Introduction: realism in the postwar shift to subliminal Eurocentrism

If international theory had been divided between pro-imperialism and anti-imperialism as a function of varying scientific racist and ‘manifest’ Eurocentric metanarratives up to WWII, the post-1945 era exhibited, at least until 1989, a significant epistemic shift. Conventional IR historiographers might assume that if there was any racism or Eurocentrism within international theory in the past then this would have been exorcized, if not after 1919 then certainly after 1945. And because Eurocentric institutionalism and racism are usually conflated then the post-1945 era of international theory is thought to be free of subjective Western bias.

In the United States in particular, IR theory was allegedly founded on positivist principles, one of which is the assumption of value-neutrality. This, of course, is most closely associated with the rise of ‘scientific’ political realism in its ‘classical’ form (though equally it found its voice in the behavioural revolution in the 1950s and 1960s). As one of realism’s key theorists argued, theory ‘must be judged not by some preconceived abstract principle or concept unrelated to reality, but by its [scientific] purpose: to bring order and meaning to a mass of phenomena which without it would remain disconnected and unintelligible’ (Morgenthau 1948/1967: 3). And it was upon this basis that the classical realists launched their sustained attack on ‘un-scientific’ interwar ‘idealism’. However, this chapter argues that while IR theory did indeed take on a new guise after 1945 by discarding scientific racism, it nevertheless failed to escape the generic political bias of Western-centrism that had underpinned pre-1945 international theory. This ‘Westphilian’ or West-centric thinking took the form of what I call subliminal Eurocentric institutionalism. How then does realist subliminal Eurocentrism differ to that of its explicit or conscious Eurocentric predecessor?