From White To Western: 'Racial Decline' and The Idea of The West in Britain 1890-1930

Journal of Historical Sociology Vol. 16 No.
3 September 2003 ISSN 0952-1909
From White to Western: Racial Decline and the Idea of the West in Britain, 18901930
ALASTAIR BONNETT
Abstract Drawing on British works of imperial and social commentary, this article shows how a literature of white crisis emerged between 18901930. It was a literature that, whilst claiming to defend and afrm white identity, in fact exposed the limits of whiteness as a form of social solidarity. It is shown how these studies drew together a variety of challenges deemed to be facing the white race and, more specically, how they exhibited a contradictory desire to defend white racial community whilst attacking the masses. The idea of the West, developing alongside, within and in the wake of this crisis literature, provided a less racially reductive but not necessarily less socially exclusive identity.
***** Introduction In contemporary Western1 societies the explicit celebration of white racial identity has a marginal place within public debate. Indeed, any such afrmation appears to have become, perhaps irredeemably, associated with a reactionary and ignorant populism. This connection has been interpreted as a response to relatively recent phenomena, such as the rise of multicultural rhetoric within civic life2. However, not only does such an interpretation provide a foreshortened history of the crises of whiteness, but it is unable to address the most pressing question that arises from these crises, namely what kind of identities have emerged in the place of whiteness? Drawing largely on British works of imperial and social commentary, this article shows how between 189019303 there emerged a literature of white crisis, a literature that, whilst claiming to celebrate white identity, in fact exposed the limits of whiteness as a form of social solidarity. By identifying whiteness as inherently and eternally vulnerable to attack and, moreover, as based upon an allegiance between the masses and the elite that neither side was willing to support, these studies unwittingly exposed the unsustainable and contradictory logic of white racism. The idea of the West, developing alongside, within and in the wake of this crisis literature, provided a less racially reductive but not necessarily less socially exclusive vision of community. As this implies, my concern is not to identify a linear transition from white
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From White to Western
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to Western but to explicate a varied arena of transformation in which whiteness gradually came to seem an inappropriate and inadequate identity to evoke for those engaged in public debate, whilst the idea of the West became increasingly attractive and useful. The temptation to claim that Western was (and is) merely a euphemism for white will be, at least partially, resisted. The West and white were rarely entirely synonymous, either in terms of their meaning or usage. More specically, the idea of the West became useful because it could evoke a set of political principles and values that could be both cosmopolitan and ethnocentric, apparently open to all but rooted in the experiences and expectations of a narrow social strata. It is difcult to understand the history of whiteness without also interrogating its declining role in public discourse. Yet this deracialisation process was not discrete or autonomous from the changing fortunes of other categories of social afliation. It is instructive to bring this focus upon the entangled nature of identities into contrast with Fredis position in The Silent War (1998), a study which details the rhetoric of deracialisation within international politics in the rst half of the last century. Fredi effectively demonstrates a growing awareness amongst British colonial ofcials and their political masters that race was being used as an axis of solidarity against white control. It was, he maintains, because race came to be seen as destabilising and dangerous to the established geopolitical order that ofcial support and legitimacy for anti-racism began to emerge. Fredis central thesis is certainly of interest, yet it also remains mired in one of the more unhelpful conventions of contemporary ethnic and racial history, namely that any such account must prioritise narratives of explicit racism (paying particular attention to their material reproduction and rhetorical obfuscation). As we shall see, when exploring the relationship between whiteness and the West, it is just as important to understand how the idea of being Western became attractive and how the West was westernised, as it is appreciate the ight from whiteness. There are four parts to my account. In the rst two sections I outline the constituent themes within studies of white crisis produced by British social and political commentators between 1890 and 1930 (inevitably a few important non-British works that had a signicant impact of the British debate are also drawn into the discussion4). The former of these two sections addresses the wider set of factors that provoked this crisis discourse. It is my intention, not simply to establish that such a discourse did exist, but also to show how it brought into collision a variety of challenges deemed to be facing the white race. The second part of this essay
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is focused upon the theme of class and whiteness within the same body of literature. It examines the uneasy relationship between the defence of whiteness and the critique of mass society. This discussion is supplemented, in a brief third section, by an assessment of the main factors that undermined the credibility of white supremacism and the idea of race in the early-mid twentieth century. In the nal and fourth part of the article I explain the rise of the idea of the West and offer some suggestions as to why and how it interacted with whiteness. Drawing on both the literature of white crisis and a contemporaneous and related literature that asserted the West as a discrete social and ethno-geographical category, it is shown how the concept of Western identity reected and, at least in part, helped resolve, the experience of crisis that had come to be associated with whiteness. Narratives of White Decay The period when the white race was represented as undergoing a grave crisis was, in Britain, also the period when white supremacism was most fully and boldly incorporated within public discourse. This relationship is unsurprising, for the one is the ip-side of the other. One of the core attributes of white identity were the extraordinary claims of superiority made on its behalf, claims that led to a profound sense of vulnerability. The threat of miscegenation and the struggle to maintain white racial purity provide one expression of this vulnerability. However, although such concerns are central to some of the works we will be considering here (for example Gregory, 1925), they do not provide a predominant motif within the literature of white crisis. The sense of racial threat this literature explores is not discrete and particular. It is sprawling and expanding: it mirrors the vast reach and extraordinary boasts of whiteness. The dialectical momentum that makes whiteness fragile precisely because of its ascendancy is a familiar one. Indeed, it is neatly summarised in the title of Chamberlin and Gilmans (1985) study of fears of decay, Degeneration: The Dark Side of Progress. However, recent cultural historians err when they encourage us to view the theme of racial decline as an illustration of a specically n de sicle concern with degeneration (see also Ledger and Luckhurst, 2000; Greenslade, 1992). The romantic melancholia of Max Nordaus (1993; rst published 1892) Degeneration has a central place in this contemporary narrative. In a typically languorous passage Nordau depicts his time as the [d]usk of nations, in which all suns and all stars are gradually waning, and mankind with all its institutions and creations is persisting in a dying world (p1).
