Introduction
This article advances the debate on race and hierarchy in international politics through a focus on US declinist discourse. It explores the continued salience of racial hierarchies in maintaining a state’s status within the international system and in identifying threats to that position. Specifically, it examines how ‘racial social fields’ can operate in the contemporary international community to assert or elevate an actor’s status.
Invoking race as a status marker to assert social hierarchies in international politics has a long history. In the late-nineteenth century, the idea that ‘Western’ (which effectively meant European and North American) civilisation and the White race were inherently superior was widely accepted and advanced. White skin colour effectively became a status marker. Ideologies such as scientific racism and Social Darwinism served as an ‘objective’ justification for drawing on race to claim superiority, including in international politics.Footnote 1
Since the end of World War II (WWII), openly claiming superior status on the basis of race has arguably become delegitimised and increasingly taboo in the context of decolonisation and the spread of the norm of racial equality.Footnote 2 The ‘standard of civilisation’, which operated to elevate ‘White’ political institutions, laws, and customs to a higher status, has allegedly become ‘colour-blind’. Nowadays, the adoption of liberal democratic governance and market capitalism as markers for development and ‘good’ governance is discursively placed on a normative rather than a racial footing.Footnote 3 The examples of liberal democracies in Asia or Africa are said to be proof that anyone can become ‘civilised’, regardless of skin colour.
This article, however, challenges the assumption that status-seeking on the basis of racial superiority is a thing of the distant past. It does so by examining the so-called ‘Japan Threat’ discourse, which was particularly prominent in the United States (US) in the late-1980s and early-1990s. While Japan (unlike China today) posed no military threat to the US and was a key American ally, its growing economic clout triggered power transition fears, and with it, the loss of American status in international society. I argue that the ‘Japan Threat’ thesis was not only just to do with threat perceptions: it was also a discourse that sought to shore up the US’s position in the global pecking order. Japan was recast as a ‘non-Western’ state with a fundamentally ‘alien’ civilisation. On this basis, it was accused of engaging in immoral trade/economic policies, and was seen as unqualified for and incapable of replacing US global leadership. American (and by implication, European) civilisation, on the other hand, had universal qualities that uniquely qualified the US to maintain its hegemonic position and superior position in the global social hierarchy.
The ‘Japan Threat’ thesis is puzzling for a number of reasons. First, in terms of conventional, material status markers, Japan was not even close to catching up with the US. While it may have become the world’s second largest economy after America (until it conceded that position to China in 2010), in terms of military power Japan was in no position to challenge US dominance. Indeed, Japan was heavily dependent on the American provision of military security. Second, and more importantly, Japan was not only an established liberal democracy but also a key American ally with a human rights record on a par with other ‘Western’ powers. If we are to accept the claim that democracies do not go to war with one another, the chances of another war with Japan were minimal, and nor was Japan about to challenge the post-WWII liberal international order. This poses two pertinent questions. First, if Japan posed a limited security threat in the traditional sense, why was there a highly visible and persistent discourse about an imminent Japanese challenge? Second, why was Japan at the same time framed as an ‘inferior’ state incapable of providing global leadership (and with it, a claim to a status on a par with the US)?
In what follows, I show that the ‘Japan Threat’ thesis can be interpreted as an attempt to secure the US’ status as the hegemon by introducing race as an additional status marker that elevated the US’s position vis-à-vis Japan. This is done by examining prominent scholars and public intellectuals who were the main proponents of the ‘Japan Threat’ during the late-1980s and early-1990s, publishing their viewpoints in highly influential platforms such as The Atlantic, Foreign Affairs, and International Security or by leading publishers such as Simon & Schuster. Elite discourses – particularly in this historical context, when the Internet and social media were still in their infancy – can and did play a role in shaping certain worldviews, or even constructing dominant narratives.Footnote 4
It is important to acknowledge that the ‘Japan Threat’ thesis was one among many other debates concerning the US’ perceived ‘decline’ at the time. Joseph S. Nye’s hugely influential work on ‘soft power’, which argued that the US was far from declining thanks to its abundant soft power, was written in the context of Nye’s own critical stance towards proponents of the ‘Japan Threat’.Footnote 5 While a comparative analysis of the competing arguments in this debate lies beyond the scope of this paper, I do not wish to imply that the ‘Japan Threat’ thesis was the only discourse that ‘mattered’. Nevertheless, the fact that these authors and their works were readily finding outlets for publication reflects the existence of a certain ‘resonance’ within American society during this time, as well as the fact that their arguments were taken seriously.Footnote 6 This article’s focus on these mainstream sources is therefore partly aimed at capturing this intellectual sentiment, while also ensuring that the analysis does not fall into the trap of selectively examining provocative but fringe voices that ultimately lacked the traction to shape the broader discourse.
This article’s focus on the ‘Japan threat’ thesis offers two contributions to the debate. First, it advances our understanding of how race functions as a status marker in contemporary international society, and takes up Freeman, Kim and Lake’s call for a better understanding of ‘how, where and why racial hierarchy exerts its most pernicious effects’.Footnote 7 While recent scholarship in International Relations (IR) has increasingly highlighted that racism persists despite decolonisation,Footnote 8 we still know relatively little about how racial hierarchies are invoked today when it comes to competition for status among great powers. Recent studies by Ward and Mukherjee have examined Japan’s ‘status denial’ in the early-twentieth century and identified racial dynamics behind it, but their analyses remain confined to a pre-decolonisation context.Footnote 9 Whether similar mechanisms operate in the postcolonial, liberal international order remains an open question. By examining a case in the late-twentieth century, this article demonstrates that racialised status dynamics continue to shape how states position themselves on the global social hierarchy. This generates important implications for understanding how the future rise of non-Western states – such as India and some Gulf states – may be interpreted and contested within a still-racialised international order.
