From white to western: 'racial decline' and the idea of the west in Britain 1890-1930

7/31/2019 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 Declineand the Idea of the West in Britain,

18901930

ALASTAIR BONNETT

Abstract Drawing on British works of imperial and social commentary, this articleshows how a literature of white crisis emerged between 18901930. It was a liter-

ature that, whilst claiming to defend and affirm white identity, in fact exposed the

limits of whitenessas 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 specifi-

cally, 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 whiteracial identity has a marginal place within public debate. Indeed,any such affirmation appears to have become, perhaps irre-deemably, associated with a reactionary and ignorant populism.This connection has been interpreted as a response to relativelyrecent phenomena, such as the rise of multicultural rhetoric withincivic life2. However, not only does such an interpretation provide aforeshortened history of the crises of whiteness, but it is unable toaddress the most pressing question that arises from these crises,

namely what kind of identities have emerged in the place ofwhiteness?

Drawing largely on British works of imperial and social com-mentary, this article shows how between 189019303 thereemerged a literature of white crisis, a literature that, whilst claim-ing to celebrate white identity, in fact exposed the limits of white-ness as a form of social solidarity. By identifying whiteness asinherently and eternally vulnerable to attack and, moreover, asbased upon an allegiance between the masses and the elite thatneither side was willing to support, these studies unwittinglyexposed the unsustainable and contradictory logic of white racism.The idea of the West, developing alongside, within and in the wakeof this crisis literature, provided a less racially reductive but notnecessarily less socially exclusive vision of community. As thisimplies, my concern is not to identify a linear transition from white

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Journal of Historical SociologyVol. 16 No. 3 September 2003ISSN 0952-1909


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to Western but to explicate a varied arena of transformation inwhich whiteness gradually came to seem an inappropriate andinadequate identity to evoke for those engaged in public debate,whilst the idea of the West became increasingly attractive anduseful. The temptation to claim that Western was (and is) merelya euphemism for white will be, at least partially, resisted. TheWest and white were rarely entirely synonymous, either in termsof their meaning or usage. More specifically, the idea of the Westbecame useful because it could evoke a set of political principlesand values that could be both cosmopolitan and ethnocentric,apparently open to all but rooted in the experiences and expecta-tions of a narrow social strata.

It is difficult to understand the history of whiteness withoutalso interrogating its declining role in public discourse. Yet thisderacialisation process was not discrete or autonomous from thechanging fortunes of other categories of social affiliation. It isinstructive to bring this focus upon the entangled nature of iden-tities into contrast with Fredis position in The Silent War(1998),a study which details the rhetoric of deracialisation within inter-national politics in the first half of the last century. Fredi effec-tively demonstrates a growing awareness amongst British colonial

officials and their political masters that race was being used asan axis of solidarityagainstwhite control. It was, he maintains,because race came to be seen as destabilising and dangerous tothe established geopolitical order that official support and legiti-macy for anti-racism began to emerge. Fredis central thesis iscertainly of interest, yet it also remains mired in one of the moreunhelpful conventions of contemporary ethnic and racial history,namely that any such account must prioritise narratives of explicitracism (paying particular attention to their material reproduction

and rhetorical obfuscation). As we shall see, when exploring therelationship between whiteness and the West, it is just as impor-tant to understand how the idea of being Western became attrac-tive and how the West was westernised, as it is appreciate the flightfrom whiteness.

There are four parts to my account. In the first two sections Ioutline the constituent themes within studies of white crisis pro-duced by British social and political commentators between 1890and 1930 (inevitably a few important non-British works that hada significant impact of the British debate are also drawn into thediscussion4). The former of these two sections addresses the widerset of factors that provoked this crisis discourse. It is my inten-tion, not simply to establish that such a discourse did exist, butalso to show how it brought into collision a variety of challengesdeemed 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 samebody of literature. It examines the uneasy relationship between thedefence of whiteness and the critique of mass society. This dis-cussion is supplemented, in a brief third section, by an assessmentof the main factors that undermined the credibility of whitesupremacism and the idea of race in the early-mid twentiethcentury. In the final and fourth part of the article I explain the riseof the idea of the West and offer some suggestions as to why andhow it interacted with whiteness. Drawing on both the literature ofwhite crisis and a contemporaneous and related literature thatasserted the West as a discrete social and ethno-geographical cat-egory, it is shown how the concept of Western identity reflected

and, at least in part, helped resolve, the experience of crisis thathad come to be associated with whiteness.