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Yet, Nordau provides neither a paradigmatic text for the style or the substance of the literature of white crisis (though see Nordau, 1912). The resolutely unromantic racial pessimism of Charles Pearsons National Life and Character: A Forecast (1894; rst published 1893) provides a far more convincing founding text5. Basing his predictions on economic and demographic patterns, Pearson states that the lower races will inevitably gain markets and territories from white societies that were becoming reliant on the comforts and security of the state. There is nothing dewy eyed about his forecast: when we are swamped in certain parts of the world by the black and yellow races, we shall know that it has been inevitable (p32). The economic ascendancy of those who Inge, following Pearson, was later to term the cheaper races (Inge, 1922, p227), meant that the white will be driven from every neutral market and forced to conne himself within his own (Pearson, 1894, p137). Pearsons emphasis on the inevitably degrading relationship between social welfare and racial character re-afrmed Darwins position as stated in The Descent of Man (1901; rst published 1871). In a passage that indicates how open Darwin was to the eugenic interpretation of evolutionary theory, he notes that modern social assistance allows the weak members of civilised societies to propagate their own kind . . . accepting in the case of man himself, hardly any one is so ignorant as to allow his worst animals to breed (p206)6. The literature of white crisis encompassed this eugenic tendency. Yet it is not reducible to it. The debate on whiteness registered concerns that went far beyond the creed of national better breeding. Indeed, although the institutional and ideological organisation of the eugenics movement was oriented towards national categories (more specically, the British or English race), its work may be better understood if placed within a broader discussion concerning the imperial and racial character of Britons (and/or Englishmen and women) as white people (cf Searle, 1976; see Stone, 2001, for discussion). It is whites and whiteness that provide the shared focus of the commentators considered here, some of whom were inuenced by eugenics, but few of whom can be said to articulate a simply or purely eugenic form of social theory. Pearsons role as [c]hief among these prophets of racial pessimism (Giddings, 1898, p570) established his defeatist reputation both within and outside the literature of white crisis (see, for example, the hostile comments of Putnam Weale, 1910; also Kidd, 1902; Giddings, 1895). Although . . . the White Race be nearing the twilight, counselled Curle (1926, p142), let us not lose our bearings. Certainly, the evidence that white power was in decline was
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far from conclusive. The crisis of whiteness pre-dates the receding tide of empire. White control over the worlds peoples increased throughout the period being considered. As the Dean of St. Pauls, William Inge (1922) noted, No important non-European government remains, except in China and Japan (p214). Yet, just one paragraph later, Inge (see also Inge, 1919) joins the chorus of racial panic, telling us that by 1901 the tide had really begun to turn against the white world. The signicance of this year is not explained by Inge although a few sentences later he alights upon the 1897 Diamond Jubilee celebrations as the culmination of white ascendency. Much of the uncertainty of Inges portrait reects the propensity, found throughout this genre, to nd the seeds of racial disaster everywhere. Indeed, for Inge, the magnicent pageant of the Jubilee also sounded a death-knell for white power, for the spectators . . . could observe the contrast between the splendid physique of the coloured troops and the stunted and unhealthy appearance of the crowds who lined the street (p214). The event that seemed to substantiate white self-doubt was a military defeat. Although the rout of Italian forces by the Ethiopians at Adowa in 1896 was greeted with equal consternation by some (Lyall, 1910), the outcome of the Russo-Japanese war was widely seen as the most signicant and shocking demonstration of non-white military potential. In 1904 it was generally expected in Britain that the Russo-Japanese war, begun that year, would be speedily settled once the Russian Baltic eet arrived in the Far East. With the defeat of Russia the following year (the Japanese eet, under Admiral Togo, destroyed all but three of Russias ships in the Straits of Tsushima in May 1905) a novel phase in international relations appeared to have begun. The victory of little Japan over great Russia explained Basil Matthews in 1924 (p27), challenged and ended the white mans expansion. It signied the end of an age and the beginning of new era (p28). In The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy, a book that quickly became the best known example of white crisis literature on both sides of the Atlantic, the American Lothrop Stoddard (1925, rst published 1920) phrased the matter in even more cataclysmic terms. With that yellow triumph over one of the great white powers (p21), he wrote, the legend of white invincibility was shattered, the veil of prestige that draped white civilisation was torn aside (p154). For Stoddard the signicance of Russias loss also turned on another matter: the formal alliance of Britain with Japan. This view was also expressed in Britain. In The Conict of Colour (1910) Putnam Weale offered a stinging critique of the British governments sensational step of allying herself with
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Japan (p113). For Putnam Weale the Anglo-Japanese Alliance (1902) amounted to the most self-defeating form of racial treason: The secrets of supremacy have been revealed; and other countries, led by what England has done, are beginning to accept in their extra European affairs what may be called the same clumsy doctrine of pis-aller (p117). An ideal of international white solidarity was a logical outcome of the emergence of white identity as a primary social and political concern. Yet it remained a doomed and crisis-prone ideal, continuously vulnerable to the manifold difculties inherent in employing a vaguely dened, highly idealised, yet utterly material, category as a signicant geo-political entity. These difculties are clearly illustrated by the attempt to employ the notion of white community during and in response to the Great War. The First World War was routinely termed within the literature of white crisis as a fratricidal war, the most important and latest event in a litany of racial self-abandonments and self-degradations. The danger the poet Sir Leo Chizza Money (1925) wrote about in The Peril of the White is not Yellow Peril, or a Black Peril, but a peril of self-extermination (p148), for whites in Europe and elsewhere are set upon race suicide and internecine war (pxx). Moneys concern with white solidarity led him to attack both Stoddard and Inge for their attention to intra-white racial differences (what Money calls Nordiculous theory (p147)): it is suicidal, he noted, to encourage racial scorns, racial suspicions, racial hatreds amongst the small minority that stands for White civilisation (p149). However, both Stoddard and Money were in agreement on the political implications of the war: that the only way white solidarity could be secured was by creating a European political union. Europeans must end their differences argued Money. It is time, he proposed, to federate all the States of Europe (px). Yet, such a clear solution to the crises of whiteness was immediately undermined by these authors ruminations on the traitorous nature of huge swaths of white people, most notably East Europeans and the working classes. Other authors added women and effeminate men to this list of suspects (Whetham and Whetham, 1911; Curle, 1926; Champly, 1936; Rentoul, 1906). Even the physical environment could not be relied upon to support white ambitions. Indeed, during the same period academic geographers had become pre-occupied with the limits of white settlement across whole swaths of the colonial world (Trewarthara, 1926; Woodruff, 1905; see also Livingstone, 1994; Kennedy, 1990). The impossible aspirations of white solidarity and its consequent multitude of vulnerabilities made any specic attempt to see a solution to its present dilemmas inevitably inadequate. However, it