Second, the article contributes to debates on how actors at the top of the hierarchy work to preserve their superior status. Much of the literature assumes that ‘social hierarchies matter much more for the behavior of those who are positioned lower down on a material hierarchy – like those who fall just short of great power standing’.Footnote 10 This, combined with the policy agenda that a failure ‘to manage [rising powers’] respective status expectations and claims the world will suffer the costs of foregone cooperation at best and intensified interstate rivalry and even war’,Footnote 11 has generated research centred on how rising powers attempt to reshape the global pecking order.Footnote 12 This focus, while valuable, obscures the strategies used by high-status actors to defend their privileged position.Footnote 13 In the few works that do examine how high-status states try to maintain their social standing,Footnote 14 status protection involves mainly military or economic status markers (including a track record of winning wars),Footnote 15 the instigation of war,Footnote 16 or ‘soft power’.Footnote 17 It overlooks race as a potential resource for status defence. Even in studies that implicitly acknowledge that race has been used by high-status states to protect their position in the international community, the mechanisms through which they did so remain under-examined because the authors’ focus is on rising powers.Footnote 18 This article addresses this gap by showing how racialised narratives can still be deployed by actors of high social standing to stabilise the social hierarchy in international society.
The article proceeds as follows. It first discusses how race has served as a status marker in the international community. It then examines the ‘Japan Threat’ discourse and explores how Japan and its ‘alien’ civilisation were made into a negative quality that disqualified it from global leadership and made it inferior to the US. The ‘Japan Threat’ thesis was produced by power transition fears, but its purpose was not limited to warning Americans about an imminent (economic) threat posed by Japan. It was also a discourse that invoked race as a status marker in order to compensate for a perceived loss of status in the social field of economic development.Footnote 19 Framing superiority around ‘civilisation’ served to re-introduce race through the back door. The ‘Japan Threat’ thesis enabled political agents in the US to emphasise American racial superiority to help compensate for the country’s perceived relative loss of status in areas such as economic strength, and to shore up its identity as the undisputed leader of the capitalist ‘Free World’. The conclusion provides a discussion on how race continues to be used as a status marker today, and put forward a number of implications that the example of the ‘Japan Threat’ brings to the fore.
Finally, a brief note on terminology is in order. As noted below, a crucial component of the ‘Japan Threat’ discourse was the redefinition of the geographical scope of the ‘West’ and who belonged to it. This serves to highlight that the term the ‘West’ or ‘Western’ is, in fact, a social construct. While it is common for this term to be used as a shorthand to denote Western Europe and North America, it is important to acknowledge that its meaning and geographical scope have evolved over time.Footnote 20 In order to avoid the reification of this particular interpretation of the West, unless stated otherwise, I use the terms ‘the “West”’ and “Western”’, with quotation marks, in this paper to denote an imagined grouping of states and societies that belong to the geographical regions of Western Europe and North America, and are typically racialised as ‘White’ states.Footnote 21 Similarly, within the context of this paper, the term ‘“non-Western”’ denotes states and societies that are imagined to fall beyond these geographical areas.
International society as a racial ‘social field’
In recent years, the discipline of IR has moved away from theorising on the assumption of an anarchic international system of sovereign states and has paid increasing attention to the concept of hierarchy. As part of this move, we have witnessed a growing interest in how actors seek status to gain an elevated position within the international social order.Footnote 22 An inherently social concept like status – defined by Larson, Paul and Wohlforth as ‘collective beliefs about a given state’s ranking on valued attributes (wealth, coercive capabilities, culture, demographic position, sociopolitical organization, and diplomatic clout)’ – needs to be recognised by an actor’s peers.Footnote 23 Social actors have sought to invoke a variety of social symbols that denote a superior position in the given social hierarchy. These symbols, or ‘status markers, referring to positions and protocol symbolizing respect and deference’,Footnote 24 are wide-ranging and have evolved over time.Footnote 25 Status-seeking in the international community thus entails an attempt to acquire certain attributes of high status, and to shape how the actor’s peers perceive its social standing. Musgrave and Nexon state that these attributes can be drawn from a wide variety of ‘social fields’, and an actor will attempt to identify what symbols carry high prestige in the eyes of the status-seeker’s target audience. High status, they argue:
… reflect the possession of field-relevant capital—that is, resources and performances that confer status and commensurate power within a particular social context. Those with more field-relevant capital occupy a higher position than those with less. Various forms of capital serve as both the objective and currency of power …Footnote 26
Traditionally, the discipline of IR has assumed that ‘military and economic resources serve as critical field-relevant capital’.Footnote 27 Robert Gilpin, for instance, states that the ‘most prestigious members of the international system are those states that have most recently used military force or economic power successfully and have thereby imposed their will on others’.Footnote 28 Morgenthau similarly claims that the display of military power (such as military parades) has been a crucial component of the ‘politics of prestige’.Footnote 29
Constructivist scholarship has challenged this materialist focus on status and status markers, and demonstrated that states may also seek superior status by invoking symbols of normative/ideological significance. Indeed, ‘actors of all sorts in world politics … are avid observers, and sometimes obsessive players of international status games’,Footnote 30 and international politics is littered with examples of states invoking a variety of symbols to get their peers to recognise their desired status. In its early days of existence, the Soviet Union made sure its diplomats shed their ‘old revolutionary uniforms’ and wore ‘the frock coats and striped trousers of the traditional diplomat’ instead.Footnote 31 Such attempts were intimately connected to Moscow’s desires to be ‘regarded as a “legitimate state” and to be treated with respect. To this end they had to make sure that they followed all the relevant rules that pertained to states’.Footnote 32 Even state banquets can be seen as a stage where a state’s status is at stake: in 2006, the Japanese government reportedly objected to the Chinese government’s state banquet menu, which included sea cucumber soup. Sea cucumber soup, the Japanese argued, ranked third in terms of prestige, below shark-fin soup and bird’s nest soup. In the eyes of Tokyo, only bird’s nest soup – which uses the nests of swiftlets and is an extremely expensive ingredient – could be considered a dish of a higher symbolic rank befitting a state of Japan’s stature.Footnote 33
The quest for status thus requires attention to the socially and temporally contingent nature of symbols. This suggests that actors in the international system can potentially claim prestige by invoking a variety of ‘social fields’. It means that ‘[t]here are many potential hierarchies as there are social fields: the same actors may occupy different positions in different fields. Actors may try to create fields…in which they enjoy advantages in field-relevant capital’.Footnote 34 How, then, does race fit into this?
