will
increasingly identify and distinguish themselves from others would be among
lines of “ancestry.” Huntington did not go on to elaborate on the definition
of “ancestry.” Geneticists, however, use the word to describe human diversity
and as a substitute for “race” as it reflects the fact that human variations do
have a connection to the geographical origins of our ancestors such that, with
enough information about a person’s DNA, scientists can make a reasonable
guess about their ancestry.15
Whether Huntington, however, was using the word “ancestry” as a substi-
tute for “race” is not clear. He certainly did make an almost seemingly consci-
entious effort to avoid the word throughout his book including in its index. But
as historian Akira Iriye had noted, a close parallel exists between Huntington
and with whom the IR scholar John M. Hobson labeled as a “racist-realist,”
the US naval officer, historian, and author of the widely read book The Influence
of Sea Power Upon History, 1660–1783 (1890), Alfred Mahan.16 In his essay, A
Twentieth Century Outlook published in the September 1897 issue of Harper’s
Monthly, Mahan asserted that “the East”17 is “rapidly appreciating the material
advantages and the political traditions which have united to confer power upon
the West” and in the process appropriating the West’s modern technology.
For Mahan, this is an alarming development as he sees the East in the position
of being able to challenge the power of the West and that these non-West-
ern countries were “outside of the commonwealth of peoples to which we
[the West] racially belong.”18 This commonwealth had at its foundation com-
mon “spiritual convictions” derived from classical traditions of thought and
Christianity. The East, however, despite its modernization, has not embraced
the spiritual civilization of the West, and instead of becoming Westernized, it
remained alien to the West. In Mahan’s mind, this situation led to an inevitable
clash between East and West over “whether Eastern or Western civilization is
to dominate throughout the earth and to control its future.”19 Mahan warned
that if “the Chinese … [were] organized by the Japanese to overthrow the
Russian Empire and conquer its territory, they might constitute the Yellow
Peril to the world’s freedom.”20 Accordingly, in anticipation that “China …
may burst her barriers eastward as well as westward” toward the Pacific and
the European continent, the US needed an exceptionally robust response that
would mobilize all of its sea power and the use of the strategic defensive poten-
tial of its Hawaiian colony to block a “wave of barbaric invasion” and the
“Yellow Peril” from across the Pacific.21
Not only did Huntington’s arguments of a clash between the Christian West
against the Islamic-Confucianist East have a similarity with those of Mahan’s
predictions of a clash between a Japan–China-led East and the Christian West.