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was within the arena of class conict that the literature of white crisis exposed the limits of white solidarity most glaringly and thoroughly. The Class Limits of White Solidarity The literature of white crisis is a literature of white supremacism. Yet it is also a literature in which the mass of white people are treated with suspicion and, often, open contempt. This paradox provides the clearest evidence that this is not merely a literature about crisis but in crisis: its central category is constantly found to be failing, to be unworthy. Thus whiteness is, unintentionally, exposed as an inadequate category of social solidarity. For if the white nation is split between The British sub-man (Freeman, 1921) and Stoddards neo-aristocrats, then the idea of white community necessarily appears, at best, a memory of a bond now passed into history. A related irony concerns the fact that, despite its disgust for the white masses, this is a literature that is coming to terms with the latters claim on whiteness. At no point do any of the authors discussed here doubt that the European heritage working class is white. The tradition of dening whiteness as a bourgeois possession and of seeing the urban working class (more specically, the residuum) as unworthy of the same racial status may certainly be detected, particularly within the more bellicose commentators such as Curle and Inge. However, by the end of the nineteenth century such exclusivity was being effectively challenged by national and imperial forms of social inclusively, forms that made white identity increasingly available to the working classes (see Bonnett, 1998; Hyslop, 1999). Lord Curzons often attributed remark, made when watching English soldiers washing during the Battle of the Somme I never knew the working classes had such white skins signals the survival of somewhat older attitudes amongst the British upper classes. Yet it is the anachronistic quality of the remark that is of interest here: by the 1910s the public articulation of the idea that the working class was less than white had become note-worthy, indeed eccentric. As this implies, the contradictory and self-defeating nature of the literature under consideration here derives, in large measure, from the difculties that a class inclusive view of whiteness present to those who wish to employ racism as a form of social elitism. The problem is compounded by the fact that the suspect nature of most white people is not a minor chord within any of the texts under discussion: indeed, it is usually a key site of argument and evidence. For Inge (1922) civilisation is always the property of an
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elite: it is the culture of a limited class, which has given its character to the national life, but has not attempted to raise the whole people to the same level (p228). Without this superior element whiteness is an empty vessel, deprived of intelligence and direction. The brainy and the balanced have always controlled our world, says Curle, when they cease to do so, our White Race must pass into its decline (1926, p213). The elite are represented as an inter-breeding group possessing qualitatively different cultural values to the masses; almost a race within a race. Thus the most profound challenge for whiteness located by the authors under discussion concerns the weakening of this groups grasp on power. Indeed, the imminent possibility of being swamped by inferior whites is identied time and again. Soon, I suppose, the masses will be in control of legislation warns Curle (1926, p215). Money, echoing a concern made familiar by the eugenics movement (Pearson, 1897) and sustained across the political spectrum (Whetham and Whetham, 1911; Webb, 1907; see also Winter, 1974; Paul, 1984), noted that In Europe and America alike, the White races appear to be dying off from the top downwards, adding, In Britain, in especial, the most intelligent people are refraining from rearing families.7 The difculty of asserting both white solidarity and class elitism was resolved, in part, by asserting that the best stock of the working class had long since climbed upward. Thus the racial connection to the masses could be claimed to be existent but atrophied. For Ireland
over a period of several centuries there has occurred a striking and progressive decline in the cultural contribution from the lower classes in the United Kingdom, and, of course, a corresponding relative increase in the contribution from the upper and middle classes (Ireland, 1921, p139).
Two origin myths of the white bourgeois were employed to secure this argument. One identies their geographical and social roots in the hardy and muscular country life of pre-industrial rural England. The other locates them as the progeny of natural winners, i.e., as being the inheritors of a ghting stock that was able to demonstrate superiority before the struggle for existence was compromised by luxury and state interference. The former position is commonly encountered through depictions of the degenerative nature of the city, a position expressed concisely by Galton in 1883: [T]he towns sterilise rural vigour (p14; see also Masterman, 1901; White, 1901; Haggard, 1905; Cantlie, 1906). Pearson (1894) also noted that the towns have been draining the life-blood of the country districts, the vigorous countryman becoming absorbed
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into the weaker and more stunted specimens of humanity who ll the towns (p1645). Thus the racial gift (Whetham, cited by Soloway, 1982, p158) that rural migrants bring to the town is soon squandered, an analysis that both roots the elite rmly within a white, rural past and condemns the process of mechanisation as an enemy of the race (Inge, 1922). These considerations imply that the discovery of working class ill health at the turn of the nineteenth century developed from a discourse of white decline, rather than the other way round. The supposed poor physical state of army volunteers for the Boer War, particularly those from the cities, encouraged and enabled the articulation of concerns about the degeneracy of the race and its urban context (see, for example, White, 1899; 1901; Shee, 1903). However, the evidence of ill-health reected less an empirical reality (since it was both misread and considerably exaggerated; see Soloway, 1982, for discussion) than a class investment in representing the proletarian as a degenerate group. Freemans (1921; also Freeman 1923) sub-man, a phrase also taken up by Inge (1922), is the same person as Stoddards (1922) Under-Man and Curles (1926) C3 type. He is white yet the enemy of whiteness; an enemy who is both a racial throw-back and harbinger of an anarchic future. In The Revolt Against Civilisation, Stoddard (1922) offers a detailed depiction of the Under-Man as a discrete group, with his own traditions, interests and agenda. [T]he basic attitude of the Under-Man is an instinctive and natural revolt against civilisation (p22), he suggests. The Under-Man multiples; he bides his times (p23), waiting for his opportunity. This time, Stoddard concludes, has now come: the philosophy of the Under-Man is today called Bolshevism (p151), which is at bottom a mere rationalising of the emotions of the unacceptable, inferior and degenerate elements (p203; see also Armstrong, 1927). For Curle the masses, or the Unt, although less prey to communism than Stoddard suggests, are equally as primitive. A new class and racial war is in the ofng he notes, between the masses who will soon be in control of legislation (p215) and who, out of a sense of selfpreservation, seek to thwart eugenic legislation, and the one man or woman in twenty-ve who possess what is good in the British (p62). Viewing the world through what Taguieff (1995) calls the reductio ad Hitlerum concerns of contemporary anti-racism, it is tempting to categorise such views as proto-fascist. In this way the opinions of Pearson, Inge, Putnam Weale, Money, Curle et al., appear to achieve at least partial fullment within the neoaristocratic totalitarian regimes of the 1930s and 1940s. Although this line of ascent is not without foundation, it overlooks the fact
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that the literature of white crisis tells us more about the contradictions and failure of racial supremacism than about its political possibilities. Once the bulk of whites had been dismissed as, in some way, inadequate, the problem of how to construct a positive programme to save white society became acute. Indicative of the seriousness of the problem is the fact that many of the texts under discussion conclude with utopian ourishes; far-fetched proclamations of racial re-birth. Freemans (1921) and Inges (1922) plans for experimental communities of superior whites are illustrative. Freeman envisaged such settlements in Britain, whilst Inge warned that they would need to be established in remote colonies (he suggests, Western Canada, Southern Chile or Rhodesia) in order to avoid cross-class contamination. In either location, the settlements would consist of non-degraded whites who could live, work and reproduce in isolation. Such plans clearly suggest that the only way of saving the race is to escape white society. In so doing they condemn whiteness as inadequate to the task of dening a meaningful identity for the cultural/racial elite. The idea of a white race is central to this genre, yet it constantly fails these authors. Or, rather, they fail to believe in it sufciently for it to be effective and sufcient. It is unsurprising that the literature of white crisis was soon forgotten, the titles of its key texts coming to look, from the late 1930s onwards, somewhat startling and eccentric. Yet there is another story running both alongside and within the texts under discussion. For there are powerful hints in each of the texts considered of how another category of identity, that of the West, could offer rmer foundations for our identity, particularly for an elite identity. However, before we can consider the rise of the West, it is necessary to note some of the other factors that helped ensure the eclipse of whiteness as an explicit and unembarrassed reference within Western public debate. The Rhetoric of White Supremacism: Decline and Eclipse The literature of white crisis shows the limits of white supremacism. More specically, it illustrates the difculty of sustaining commitments to racial solidarity, racial supremacism and social anti-egalitarianism as a coherent and stable belief-system. Such a world view is not merely prone to crisis but manacled to it. One can nd evidence to suggest that politicians and other public commentators in Britain were loosing faith in the idea that whites were natural rulers at anytime in the period under review. However, a reasonable case can be made for the immediate wake of the First World War providing the rst clear expression of a serious collapse of the ideology of white imperial destiny (Irvine, 1972). Pannikar