Race as a status marker
Race is commonly seen to have been a relevant social field from which superior status – namely great power status – could be claimed, particularly in the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. This was a time when European and North American imperialism had reached its apogée. The industrial revolution and a growing belief that ‘Western’ civilisation represented the apex of human development resulted in a belief that the White race was destined to exercise its leadership over the world. It was the White race’s God-given mission to spread the trappings of ‘Western’ civilisation.Footnote 35 To this end, the European powers and the US, aided by superior military technology, imposed the ‘standard of civilisation’ on the non-Western world in an effort to guide the ‘uncivilised’ or ‘savage’ towards political maturity. Failure to conform to this often entailed the former suspending the political autonomy of non-White ‘savages’ by guiding the latter to ‘political maturity’ under their tutelage. It is no coincidence that during this time the ‘possession of colonies – and the performance of imperial management … became important capital in the field of great-power competition during the nineteenth century’.Footnote 36
The fact that ‘Whiteness’ was a status marker was not lost on other ‘non-Western’ states and societies. Japan, despite becoming the first ‘non-Western’ state to fulfil the ‘standard of civilisation’, was served a bitter reminder of this when its proposal for the inclusion of a racial equality clause in the Covenant of the League of Nations was quashed at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919. As Rohan Mukherjee notes, ‘[w]hile the world certainly considered Japan to be a major power … the great powers looked down on Japan’s rise as a non-European and non-Anglo-Saxon great power’.Footnote 37 Japan’s subsequent rebellion towards the US and Britain in WWII is partly attributed to its growing sense of anger towards the ‘continued official discrimination (especially related to immigration) that … signaled the existence of an ultimate status ceiling for Japan’.Footnote 38 Ironically, some Japanese public intellectuals drew on racial social fields that gave superior status to Whites to claim racial superiority over their fellow Asians and equality with the ‘Western’ powers. The distinguished Japanese economist Taguchi Ukichi claimed in 1904 that the ‘Chinese and Japanese were not of the same race’ and the Russians (with whom the Japanese were engaged in war at the time) ‘were Mongoloid Tatars’.Footnote 39 In contrast, the Japanese could trace their ancestry to the White race, because ‘the Japanese language shared the same roots with Aryan languages’.Footnote 40 Taguchi’s discourse, while outlandish, is significant in that he associated Japanese superiority with ‘Whiteness’, while stigmatising Japan’s military foes as being ‘Mongoloid’. It demonstrates the global diffusion of the notion that being ‘White’ was a social marker of superiority.
Limitations of existing works
As the discussion above shows, race has often been a social field that actors can invoke to claim superior status. Yet when it comes to theorising this dynamic, the discipline of IR has a somewhat inconsistent record. One of the reasons could be linked to the evolution of IR theory. As Maass and Shilliam note, the heuristic move of placing ‘an anarchic realm of sovereign states’ at the centre of our theoretical analysis has resulted in a systematic neglect of how race has shaped ‘the production of state power and construction of national interests’, and ‘encouraged theorizing in terms of state attributes, suppressing consideration of the transnational and subnational arenas where racialization often operates’.Footnote 41 Furthermore, during the Cold War, IR theory was dominated by materialist theories which (as noted above) claimed that the main source of status in the post-WWII order continued to be located in military and economic social fields, where race was irrelevant. This tendency persists in case studies investigating great power status, where military and economic power are often seen as key status markers needed to be recognised as such.Footnote 42
The end of the Cold War and the rise of constructivist approaches have resulted in greater scope for theorising about non-material sources of status markers. However, constructivists’ implicit normative agenda of both proving and demonstrating the possibility for normative progress in a supposedly anarchical international realm meant that there was a tendency to emphasise progressive, liberal norms as a source of status.Footnote 43 In this context, regime type and adherence to global human rights were conceived of as important social fields. It was argued that in the post-Cold War era liberal democratic governance and the adoption of market capitalism had arguably become the new ‘standard of civilisation’, and any state wishing to seek the status of being a ‘legitimate’ member of international society would need to demonstrate its credential as a liberal democracy that actively sought to uphold global human rights norms.Footnote 44 There was limited scope for ‘regressive’ status markers like race to play any role in elevating a state’s position in the international community.
The second reason is temporal. In discussions with regard to the ‘decolonised’ post-WWII international community, there is a tendency to treat the idea of invoking race to claim superior status as an obsolete relic of the past.Footnote 45 Postcolonial scholars have provided a corrective to this by highlighting that decolonisation has not eradicated structural inequalities between the industrialised states in the Global North and the Global South.Footnote 46 They have also pointed out that much constructivist scholarship takes as a ‘given’ that high-status, ‘progressive’ norms are ‘Western’ norms which emanate from Europe or North America.Footnote 47 This, in turn, reproduces racial hierarchies that imply ‘non-Western’ (and therefore often non-White) peoples and societies are somehow less ‘modern’ or ‘developed’.Footnote 48 Attempts to propagate ‘global’ human rights – which in practice tend to be carried out by powerful ‘Western’ actors and states – have also been said to carry ‘racial connotations in which the international hierarchy of race and color is reintrenched and revitalized….[I]n the human rights narrative, savages and victims are generally non-white and non-Western, while the saviors are white’.Footnote 49
However, such critiques have been frequently and all too readily brushed aside by rebuttals that insist that status markers such as ‘economic development’ or ‘liberal democracy’ are essentially ‘colour-blind’. This allows ‘plausible deniability’ against charges of racialised thinking. This line of argument is visible in the work of R. J. Vincent, who acknowledged that a ‘caste-system’ arguably existed in the international community, where ‘the rich world is predominantly white, and the poor world predominantly coloured’. However, the Whites were placed at an elevated position in this ‘caste’ because they could claim superiority based on superior economic development. Highly industrialised non-White states, therefore, would be, and were treated as equals. Vincent argued that those former colonies that had attained economic wealth were ‘now not merely equal members of international society … but powers of close to the first rank’, and that ‘the several East Asian countries that have enjoyed such economic success … can hardly be said still to be straining under a racial yoke’.Footnote 50 The logic here is that a state will be (and has been) treated as an equal with the industrialised states of North America and Western Europe (and by implication, ‘White’ states) if it attains a similar level of military or economic might, or transforms itself into a liberal democracy.