Narratives of White Decay

The period when the white race was represented as undergoinga grave crisis was, in Britain, also the period when white suprema-cism was most fully and boldly incorporated within public dis-course. This relationship is unsurprising, for the one is the flip-side

of the other. One of the core attributes of white identity were theextraordinary claims of superiority made on its behalf, claims thatled to a profound sense of vulnerability. The threat of miscegena-tion and the struggle to maintain white racial purity provide oneexpression of this vulnerability. However, although such concernsare central to some of the works we will be considering here (forexample Gregory, 1925), they do not provide a predominant motifwithin the literature of white crisis. The sense of racial threat thisliterature explores is not discrete and particular. It is sprawling and

expanding: it mirrors the vast reach and extraordinary boasts ofwhiteness.

The dialectical momentum that makes whiteness fragile preciselybecause of its ascendancy is a familiar one. Indeed, it is neatlysummarised in the title of Chamberlin and Gilmans (1985) studyof fears of decay, Degeneration: The Dark Side of Progress. However,recent cultural historians err when they encourage us to viewthe theme of racial decline as an illustration of a specificallyfin desicleconcern with degeneration (see also Ledger and Luckhurst,2000; Greenslade, 1992). The romantic melancholia of MaxNordaus (1993; first published 1892) Degenerationhas a centralplace in this contemporary narrative. In a typically languorouspassage Nordau depicts his time as the [d]usk of nations, in whichall suns and all stars are gradually waning, and mankind with allits institutions and creations is persisting in a dying world (p1).

322 Alastair Bonnett



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Yet, Nordau provides neither a paradigmatic text for the style orthe substance of the literature of white crisis (though see Nordau,1912). The resolutely unromantic racial pessimism of CharlesPearsons National Life and Character: A Forecast(1894; first pub-lished 1893) provides a far more convincing founding text5. Basinghis predictions on economic and demographic patterns, Pearsonstates that the lower races will inevitably gain markets and ter-ritories from white societies that were becoming reliant on the com-forts and security of the state. There is nothing dewy eyed abouthis forecast: when we are swamped in certain parts of the worldby the black and yellow races, we shall know that it has beeninevitable (p32). The economic ascendancy of those who Inge, fol-

lowing Pearson, was later to term the cheaper races (Inge, 1922,p227), meant that the white will be driven from every neutralmarket and forced to confine himself within his own (Pearson,1894, p137).

Pearsons emphasis on the inevitably degrading relationshipbetween social welfare and racial character re-affirmed Darwinsposition as stated in The Descent of Man (1901; first published1871). In a passage that indicates how open Darwin was to theeugenic interpretation of evolutionary theory, he notes that modern

social assistance allows the weak members of civilised societies topropagate their own kind . . . accepting in the case of man himself,hardly any one is so ignorant as to allow his worst animals tobreed (p206)6. The literature of white crisis encompassed thiseugenic tendency. Yet it is not reducible to it. The debate on white-ness registered concerns that went far beyond the creed of nationalbetter breeding. Indeed, although the institutional and ideologi-cal organisation of the eugenics movement was oriented towardsnational categories (more specifically, the British or English race),

its work may be better understood if placed within a broader dis-cussion 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 thatprovide the shared focus of the commentators considered here,some of whom were influenced by eugenics, but few of whom canbe said to articulate a simply or purely eugenic form of socialtheory.