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(1953, p201) notes of the period that, With the solitary exception of Churchill, there was not one major gure in any of the British parties who confessed to a faith in the white mans mission to rule. If they had sought to, such doubters could have received intellectual support from liberal anti-imperialists, the most prominent of whom in Britain was J.A. Hobson. In The Crisis of Liberalism, Hobson had warned that,
Deliberately to set out upon a new career as a civilised nation with a denition of civilisation which takes as the criterion race and colour, not individual character and attainments is nothing less than to sow a crop of dark and dangerous problems for the future (Hobson, 1972, p244; rst published 1910).
The theme that Hobson stresses that racial ideology breeds contempt and conict provided the most potent and inuential challenge to the explicit assertion of the white ideal. Rich (1986) has detailed how the feeling that race prejudice was in some respects linked to war encouraged the mood of hostility to it in the 1920s as liberals and socialists hoped for an international order that would end all war (p98). However, the retreat from race and, more specically from whiteness, encompassed a much broader political constituency than those on the left. The feeling Rich identies also increasingly shaped Christian views on race. In The Clash of Colour, the missionary and Christian publicist Basil Matthews (1925) drew on images of Britains brutish ancient past, to assert that white superiority is of recent growth; it may not persist for long (p135). His solution to the menace of world race-war (p142) rested upon the assertion of Christian fellowship within the World team. Within the scientic community too, views were shifting. Criticism of race as an objectively intelligible category may be discerned throughout the history of scientic racism (see Hannaford, 1996). However, the credibility of race became fatally compromised once knowledge of genetics had advanced to the point where race was irrelevant to the scientic classication of human difference (see Barkan, 1992, for discussion). Britain Hogbens Genetic Principles (1931) and Haldanes Heredity and Politics (1938) provided the rst sustained scientic refutations of racism. It was a position popularised by Huxley and Haddon in We Europeans (1939; rst published 1935). Huxley and Haddon suggested that the word race should be banished, and the descriptive and non-committal term ethnic group should be substituted (p220). The notion that the word ethnic (and, by extension ethnicity) is to be preferred because it enables one to avoid implying connotations of homogeneity, of purity of descent, and so forth (p221), helped to restrict
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racial labels, such as white, to the ignorant terminological currency of everyday, pre-scientic, communication. Another factor was moving against the rhetoric of white supremacism. Summarising his assessment of British scholarly and popular journals of the 1930s, Fredi (1998) notes that a clear correlation was drawn between those who were racially conscious and those who were anti-white (p121). What Fredi is highlighting is an increasing tendency to associate racial consciousness with a consciousness of racial oppression. Thus it became the task of British colonial policy, not merely to rhetorically deracialise colonial encounters but, at least to appear, to oppose the meaningfulness of the very idea of racial hierarchy. This process was considerably encouraged by a desire to challenge the global inuence of the Soviet Union (the anti-racist credentials of the USSR were taken seriously within Britian, even by ardent anticommunists; see for example Hodson, 1950). The association of race hatred with Nazism further consolidated the authority of anti-racism. There is, noted one senior British ofcial in the wake of the clear opposition to race discrimination offered in the United Nations Charter (1945), something like ofcial unanimity of opposition to this species of primitive prejudice (Corbett, 1945, p27). The notion that whiteness was a meaningful cultural factor was also undermined by mounting evidence that Westernisation was both possible and often profound. The modernisation of Turkey and China provided two inuential illustrations of a process that clearly questioned the basis of racial determinism. This point may be evidenced by reference to the literature of white crisis itself, as I explain in the next section. However, non-whites (or nonWesterners) aspiration to be Western also provided the central concern of other internationally minded commentators (Toynbee, 1923; 1931; see also Marvin, 1922). Explaining the formation of a new world culture, Toynbee (1931) noted that, whilst before 1914, Westernisation was carried out as a minimal programme, after the war, non-Western peoples, especially in the East, have been seized by a furore of iconoclasm (p764): Apparently the Turks and the Chinese have come to the conclusion that the world of the future is destined to be unied on a Western basis, not only on the supercial economic plane, but right down to the deeper levels of social life (p765). Thus the public legitimacy of the white ideal drained away. The second half of the twentieth century saw the emergence, and certainly the popularisation, of much of the terminology that now explains earlier British attitudes to race (for example, the terms racist and white supremacist). I have afforded the diverse forces
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that came to be lined up against the public discourse of white supremacist an admittedly minimal treatment. This is, partly, because of the constraints of space. It is also a reection of the fact that my analysis suggests that, even at its zenith, white identity was in crisis: with hindsight its decline and eclipse appears foretold in its propaganda. In addition, I have argued that white identity does not possess a discrete history: contemporaneous with this crisis, another form of identity was emerging and gaining acceptance, both within and alongside the literature of white decay.
Becoming Western The contemporary idea of the West refers to far more than a geographical entity. It is a social, political and ethnic designation designed to evoke those values, practices and people that are, in other contexts, described as one or all of the following: democratic, capitalist, free, modern, developed, Christian, white. The notion that Western society is a unity (Toynbee, 1923, p4), that the West has its own discrete history, that it is an intelligible eld of study (Toynbee, 1934, p36); that it is, moreover, a perspective, an ethno-cultural repertoire, is a late nineteenth century and twentieth century creation that far exceeds the terms older, largely religious, meanings (cf Baritz, 1961). Indeed, in Britain, an ideologically elaborated and defended notion of the West was relatively rare until the last two decades of the nineteenth century. The phrase the Western world is used by Marx (1992, p319; originally published 1853) in the 1850s when commenting upon British colonial policy in Asia. The same context, if different political conclusions, occasions the use of the term by Macaulay in 1835 (Macaulay, 1970). GoGwilt (1995) notes such usages are merely descriptive. However, these authors were well versed in stereotypes of Eastern social rigidity and conservatism. These are clichs to the fore in Marxs depiction, in Capital, of Asiatic unchangeableness. The concomitant stereotype of the West was pin-pointed in the radical British MP, Joseph Cowens depiction, from 1880, of the conicting civilizations of East and the West the one iconoclastic and progressive, the other traditional and conservative (Cowen, 1909, p87). However, where GoGwilt is right is in his insistence on the increased complexity and ubiquity of the idea of the West in the context of perceived threat to it. He goes on to argue that