This faith in the moral progress towards racial equality can be seen in more recent scholarship concerning the People’s Republic of China’s (PRC) quest for equality with the ‘Western’ great powers. China is argued to be refused this status on the basis that its growing military power and aggressive behaviour in territorial disputes disrupt the balance of power, and because of its refusal to embrace liberal-democratic domestic governance.Footnote 51 Although some scholars have pointed out that the singling out of China as the biggest threat to US hegemony may be linked to racial differences amplifying threat perceptions,Footnote 52 such critiques are dismissed by claims that once the PRC democratises, it will attain equality with the ‘Western’ powers. As Ward states, the ‘impermeable status category boundaries facing … China’s struggle for great power status’ are linked to ‘domestic political institutions and conformity with human rights norms’.Footnote 53 ‘Objective’ theories such as the Democratic Peace thesis – which argue that democracies generally do not go to war with each other – frame the rise of China as a security issue for ‘Western’ democracies,Footnote 54 and serve to refute any charges of racism in debates about China’s rise. Given this context, it is unsurprising that Ward asserts that ‘race is no longer an integral marker of status’ in international society today.Footnote 55
The ‘Japan Threat’: the re-emergence of race as a status marker
These denials, however, come under considerable challenge when applied to the ‘Japan Threat’ thesis that emerged in the late-1980s and early-1990s. The ‘Japan Threat’ discourse essentially argued that Japan was not only the biggest threat to US hegemony but also utterly undeserving of leading the global community. It was, proponents argued, in the interests of the US, and indeed of the world, to nip Japan’s burgeoning power in the bud.
The US has, despite its hegemonic position and nationalistic claims by some observers of the longevity of the ‘Pax Americana’, often been ‘preoccupied by [the US’s] status and consumed by inner doubt’ about its ability to maintain its position in the international hierarchy.Footnote 56 This has continued despite the fact that the collapse of the Soviet Union seemed to signal the ultimate triumph of the US-led ‘free world’.Footnote 57 American scholars and pundits have thus been engaged in oscillating discourses between trumpeting the virtues and longevity of US hegemony,Footnote 58 and the more recent fretting about the almost inevitable decline of US power, and with it, the rise of the challenger.Footnote 59
The ‘Japan Threat’ discourse – originally known as ‘Japan bashing’ – was a response to US insecurities about loss of status in military, economic, and social fields, and it ‘predated the demise of the Soviet Union by at least a decade’ before reaching its zenith in the late-1980s and early-1990s.Footnote 60 M. J. Heale notes that ‘humiliating foreign policy reverses’ in this period (such as the American military’s withdrawal from Vietnam, or foreign policy failures in Iran) had ‘called the American mission into question’, and even ‘Jimmy Carter famously contended in a televised speech that the United States was suffering from “a crisis of confidence”’.Footnote 61 The perceived changes in the power balance following the thawing of the Cold War standoff between the US and the Soviet Union, and American anxieties about its status had much to do with the increasing prominence of the ‘Japan Threat’ thesis, and this zeitgeist was reflected in scholarly debates at this time. ‘Polls report’, Joseph S. Nye wrote in his influential article ‘Soft Power’ published in 1990, ‘that nearly half the [American] public believes the country is in decline’.Footnote 62 Samuel P. Huntington also noted that by 1988 ‘the United States [had] reached the zenith of its fifth wave of declinism since the 1950s’.Footnote 63
American economic decline was another key source of status anxiety.Footnote 64 Washington, it was argued, had spent too much money ‘to maintain an extensive military capability in far corners of the world’, and that they were ‘falling victim to the classic syndrome of “imperial overstretch” that has doomed great powers throughout history’.Footnote 65 A myopic obsession with anti-communism had meant that the US had ‘sacrifice[d] … America’s economic interests in the name of foreign policy and defence considerations.’Footnote 66 The US was consequently seen as ‘declining economically compared to other market economy countries, most notably Japan, but also Europe and the newly industrializing countries’.Footnote 67 Furthermore, as the US–Soviet détente shifted the focus away from military means of waging war to economic power, pundits claimed that ‘Japanese economic power posed a more serious threat to the future of the US’. It was telling that ‘[a]sked in 1989 whether the Soviet military or Japanese economic power posed a more serious threat to the future of the US, 20.8% of Americans said the Soviet Union, and 69.8% said Japan’,Footnote 68 even though discussions of the Japan Threat may have – at least in its early stages – ‘been principally promoted by elite opinion’.Footnote 69
Dealing with status anxiety: differentialist racism and the ‘Japan Threat’
The ‘Japan Threat’ thesis can be understood as a response to the aforementioned power transition fears, but it is also interlinked with a strategy aimed at identifying an alternative social field to locate a new source of status markers to compensate for the perceived loss of US status in the social field of economic power. There is a range of strategies that an actor can use to compensate for status loss, real or perceived. One way, which Larson and Shevchenko have dubbed ‘social competition’, is to identify the relevant social field in which one has fallen short, and seek to strengthen that particular field.Footnote 70 Larson and Shevchenko identify another strategy (‘social creativity’) that can be used to deal with a perceived loss in status, which is to find alternative social fields from which the actor can claim superior status.Footnote 71 This is ‘compensatory by singling out traits other than those inherent in the threatened sense of greatness’.Footnote 72
While Larson and Shevchenko’s empirical focus is on rising powers’ strategies to boost their social standing, the dissemination of the ‘Japan Threat’ thesis, which amounts to ‘social creativity’, demonstrates that high-status powers can make use of this tactic to protect their superiority and deny the ‘upstart’ social equality. The ‘Japan Threat’, however, was not the only discourse that sought to compensate for the US’ perceived decline in this way. As noted above, the concept of ‘soft power’ claimed that any loss of American power in the field of economic and technological prowess would be compensated by attraction to American culture or values,Footnote 73 and was also aimed at allaying fears that the US was on the wane. What differentiated the ‘Japan Threat’ discourse from its ‘soft power’ counterpart was that it used race as a status marker to elevate the US vis-à-vis Japan. Put differently, the ‘Japan Threat’ thesis was a move that (re)introduced a status marker that effectively moved the goalposts for ‘greatness’ in a way that was totally out of Japan’s reach. The use of race as a key status marker was arguably highly effective in perpetuating American superiority, because Japan would be unable to ‘catch up’ with the US as it had with economic power or democratic governance unless it changed its race. Japan’s relatively homogeneous ethnic makeup ensured this was a highly remote possibility.
The utilisation of racial social fields in the ‘Japan Threat’ discourse did not entail the overt use of biological characteristics, given ‘the failure of scientific racism and growing respect for racial equality’ that ‘delegitimized overtly racist approaches during the late twentieth century’. Instead, it employed ‘essentializing logic using … civilization rather than race’.Footnote 74 Status hierarchies based on claims about cultural or civilisational differences may not always reflect racism per se. It can be argued that ‘racism is not operative’ when members of the cultural groups ‘can voluntarily change their identities and advance to positions of prominence and prestige within the dominant group’.Footnote 75 While the creation of hierarchies is arguably racist in the sense that it can supply ‘a purported rationale for racial domination (in its colonialist form)’,Footnote 76 there are, at least in theory, pathways to assimilation and acceptance as social equals. Culture is treated as malleable, and there is openness to the possibility of cross-cultural interactions and influence.
However, civilisational/cultural hierarchies can become the functional equivalent of racial hierarchies when culture or civilisation is ‘regarded as innate, indelible, and unchangeable’,Footnote 77 and attributed to ‘racial groups almost as if those characteristics were inherent in the groups’ nature’, ‘passed on through the generations, just as biologistic racial ideology claims about what it regards as racial behavioural/psychological characteristics’.Footnote 78 Here, civilisations or cultures are seen ‘as hermetically sealed entities’.Footnote 79 Devoid of outside influences and interactions, they become ‘virtually as difficult to change as are biological characteristics’,Footnote 80 and ‘[function] as a way of locking individuals and groups a priori into an immutable determination’.Footnote 81 Etienne Balibar states that this can be considered a ‘differentialist’ form of racism.Footnote 82 As culture linked to a particular racial group is perceived to be unchangeable, it perpetuates racial domination by denying the identity management strategy of ‘social mobility’, where a lower-status actor can assimilate into the dominant actor’s culture to attain social equality.Footnote 83
The shrinking conceptual space of the ‘West’, and the re-othering of Japan
In the context of the ‘Japan Threat’, ‘differentialist racism’ was used to argue that Japan did not share the same civilisation with the US and Western Europe, even though it was a liberal democracy and a key member of the capitalist ‘Free World’.Footnote 84 Effectively, this meant redefining the ‘West’ along racial lines, and excluding Japan from it. During the Cold War, the boundaries of the ‘West’ had included states that belonged to the US-led capitalist camp. As Jacinta O’Hagan points out, in the ‘mid-twentieth century, the West was constituted primarily in antithesis to totalitarianism, first facism [sic], and later communism … as the Cold War became globalised, the terms East and West took on a more conceptual than a geographic meaning’.Footnote 85 Japan was thus considered an important member of this particular construction of the ‘West’. The ‘Japan Threat’ pundits essentially re-conceptualised the ‘West’ as North America and Western Europe.
As per ‘differentialist racism’, Japanese civilisation or culture was assumed to be ‘whole and intact, watertight under an eternal sky’, and separate from this new imagining of the ‘West’.Footnote 86 In one of the most famous academic examples of this conceptual move, Samuel P. Huntington categorised Western European liberal democracies, Canada, and the US as belonging to the same ‘Western’ civilisation, while Japan – despite being a liberal-democratic, capitalist state and a key US ally – was treated as a separate civilisational category.Footnote 87 Given that the states that were categorised as part of ‘Western’ civilisation were typically racialised as ‘White’, Huntington – like scientific racism – was essentially conflating race with civilisation.
Having categorised Japan’s culture as ‘alien’ from ‘Western’ civilisation on the basis of racial lines, proponents of the ‘Japan Threat’ thesis then asserted American superiority by stating that the US and its civilisation represented and epitomised ‘universal’ values that were only shared by other ‘White’ states in Western Europe.Footnote 88 They located ‘difference in terms of culture and institutions’ to elevate ‘the West to exceptional status’.Footnote 89 The US’ inherently superior ‘Western’ civilisation, coupled with superiority in military, economic, and social fields, entitled the US to global leadership. Huntington mirrored this line of thinking in arguing that only the US was qualified to exercise leadership over the world because its values had universal qualities. In the context of the post-Cold War world, Huntington asserted, the US was
… the only major power whose national identity is defined by a set of universal political and economic values. For the United States these are liberty, democracy, equality, private property, and markets. In varying degrees other major countries may from time to time support these values. Their identity, however, is not defined by these values, and hence they have far less commitment to them and less interest in promoting them than does the United States.Footnote 90
This again reproduced well-established racial hierarchies that associated ‘universal’ or ‘progressive’ norms with the US and Western Europe, while lumping states outside these areas together as ‘backward’ and thus occupying a lower position in the global social hierarchy.