Precisely because the superiority of European knowledge remained unquestioned, there was no need for an idea of the West. The point at which such an idea was
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needed was the moment when it was no longer clear . . . what Europeans were doing administering societies outside Europe. (GoGwilt, 1995, p222).
The roots of the contemporary meaning of the West are most clearly traceable to early-mid nineteenth century Russia, where the term formed part of a debate between Westernisers and Slavophiles (Bassin, 1991; 1998; Neumann, 1996). The political commentary of Danilevsky, especially his book Russia and Europe (1890; originally published 1869), is indicative of the way that the Russian debate preceded later Western accounts. Danilevsky developed a model of the life-cycle of civilisations, and argued that the West had entered its decadent stage. Both ideas were later to be reinvented by Western Europeans (such as Spengler and Toynbee). However, although the rst British book-length elucidation of Western civilisation was published in 1902 (Kidd, 1902), the notion of a Western civilisation and Western identity only began to achieve ubiquity from the 1920s. It cannot be claimed that the contemporary notion of the West emerged out of the literature of white crisis, certainly not in any direct or simple fashion. However, this old word for a new idea did represent a partial resolution of this literatures problematic attempts to marry social elitism with racial solidarity. Usually dened as a civilisation, rather than a race, the West could connote an enviable and exclusive cultural heritage alongside a sense of social commonality. This function of the idea is apparent both within the literature of white crisis and from the emerging literature about the West that also developed from the 1890s. In what follows I shall: rst, address the role of the West within the studies of white crisis; second, examine the overlapping and contemporaneous body of work that privileged the West as its main object of inquiry; and third, and far more sketchily and speculatively, consider why the West was taken-up after the exhaustion of the white crisis literature in the 1930s. However, before continuing, it is useful to admit that the literatures of white crisis and the West can be difcult to separate. The habit of using white, Western and civilised as synonyms can be found in both types of work. Moreover, certain genuinely hybrid formulations developed, such as the notion of a Western race (for example, Marvin, 1922; see also Little, 1907). However, in the light of the analysis provided earlier, what is most striking about the literature that employs the West as its principal analytic category and descriptive focus is its ability to side-step the contradictions of racial logic, especially the problems associated with the assertion of racial solidarity in a highly stratied society. The West is dened as a set of principles or values inherent within (or associated with)
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a European or Western Christian heritage, culture and history. It is not dened explicitly as a natural unit but as a cultural force; a current of such self-evident sophistication that, whatever its future, it appears as more socially and intellectually advanced than potential rival civilisations. This ethno-cultural reading of the West may also be discerned within the literature of white crisis. It remains there as a marginal device, its latent signicance overshadowed by the assumptions and prejudices of white supremacism. Yet, although infrequent, its presence tells us a great deal about the utility of the idea. It is particularly revealing that when the higher aspirations and cultural achievements of white civilisation are being depicted they are often called Western. Referring to white colonial control, Money (1925) notes that Contemplating the glories of western art, philosophy and science, we feel justied in holding dominion (p166). Thus, racial power is legitimised by reference to categories and social forms that slide away from clear racial designation. The abstract and lofty terrain of Westerness is also communicated by its association with the grandest scale of international political machinations (Inge, 1919; 1922; Putnam Weale, 1910). When these authors write of the Western world they appear to be exhibiting a concern that white is too small and reductive a word. Hence, despite the centrality of the latter category to their analyses, a sense of frustration with its prosaic, lumpen quality emerges between the lines. A related illustration of the way the idea of the West is used to help resolve the contradictions and tensions inherent within racial thinking may be found in the tendency to deploy the term when these commentators are trying to grapple with the distinction between European and Asian races as well as between Russia and Western Europe. The idea of the West is found most frequently in Stoddard when he is seeking to differentiate these entities8. It is a distinction that, as I note below, was further popularised by Spengler and his followers. Yet in the studies of white crisis, such distinctions are neither rationalised nor explained in terms of their central premise (ie., the white ideal). The West is used but left untheorised. It appears as a useful device, a quick x, for when whiteness no longer functions. One of the clearest examples of the usefulness of the idea of the West, is that it allows these authors to broach the issue of cultural mimesis. The philosophy and social atmosphere of the West, notes Putnam Weale (1910) may be totally different (p130) to that of the East, but that has not stopped the Japanese from borrowing and adopting the civilisation and inventions of the West (p135). Whilst whiteness can only be mimicked (see also Champly, 1936),
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Westerness can be borrowed and adopted. It is a position that implies that race is xed but culture is uid. Yet these authors also contend that culture is a racial attribute. Thus Westernisation is a possibility that disrupts their racial logic. It holds a fascination for them but is, fundamentally, theoretically indigestible. Inevitably, Pearson, Inge, Putnam Weale, Money, Curle et al all maintain that, at root, Westernisation is a sham, a supercial spectacle: non-whites can never acquire the ways of whiteness. Yet this manoeuvre, designed to save race as an explanatory principle, exposes another aspect of its unsustainability, especially when contrasted with the ability of less racially determinist commentators, such as Toynbee (1931), to empirically substantiate Westernisation as an inescapable aspect of an emerging world culture. The literature of white crisis contains the seed of its own intellectual subversion and succession. By allowing the West to resolve the incoherence of whiteness, these commentators may be read as admitting to the inadequacy of their central category. Thus the studies they produced expose the limits of whiteness at the same time as they provide brief glimpses of the way Western identity might be cast as radically changing the terms of the debate. However, to understand how the West emerged alongside and through this debate we need to turn to an, initially much smaller but closely related, body of British social and political commentary; the literature of the West or, more accurately, Western civilisation. Despite the fact that its political conclusions were not necessarily less racist, it is a literature whose concerns and terminology are more familiar to contemporary readers. As noted earlier, the idea of the West and, more specically of Western civilisation, was closely associated with the delineation and analysis of principles or values. The intellectually elevated nature of this focus allowed Westerness to be defended whilst, at the same time, critiqued in its own terms. In other words, a central device of this body of studies is the auto-critique, in which the West is seen as failing to live up to its own high standards or cultural potential. As this implies, the West is relatively amenable to the language and politics of reexive social criticism; a phenomenon of considerable rarity within the British debate about whiteness. Ramsey MacDonalds speech to the West London Ethical society in 1901 (The propaganda of civilization), provides a signicant illustration of the nature and critical possibilities of such auto-critique. MacDonalds argument relies on his account of the two attributes that dene Western. The superior claims of Western civilization, he notes are founded mainly on two circumstances the rst is our abhorrence of violent human suffering; the second, the value
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we place upon settled government (MacDonald, 1901, p460). The rst of these circumstances may be taken to evidence the continuing inuence of an identication of the West with Christian values. However, it is also more than suggestive of the possibility of the detachment of religion from humanitarian discourse and the development of a concern for human rights. The second attribute of the West Macdonald identies is rooted in the association of Western civilisation with clear systems of legal and accountable justice. McDonalds argument is that the former circumstance is not lived up to in practice, whilst the latter is inappropriate in non-Western societies. Although occasionally conating Westerners with whites, MacDonalds decision to privilege the former category over the latter is not coincidental or arbitrary. Western offered a racially deracinated language amenable to the language of objective and detached critique. By contrast, the notion of white principles and white values would appear immediately suspect, precisely because it appears to by-pass the terrain of culture and, therefore, of civilisation, thus scuppering the possibility of auto-critique. However, although in many ways highly prescient, McDonalds interpretation of the West is not our own. It is notable that he does not identify a political meaning to Western: it is represented as too broad a term to be associated with creeds such as market values or socialism. Nor does Macdonald permit the possibility of Westernisation. Indeed, he maintains that [c]ivilzation cannot be transplanted (p463): to be sustainable, he notes, civilisation must be organic to a people or race. Moreover, MacDonalds views cannot be taken to represent the way the West was seen in 1901. This is not because they were unique or exceptional but, rather, because the West remained a highly mobile term. The uidity of the concept at this time is amply demonstrated by the work of Kidd. Although Kidd introduced the notion of our western civilisation in Social Evolution (1894) it is within Principles of Western Civilisation, a lesser known but more intellectually ambitious book, that the concept nds its rst thorough examination (see also Lishman, 1906). It is immediately apparent from this text that the principles to which Kidd refers are not those that were later to become familiar, at least within the West. The West is not dened in terms of democracy, humanitarianism, or, indeed any liberal value but, rather, as a form of spirit, or consciousness, that is intellectually superior and militarily enforced. Kidd regards the true promise of the West to lie in its potential to subjugate the present to the service of the future. [T]he signicance of Western civilisation he argues, has been related to a single cause; namely, the potentiality of a
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principle inherent in it to project the controlling principles of its consciousness beyond the present (p289). Lassiz-faire, for Kidd, was a surviving form of barbarism (p455) because it was unable to look beyond present needs. Kidd predicted the gradual organisation and direction of the State . . . towards an era of such free and efcient conict of all natural forces as has never been in the world before (p469). As this implies, Kidds western principles are those that ensure the Wests victory in a world of ceaseless struggle and domination: We are par excellence the military peoples, not only of the entire world, but of the evolutionary process itself (p458). Kidds racial vocabulary is vague. It is clear that he sees a racial content to being Western and that Western civilisation is, inevitably, white. However, notwithstanding his ardent Social Darwinism, Kidds West is a decidedly non-material entity. It is a form of consciousness or mind. The Western mind, he writes is destined, sooner or later, to rise to a conception of the nature of truth itself different from any that has hitherto prevailed in the world (p309). Kidds focus on ontological abstractions led to his contribution appearing marginal to the, more mainstream, debate on whiteness (indeed, Inge (1922, p255) accuses him of being an irrationalist). But it also enabled him to render irrelevant the kinds of crises that were causing such anguish within that literature. By by-passing direct engagement with race Kidd is able to ignore issues of racial purity, solidarity and sustainability and, hence, questions of class character and quality. Western principles and our western civilisation are expressed as transcendental forces whose inherent superiority lies in their orientation to the future, as well as in their, literally, merciless enforcement. The success of the West in the modern world-conict was thus certain: [i]t is the principles of our Western civilisation . . . and no others, that we feel are destined to hold the future of the world (p340). Kidds focus on a conict of world civilisations, a clash in which the superiority of Western civilisation was, at root, founded in the relative and absolute superiority of the Western spirit or mind, emerged as one of his most inuential legacies. Although Kidds work is unquestionably supremacist, it both sustained and subverted the more empirical and reductive language of race. The difculty of combing the two discourses is apparent within Hubbards The Fate of Empires (1913), a book which provided a somewhat uneasy denition of race as the sum of the, as yet, unborn generations (p33) in order to marry Kidds theories of future oriented societies with the dictates of the conventional
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white crisis debate. A similar problematic may be seen at work within Spenglers studies, which were to have a considerable impact in Britain in the late 1920s and early 1930s. Spengler and his proponents within Britain, such as Goddard and Gibbens (1926), share with Kidd a sense of western civilisation as a set of historical forces and values. However, the Spenglarian tradition takes the non-rationalist agenda apparent within Kidd even further, leaving aside evolutionary theory to distinguish Western Culture as an autonomous form of being or Destiny. In this way the empirical concerns of the study of white crisis are made to appear clumsy and irrelevant. Yet, whilst undermining race as science, this approach allows its further mystication as an experienced social fact. For, example, whilst Spengler (1926) is condescending about racial science as soon as light is let through it, race vanishes suddenly and completely (p129) he concludes that race is not accessible to a science that weighs and measures. It exists for the feelings with a plain certainty and at rst glance but not for the savants treatment (p130).9 Toynbees opposition to the racial content of Spenglers thinking allowed him to develop a more thoroughly cultural vision of what constitutes a civilisation. This deracialisation came to be essential, in the latter half of the century, for the legitimacy and authority of histories of the West (see, for example, Fukuyama, 1992; Roberts, 1985). However, Toynbee shared with Spengler an insistence that Russia and Western Europe have little in common. Spengler (1926, p16) differentiated between what he called the meaningless empty sound of the word Europe, and the more meaningful terms East and West. It is thanks to this word Europe alone and the complex of ideas resulting from it, he complained, that our historical consciousness has come to link Russia with the West in an utterly baseless unity. Goddard and Gibbons concured: not only does Russia not think like Western Europe but it never has done (Goddard and Gibbons, 1926, p48). Such statements were designed to provide a sense of historical depth to a sensibility that, in fact, had much shallower roots. More specically, they offered an explanation of the success of communism in Russia that connected it to the primitive and Asiatic qualities of the country. It was through this process of association that the West began to take on a far more specic political meaning than it had so far acquired. The idea that to be Western was to be capitalist or, at least, non-communist, did not emerge suddenly. However, during the 1920s the equation of the West with capitalism became a common rhetorical device within both the West and the Soviet Union. From this association a number of other connotations grew, connecting the West with the free market, demo Blackwell Publishing Ltd 2003.