Other commentators similarly categorised Japan as either possessing a monolithic and fundamentally alien political culture or belonging to a timeless ‘Confucian’ or ‘Shinto’ cultural essence, and they separated the country from North America and Europe, which were seen to have a shared ‘Judeo-Christian’ culture. The fact that Japan has been influenced by a multitude of civilisations in its history (as have the US and Europe) was completely ignored. This emphasised the ‘insurmountability of cultural differences’,Footnote 91 and effectively depicted Japanese culture as ‘indelible’, and ‘unchangeable’. It served as a proxy for difference based on biology. It also amounted to social closure,Footnote 92 as it denied Japan the possibility of ‘emulat[ing] the values and practices of the higher status group with the goal of gaining admission into elite clubs’Footnote 93
On this basis, the ‘premise maintained by the US and Europe that Japan belongs with them in that loose category known as capitalist free-market economies’ was dismissed as ‘fiction’.Footnote 94 Even Japan’s status as a liberal democracy did not save it from being treated as separate from the US or Western Europe, because Japan’s cultural difference made it a deeply flawed democracy. Karel van Wolferen argued that, unlike America, Japan was ‘ruled through highly informal structures of governance and bureaucratic authority’, where ‘[e]ven judiciary bureaucrats will not leave it up to the courts to decide in matters that affect the political system. Elections in Japan do not help shape or change concrete policies’.Footnote 95
Furthermore, it was argued that Japan’s ‘alien’ civilisation made it unfit to exercise global leadership, emphasising the superiority of the US and its values vis-à-vis Japan. James Fallows, for instance, stated his concern with the ‘weakness of “universal principles” in Japan’.Footnote 96 Fallows assumed that Japanese society or civilisation was under the influence of the ‘Shinto religion’, which ‘has no overarching theory of behavior and virtually no scripture or teachings’.Footnote 97 This meant that the Japanese would only care for their own people, not exercise leadership, and not demonstrate any empathy for those whom they considered to be outsiders. Japan’s rise to power would therefore be of no benefit to the international community. A more extreme culturalist argument appeared in a CIA-funded report Japan: 2000, which stressed ‘Japan’s uniqueness’ which ‘represents an incompatible paradigm incapable of and unwilling to change or converge’.Footnote 98 The Japanese were depicted as ‘creatures of an ageless, amoral, manipulative and controlling culture – not to be emulated – suited only to this race, in this place’. The rise of Japan would be a calamity for the US and Western Europe, as Japan’s ‘[e]conomic domination could precede the imposition of substituted value systems. This [was] particularly troubling because of the absence of any absolutes or moral imperatives in the Japanese paradigm, unlike [in] the Western paradigm, anchored in the Judeo-Christian ethic’.Footnote 99
Creating racial hierarchies through a ‘Japan Threat’
The (re-)introduction of racial social fields to protect the US’ status vis-à-vis Japan resulted in the latter’s growing economic clout being interpreted as a uniquely alien and dangerous threat.Footnote 100 Given that the Japanese and their ‘culture’ were labelled as ‘amoral’, or ‘lacking in universal principles’, it followed that economic competition from Japan was unlike that originating from the ‘Western’ states, and it made a future conflict between the US and Japan far more likely than with Europe.Footnote 101 In this sense, racial difference functioned as a lens through which threats were identified and amplified.Footnote 102 However, interpreting this development solely from the angle of threat perceptions or material power transition concerns misses the crucial fact that threat perception and US status defence were interlinked.Footnote 103 While racialised perspectives helped single out who was most threatening, these threat narratives were subsequently used to shore up the superiority of the US and the ‘West’. Threat narratives decrying ‘immoral’ Japanese trade practices effectively stigmatised Japan with ‘an attribute that is deeply discrediting’.Footnote 104 Given that stigmatisation entails ‘linking a person to a set of undesirable characteristics that form the stereotype’,Footnote 105 it was not a massive logical leap to suggest that since Japan did not share the ‘universal’ values epitomised by the ‘West’, its economic or foreign policies were also ‘alien’ and ‘immoral’. Labelling, separating and associating Japan with ‘undesirable characteristics’ not only reflected threat perceptions, but also provided a ‘rationale for devaluing, rejecting and excluding’ a social actor, who then ‘experience[s] status loss and discrimination’.Footnote 106 By treating Japan’s relations with the ‘West’ as characterised by immorality or ‘deviance’, proponents of the ‘Japan Threat’ were effectively reproducing the moral superiority of the West. The tendency to either ignore or explain away any potential threats from a ‘Western’ power while emphasising the danger of an Asian one also reflects racialised thinking of awarding ‘the barbaric races high, if not extremely high, levels of Eastern agency’ that is predatory in nature.Footnote 107
For instance, Fallows’ article ‘Containing Japan’ revealingly points to a sentiment that America’s relations with Japan have a more menacing quality compared with those with Europe. ‘Japanese-American relationships’, Fallows stated,
… have a fragile, walking-on-eggs quality, which makes people think that it’s dangerous to talk frankly in public. Many other international relationships are robust enough to survive open discussions of disagreements; during the nasty little ‘beef hormone’ war early this year … no one imaged that the United States and the European Community were about to turn their backs on each other.Footnote 108