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cracy and an open society. This chain of association was further strengthened by the casting of both fascism and Nazism as, like communism, authoritarian and inhumane and, therefore, not authentically Western ideologies.10 In Our Threatened Values Gollancz (1946) provided one of the clearest articulations of this position, repeatedly drawing communism and Nazism together as non-Western: For Nazis, western values are, I repeat, evil, Gollancz writes, for communism they are, for the time being at least, irrelevant (p623). Such formulations helped to render further redundant the kinds of crisis of class character and solidarity discussed in the previous section. Within a world divided between authoritarianism and Western open society, the whiteness of Russia or the Nazis became an irrelevance, a racial commonality that merely obscured the real differences. As the cultural content and denition of the West became further elaborated, the degraded nature of the white working class, already side-stepped by Kidd, was made to appear an archaic concern. The working class are notable for their absence in the discussions of Kidd and Spengler and, despite his contention that the post-Modern Age [is] marked by the rise of an industrial urban working class (1954, p338), they play little active role in Toynbees vision of contemporary Western civilisation or, indeed, for any of those who may be said to have contributed to the emerging literature on this topic. Their sights were higher and certainly more abstract. They had found a language through which to talk about us that appeared to marginalise problems concerning who exactly, empirically, we were. Even more remarkable, the West became a comprehensible collective identity that connoted a certain group of people, who just happened to be of European heritage, without it appearing to be mired in the racial mythologies of the past. The deracinated, deracialised content of the idea of the West was sustained by the development of an association between being Western and a cosmopolitan and relativist world-view. It is revealing to note, in this regard, that in her account of the way rural life in the West has been depicted in Western works of ction throughout the twentieth century as a kind of interior non-West, NadelKlein (1995) suggests that the real west has been represented as possessing urban, bourgeois, cosmopolitan values (p111). Moreover, there exists a tendency to symbolise the truly Western person as one [who] must think, live and act independently of local custom and kinship, free from the parochial constraints of any particular community (p111). The deployment of the urban cosmopolis as the real West, Nadel-Klein implies, demands its association with middle class sophistication. Thus the working
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class city type that so frightened earlier commentators disappears (even further) from view. An irony becomes apparent: the West is being represented, in contrast to communist societies and non-European societies, as open and democratic, yet the idea of the West appears less socially inclusive than more explicitly racial categories, most notably whiteness. This problem appears to have been partially resolved by the emergence, not of a new phenomenon, but of a new site of emphasis within the meaning of the West in the second half of the last century; namely the association between Western and commercialised popular culture. This development has meant, for example, that Western music could come to be conated with pop music and, by association, Western dynamism, freedom and tolerance seen as incarnated albeit sometimes self-consciously perversely in Western youth and celebrity (see, for example, Simpson, 1993; Creighton, 1995). And yet despite the ubiquity of these associations, evidence of popular afliation to the category Western in the West is unclear. Moreover, whilst an assertive white identity may have become marginalised within public discourse, within private and everyday forms of interaction and communication it still has considerable currency (Back, 1995; Frankenberg, 1997). Its continuing utility reects the maintenance of racialised power relations and gives the lie to the idea that the rhetorical deracialisation of public life, including the move from the language of whiteness to the idea of the West, reects the fact that racism no longer matters. I noted earlier the temptation to read the transition from white to Western as a transition to euphemism, a shift to the obfuscation of racism. The mismatch between public and everyday racial rhetoric mentioned above is certainly suggestive of such a conclusion. However, this public/everyday disjunction should not be over-emphasised, especially if it leads us to the erroneous idea that the Westernsiation of the West was a merely semantic process. The true signicance of this transition is, unfortunately, clouded by the unceasing appetite for narratives announcing The Triumph of the West (Roberts, 1985), or Why the West has Won (Hanson, 2001) or The west has won (Fukuyama, 2001) or, indeed, attempting to re-ignite the conict of civilisations thesis (Huntingdon, 1997). Huntingdons position strikes an especially anachronistic note since he racialises the West, noting that a signicant correspondence exists between the division of people by cultural characteristics into civilizations and their division by physical charactersistics into races (p42). Indeed, in The Clash of Civilizations he offers a map of the geographical concentrations of non-whites
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in the United States as evidence that that country is a cleft country (p205). The meaning and meaningfulness of the idea of the West has, moreover, become inseparable from the way that various forms of identity are, to a lesser or greater extent, constructed as antiWestern or non-Western (Asian values and what is commonly termed, at least in the West, Islamic fundamentalism are two notable examples). In this context, the Wests history becomes ever more elusive: it has passed through so many hands, has so many owners and inventors, that claims to have discerned its origins should always be treated with suspicion. My focus in this article has been less upon who gave us the idea of the West than upon how it worked within and against the literature of white crisis. This specic focus is designed to open-up the limits of the latter discourse, to expose its tensions and inadequacies, as well as to show how the idea of the West represented a partial resolution of these tensions as well as a response to the new context and pressures of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It is this ability, this utility, of the idea of the West that I shall return to in my conclusion. Conclusions Interrupting the polite hum of dinner party conversation, Tom Buchanan, the wealthy cad at the heart of The Great Gatsby, is moved to exclaim Civilizations going to pieces. The startled guests are treated to Buchanans particular view of world events: If we dont look out the white race will be will be utterly submerged. Its all scientic stuff; its been proved. F. Scott Fitzgerald has his character cite as evidence a book called The Rise of the Colored Empires by this man Goddard. On one level this incident is evidence merely of Fitzgeralds familiarity with one of the many incendiary racial tracts of the early 1920s (namely, The Rising Tide of Color Against White World Supremacy by Lothrop Stoddard) However, Buchanans opinions are clearly designed to evoke something bigger. They are employed by Fitzgerald to create a tone of moral panic, a pessimistic atmosphere sustained by the existence of a far-reaching and inuential debate on the collapse of white prestige. One of the distinctive attributes of this debate, in the USA as in Britain, was that it signalled both a crisis and the zenith of white identity as a public ideal. Whiteness was celebrated before 1890 but rarely with such concerted fervour and never with such an elaborate repetoire of scientic and social justications. Whiteness was celebrated after 1930 but, increasingly, those who did the
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celebrating were not drawn from the leading social and political commentators of the day. That white identitys moment of triumph should also be its moment of peril is no coincidence. Having become established as the symbol of extraordinary achievement and superiority, as the talisman of world-wide social authority, whiteness was vulnerable to any sign of challenge or social disturbance. The fact that white supremacism relied on the authority of the natural, of biological fact, compounded its unsustainability. For once the white race is accepted as an objective reality its attributes must be represented objectively, without the interference of social factors, such as class prejudice. In other words, all white people have to have the characteristics of whiteness: they must all be superior, they must all be t to rule. Yet there was no subject that the white supremacists discussed in this article felt more strongly about than the inadequacy of the masses. Their racism demanded social egalitarianism; their social elitism demanded something quite different. Something like the idea of the West perhaps? There is some truth in the latter contention but it is also too neat, too glib. We cannot assume that, because it was in the context of the crisis of white identity that the idea of the West began to become attractive, that this crisis therefore produced or led to the idea of the West. This point needs to be insisted upon, whilst at the same time the contemporaneous and novel character of the concept of the West that was emerging is recognised. Something new was being born. The literature of white crisis illuminates some of the reasons why, as well as nearly all the reasons why whiteness was inadequate to the challenges, not merely that lay ahead, but of the moment. In as far as the move away from whiteness and towards the idea of the West was a move away from using nature, and, more specifically, race, as a way of differentiating people and towards a social and political denition of community, it represents a form of deracialisation. Yet this process was a partial one: the term Western remained racially coded, burdened with the expectation that the world will never be free, open and democratic until it was Europeanised. The attacks on the USA on September 11th 2001 appeared to many to re-open traditional debates about the West versus the Rest. However, these debates are, for the most part, traditional only in as much as they refer back to the work of commentators from the period under review, the period when not merely the discourse of a clash of civilisations was rst fully elaborated but the contemporary idea of what the West means was introduced and developed. This article has argued that this idea cannot be understood, at least not well, if Western civilisation is understood as a discrete tradition. More uncomfortable material must also be
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engaged: material that suggests that the success of the idea of the West was mirrored by the failure of the idea of whiteness.
Notes
1 Although this article concerns the idea of the West, the terms West, Western and Westernisation are not placed in inverted commas unless the demands of clear expression necessitate it. This does not signal the unproblematic nature of these constructs but, rather, a desire to neither patronise the reader nor create a division between problematised and nonproblematised terms, a division which would have the effect of naturalising all the geographical and ethnic categories employed in this article not placed between scare quotes. 2 The clearest testament to this process is the assertion that whiteness is now invisible within public debate (see, for example, Delgado and Stefancic, 1997; Fine, et al., 1997; Lpez, 1996). 3 The period 18901930 contained the rise and fall of the literature of white crisis, as well as the rise of the idea of the West. However, the years at either end of this span have no special signicance. In support of this periodisation we may refer to Gogwilts (1995, p221) conclusion that the idea of Western history . . . [emerged] between the 1880s and the 1920s, as well as to Richs (1994, p90) assessment that In the course of the 1890s . . . writers began expressing pessimism over the future of the white race, and that a new climate of opinion [on the legitimacy of race patriotism] among the ruling class became apparent in the 1930s (p98). 4 The focus on Britain should not be taken to indicate that a literature of white crisis was uniquely British. In particular, a similar genre developed in France and the USA. Pearsons racial pessimism was echoed in France by Faguet (1895), whilst the regeneration of whiteness is the main theme of LAvenir de la race blanche (Novicow, 1897) and Le destin des races blanches (Decugis, 1936), a theme given an anti-feminist twist by Henry Champly in works translated as The Road to Shanghai: White Slave Trafc in Asia (1934) and White Women, Coloured Men (1936). A large and diverse body of white crisis literature was produced in the USA, the principal examples of which are Stoddard (1922; 1925) and Grant (1917; originally published 1916). 5 The waning of Anglo-Saxonism may also be discerned in this work. Indeed, like most of the authors discussed here, Pearson appears to have little interest in the Anglo-Saxon, as either a racial or national group. The decline of this identity may be taken to reect the exhaustion of the imperial fervour of the 1880s and 1890s, a process that may, in turn, have encouraged the celebration of whiteness precisely because, as a supranational identity, it was less intimately bound to the increasingly uncertain fortunes of the British empire (see also Rich, 1986). 6 This chain of association was developed in the literature of white crisis into a racial fear of socialism. However, it also extended beyond the connes of class, particularly through the critique of the atrophying effects of comfort and luxury. Thus, for example, in Degeneration: A Chapter in Darwinism (1880), Lankester offered the example of the life cycle of the sea-squirt in which the animal throws away its tail and its eye and sinks into a quiescent state of inferiority as a warning to the white race of Europe, who were liable to degenerate into a contended life of material enjoyment (p62).
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A concern with the low birth rate of the middle classes has been claimed to be the primary motive behind the eugenics movement (Searle, 1976; MacKenzie, 1976). As Stone has recently explained, this position has been used by contemporary historians to justify a view of British eugenics as a class, rather than a race-based, ideology. Whilst agreeing with Stone that there is plenty of evidence to the contrary (p418) this paper is suggestive of the mutually subversive tension between these concerns. 8 It might be expected that those contributors to the white crisis literature, such as Inge and Stoddard, most concerned to assert the importance of racial divisions within whiteness, would nd the terms the West and Western too loose and homogenising. However, it is revealing that, as with Money, Stoddards (1922), otherwise constant, anxieties about the racial and class composition of whiteness fade into the background when he adopts the terminology of western civilisation (p6). This process is allied with an appropriation of the tradition of casting Christianity as Western and Islam as Eastern and the, also well established, extension of this practice to allow East to mean Asia. Thus, Inges (1922) extreme sensitivity to the divisions within whiteness is allowed occasionally to be salved by knowledge of the unending dual between East and West (p211). The same process may be seen at work in the, less militantly supremacist, contributions of Putman Weale (1910), whose depiction of the conict between East and West as the oldest of problems (p3) belies his highly contemporary usage of both terms. For, despite these claims on historical depth, all these authors use the idea of the West, not as a religious term, nor even as one dened in relation to the East but, rather, as a cultural entity variously synonymous with military might, industrialism, progress, and the modern. 9 That the mystication of race allows the re-introduction of the language of white identity and white supremacy is apparent from Spenglers The Hour of Decision (1934). 10 Arthur Keith (1946) noted the assertion so often made in our Press and in our pulpits: We are ghting this war to save civilisation sometimes specied as Western civilisation; at others as Christian civilisation (p92). The difculty of accepting fascism and Nazism as Western was confronted by Toynbee in volume six of The Study of History, published in 1939: Italy and Germany are no alien appendages to the Western body social; they are bone of its bone and esh of its esh; and it follows that the social revolution which has taken place yesterday in Italy and Germany under our eyes may overtake us in France or England or the Netherlands or Scandinavia tomorrow (p57; also Toynbee, 1953: tyranny . . . has raised its head among our Western selves p7). Acknowledgements
I am grateful for the comments of two anonymous referees for their helpful comments on an earlier draft of this article.
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From White To Western: 'Racial Decline' and The Idea of The West in Britain 1890-1930

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From White To Western: 'Racial Decline' and The Idea of The West in Britain 1890-1930

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Journal of Historical Sociology Vol. 16 No.

3 September 2003 ISSN 0952-1909

From White to Western

From White to Western

From White to Western

From White to Western

From White to Western

From White to Western

From White to Western

From White to Western

Blackwell Publishing Ltd 2003.

From White to Western

Blackwell Publishing Ltd 2003.

From White to Western

Blackwell Publishing Ltd 2003.

From White to Western

Blackwell Publishing Ltd 2003.

From White to Western

Blackwell Publishing Ltd 2003.

From White to Western

From White to Western

Blackwell Publishing Ltd 2003.

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