The singling out of Japan can also be observed in Friedman and LeBard’s work, The Coming War with Japan, which argued that geopolitical pressures would force Japan to challenge US hegemony in the future. Friedman and LeBard implicitly reproduced racial hierarchies by implying that Japan would be the country that would fall victim to the ‘tyranny of geopolitics’. If this is presumably a key motivating factor for all states, the same dynamics would logically apply to the newly reunified Germany, but the authors seemed to go out of their way to exempt Germany from this. Ignoring the fact that Germany’s geopolitical features did not prevent Hitler’s quest for a German Lebensraum, they argued that the
… bulk of German exports go to neighboring EC member countries, with whom it is intimately linked politically Secondly—and this is a point that is critical geopolitically—Germany’s exports can be shipped by land, without the need for an extensive, over-the-horizon foreign policy.Footnote 109
The fact that Japan was seen as unable to escape the ‘tyranny of geopolitics’ or the ‘logic of anarchy’ resonated with the well-established Orientalist representations of the ‘non-West’ (and therefore non-White) world as ‘aberrant, underdeveloped, inferior’ and belonging to the realm of the irrational and chaotic.Footnote 110 It is telling that Germany is given higher status thanks to its ‘rational’, ‘forward-looking’ regional political integration project that would eventually culminate in the European Union. This, by implication, also meant that Germany was far less likely to become another victim of the geopolitical logic that would create a threatening Japan. Similar tendencies can also be seen in Daniel Burstein, who does acknowledge that some of ‘the power relinquished [by the US] has gone to our other old adversary, Germany’.Footnote 111 Yet Burstein revealingly notes that ‘while the world of tomorrow is likely to have a multiplicity of power centers, one should not rush to conclude that such diffusion prevents a single nation from exerting a predominant influence – particularly when that nation is Japan’.Footnote 112
Another popular trope was to accuse the Japanese of hoovering up American assets or engaging in ‘unfair’ trade practices that enriched Japan at the expense of the US. Such discourses bore a resemblance to the ‘Yellow Peril’ discourse of the early-twentieth century, where Japan was assumed to be ‘destined to expand and triumph over the higher races’,Footnote 113 but only through immoral, devious tactics. With regard to the dangers of Japan ‘buying up’ the US, Huntington darkly warned that the Japanese purchase of MCA studios or the endowment of chairs in elite US universities was most likely part of a deeper political plot to further Japanese influence to the detriment of American power.Footnote 114 It is revealing that the focus of Huntington’s anxiety is primarily on Japan, as it reflects his tendency to attribute an almost uniquely predatory agency to ‘non-Western’ actors. As M. J. Heale notes, ‘when alarm was being raised about Japanese buy-outs of American business [in 1989], Japanese direct investment in the United States was only about half that of the British and about the same as that of the Dutch, though no one talked about an insidious Dutch invasion’.Footnote 115
Meanwhile, in a New York Times Magazine article, Theodore H. White asserted that Japan’s new-found power was only thanks to its ‘unfair’ economic and trading policies. White claimed that while ‘Japan’s tariff rates are … roughly equal to those of other industrial nations, they are spiked with special tariffs in industries that are considered vulnerable to foreign competition. In addition, Japanese markets are protected by a maze of so-called nontariff barriers to trade – many of which fall outside the reach of GATT regulations.’Footnote 116 Such pundits ignored the fact that Japan had in fact been reducing trade barriers over time, and that the US had also been running trade deficits with ‘OPEC, Canada, the EEC, Latin America, Taiwan, Korea, and even Africa, indicating that the problem was not exclusively with Japan’.Footnote 117
It is important to note that targeting Japan for criticism took place in the context of debates over whether or not Japan’s state-coordinated model of economic development strayed from the neoliberal orthodoxy. This did mean that ‘unfair’ trading practices by the West were seen, in part, as less malignant on the basis of economic/developmental grounds rather than racial ones.Footnote 118 Nevertheless, it would be a mistake to claim that racial hierarchies were absent. The fact that ‘Western’ neoliberal economic theories were taken as inherently benign and superior while an ‘Asian’ alternative was seen as inherently pernicious arguably reproduces racial hierarchies. Furthermore, as noted by David Campbell, the singling out of Japan ‘highlights the way that certain economic relationships were (and are) taken to be an indicator of civilization’, and echoes racist historical discourses that labelled ‘the Japanese as “barbarians” because of their reluctance to trade’.Footnote 119
Conclusion
The case of the ‘Japan Threat’ discourse generates a number of important general implications for our understanding of international politics. Firstly, while specifying the exact conditions under which race will be invoked to protect status is beyond the scope of this article, the findings here suggest that race is a social field that may be more likely to come into play if (a) policy elites continue to see international hierarchy through a racialised civilisational lens, and (b) are faced with a ‘non-Western’ state that has been extraordinarily successful in managing its rise through the strategy of emulating the high-status group. This limits the range of alternative status markers the high-status group can invoke. The (re-)introduction of an additional ‘social field’ that is impossible to emulate allows the high-status group to maintain the exclusivity of their status, and race is one of them.
The evidence presented in this article suggests that race remains a powerful social concept within public imaginaries, and political elites will continue to deploy it whenever they perceived a loss of status, even though racial categories themselves can shift over time. Consequently, democratic India, a democratised China, an economically developed African state, or a secularised, democratic Muslim state would likely face status constraints similar to those Japan experienced in the 1980s.Footnote 120 Some – if not all – pundits and political elites may very well focus on any (racialised) civilisational differences, and treat these ‘non-Western’ ‘upstarts’ as latent threats, morally inferior, and therefore unfit for global leadership or equal treatment. The ‘Japan Threat’ thesis may have faded with Japan’s economic decline, but analysts continue to invoke racially derived civilisational qualities as ‘field-relevant capital’ whenever there is a debate over the end of American hegemony. Henry R. Nau’s 2001 argument is revealing:
The United States and other free societies won … because they inspired their people to greater sacrifice and achievement than communist societies did. If nations or regional actors aspire to succeed in the struggle for power in the future, they will have to succeed to some extent in the struggle for individual liberty as well. In the twenty-first century, can anyone imagine a nation becoming a power that kills (for example, the effect of population controls in China) or mutilates (for example, genital mutilation in parts of Africa) its female citizens, employs only a minuscule fraction of its women after marriage (Japan), or demands that its women remain hidden from public places (fundamentalist Islam). If Confucian, Muslim and other non-Western societies do not overcome these self-imposed handicaps, they may cause unspeakable disruption and damage in the world.Footnote 121
It is striking that Nau’s long list of negative examples comes exclusively from Asia and Africa, and North America and Western Europe do not feature at all. Nau’s imagined ‘West’ is implicitly racialised as ‘White’, and remains the only group of states that seems to be free of the ‘handicaps’ needed to lead the world. Japan is yet again lumped together with ‘other non-Western societies’. Although many of Japan’s social problems (such as gender inequality) are equally present in the ‘West’, Nau curiously does not seem to consider these as undermining (inherent) ‘Western’ claims to leadership. The same traits are therefore given a different, negative meaning when applied to Japan. They are used as markers in the ‘symbolic construction of racialized otherness’.Footnote 122
Secondly, while it is likely that ‘states benefiting the most from the status quo distribution of resources will … have an interest in defending status quo norms, rules, and institutions’ from rising powers,Footnote 123 it appears that in the Western-centric international order a rising power that is racialised as ‘non-White’ is more likely to elicit a defensive response. In 2019, US State Department Director of Policy Planning, Kiron Skinner, stated that the rise of the PRC was a fundamentally different competitor from Russia because China was ‘not Caucasian’.Footnote 124 Three years later, the European Union’s then-foreign-policy chief, Josep Borrell, claimed that Europe was a ‘garden’ where ‘[e]verything works’, while depicting the rest of the world as an invasive ‘jungle’.Footnote 125 Citing Du Bois, Freeman, Kim and Lake state that ‘the prospect of war and peace hinges upon how White-majority countries cope with perceived challenges from the “awakening of the brown and black races”’.Footnote 126 Skinner’s and Borrell’s statements suggest that areas racialised as ‘non-White’ continue to be stigmatised as ‘threatening’ or qualitatively different, and give a good indication that many actors within the ‘West’ are determined to ensure that the ‘non-Western’ world stays in its place at the lower rungs of the international social hierarchy. IR’s Eurocentric understanding of ‘world history’ has arguably contributed to this tendency as well. The discipline has almost taken for granted that the ‘international’ begins in 1648 and subsequently expands across the world. This particular understanding of history has resulted in a ‘Eurocentric interpretation of history, as if international history only began once the Western world was able to impose its dominance over the non-European world’.Footnote 127 This poorly equips us to theorise a world where the ‘non-West’ is dominant. It is unsurprising that this has given rise to a
… suspicion of the political agency of non-Western peoples and anxieties and concern about the possibility that a fragile yet longstanding and highly valuable international order would be potentially imperilled by the increasing autonomy and influence of political actors who lack a solid grounding in the mores of European civilization.Footnote 128
While the War on Terror or China’s poor human rights record and irredentist behaviour in territorial disputes may have served to obscure racialised fears of loss of status and material power harboured by the ‘West’, Japan’s experience shows that even a developed, democratic state that is a key US ally is not exempt from these dynamics. It is not always easy to solve the chicken-and-egg question of whether racial differences amplify threat perceptions or threat perceptions get racialised, as the two dynamics often coexist and get intertwined.Footnote 129 It is worth noting, however, that one of the supposedly few ‘peaceful’ power transitions between Britain and the US is said to have taken place (in part) thanks to the ethnic/racial affinity between the two states.Footnote 130 Although further research is needed, the more defensive reactions to the rise of a ‘non-White’ state give greater credibility to Barder’s claim that there exists a deeply embedded fear of the end of White supremacy within the international order.Footnote 131
However, it is important to note that making use of racial social fields to claim or protect elevated status is not a phenomenon limited to the ‘West’. Race has been invoked in Japan to explain both the success of Japan and to make up for perceived loss of status. In 1986, then Japanese Prime Minister Yasuhiro Nakasone claimed that the average intelligence of the Japanese was much higher than that of Americans because the US had ‘many blacks, Puerto Ricans and Mexicans’.Footnote 132 The liberal newspaper Asahi Shimbun noted that this reflected the belief that ethnic homogeneity ‘has been a favourable factor in the spread of education and in the development of the economy’.Footnote 133
Japan’s recent economic stagnation has also produced attempts to achieve superiority on the basis of racial social fields targeting China and South Korea (ROK). The latter two have threatened Japan’s international standing by criticising Tokyo’s handling of its pre-1945 imperialist wrongdoing. They have also experienced rapid economic growth, threatening Japan’s long-held sense of superiority as the most developed state in Asia. China overtook Japan as the second largest economy in 2010, while South Korea overtook Japan in gross domestic product per capita in 2018.Footnote 134 In this context, some commentators have begun to make use of racial social fields to claim Japanese superiority over their neighbours. Long-term Japan resident and nationalist ideologue Kent Sidney Gilbert’s book titled The Tragedy of Confucian-Controlled Chinese and Koreans (Jukyō ni shihai sareta chūgokujin to kankokujin no higeki) utilised both biological and ‘differentialist’ racism by alleging a ‘big difference in DNA between Japanese, Chinese, and Koreans’,Footnote 135 and then depicted the PRC and the ROK as trapped by a monolithic and unchanging Confucian civilisation. Gilbert then contrasted this with Japan, whose key moral backbone was the way of the samurai, or bushidō. Gilbert then positioned Japan above the PRC and ROK by highlighting the ‘selfish’, ‘immoral’, and ‘childish’ qualities the latter two displayed because of their cultural entrapment.
This highlights that invoking race to claim superiority is far from being a historical relic, despite humankind’s progress towards overcoming racial prejudice. Although we may be living in an increasingly multiracial, globalised world, we continue to inhabit a multiracist world where both the ‘West’ and the ‘non-Western’ world are guilty of using race for political ends. Unless this ends, we may see the recurrence of ‘status frustration’ among rising powers, and with it, rebellions. The ‘lessons of history’ have yet to be fully internalised. The ‘Global Colour Lines’ may be less clearly drawn, but they are far from being erased.
Acknowledgements
I should like to thank Isabella Bellezza-Smull, Peter Gries, Linus Hagström, Alexandra Homolar, Yoshiharu Kobayashi, Giulio Pugliese, Leonard Seabrooke, Jason Sharman, Catherine Suzuki, Yongjin Zhang, and the anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments.
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