Pearsons role as [c]hief among these prophets of racial pes-simism (Giddings, 1898, p570) established his defeatist reputationboth within and outside the literature of white crisis (see, forexample, the hostile comments of Putnam Weale, 1910; also Kidd,1902; Giddings, 1895). Although . . . the White Race be nearing thetwilight, counselled Curle (1926, p142), let us not lose our bear-ings. Certainly, the evidence that white power was in decline was




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far from conclusive. The crisis of whiteness pre-dates the recedingtide of empire. White control over the worlds peoples increasedthroughout the period being considered. As the Dean of St. Pauls,William Inge (1922) noted, No important non-European govern-ment remains, except in China and Japan (p214). Yet, just oneparagraph later, Inge (see also Inge, 1919) joins the chorus of racialpanic, telling us that by 1901 the tide had really begun to turnagainst the white world. The significance of this year is notexplained by Inge although a few sentences later he alights uponthe 1897 Diamond Jubilee celebrations as the culmination ofwhite ascendency. Much of the uncertainty of Inges portraitreflects the propensity, found throughout this genre, to find the

seeds of racial disaster everywhere. Indeed, for Inge, the magnifi-cent pageant of the Jubilee also sounded a death-knell forwhite power, for the spectators . . . could observe the contrastbetween the splendid physique of the coloured troops and thestunted and unhealthy appearance of the crowds who lined thestreet (p214).

The event that seemed to substantiate white self-doubt was amilitary defeat. Although the rout of Italian forces by the Ethiopi-ans at Adowa in 1896 was greeted with equal consternation by

some (Lyall, 1910), the outcome of the Russo-Japanese war waswidely seen as the most significant and shocking demonstration ofnon-white military potential. In 1904 it was generally expected inBritain that the Russo-Japanese war, begun that year, would bespeedily settled once the Russian Baltic fleet arrived in the FarEast. With the defeat of Russia the following year (the Japanesefleet, under Admiral Togo, destroyed all but three of Russias shipsin the Straits of Tsushima in May 1905) a novel phase in interna-tional relations appeared to have begun. The victory of little Japan

over great Russia explained Basil Matthews in 1924 (p27), chal-lenged and ended the white mans expansion. It signified the endof an age and the beginning of new era (p28). In The Rising Tideof Color Against White World-Supremacy, a book that quicklybecame the best known example of white crisis literature on bothsides of the Atlantic, the American Lothrop Stoddard (1925, firstpublished 1920) phrased the matter in even more cataclysmicterms. With that yellow triumph over one of the great whitepowers (p21), he wrote, the legend of white invincibility was shat-tered, the veil of prestige that draped white civilisation was tornaside (p154). For Stoddard the significance of Russias loss alsoturned on another matter: the formal alliance of Britain withJapan. This view was also expressed in Britain. In The Conflictof Colour (1910) Putnam Weale offered a stinging critique ofthe 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 theirextra European affairs what may be called the same clumsy doc-trine ofpis-aller (p117).

An ideal of international white solidarity was a logical outcomeof the emergence of white identity as a primary social and politicalconcern. Yet it remained a doomed and crisis-prone ideal, con-tinuously vulnerable to the manifold difficulties inherent in em-ploying a vaguely defined, highly idealised, yet utterly material,category as a significant geo-political entity. These difficulties are

clearly illustrated by the attempt to employ the notion of whitecommunity during and in response to the Great War. The FirstWorld War was routinely termed within the literature of white crisisas a fratricidal war, the most important and latest event in alitany of racial self-abandonments and self-degradations. Thedanger the poet Sir Leo Chizza Money (1925) wrote about in ThePeril of the White is not Yellow Peril, or a Black Peril, but a perilof self-extermination (p148), for whites in Europe and elsewhereare set upon race suicide and internecine war (pxx). Moneys

concern with white solidarity led him to attack both Stoddard andInge for their attention to intra-white racial differences (whatMoney calls Nordiculous theory (p147)): it is suicidal, he noted,to encourage racial scorns, racial suspicions, racial hatredsamongst the small minority that stands for White civilisation(p149). However, both Stoddard and Money were in agreement onthe political implications of the war: that the only way white soli-darity 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 imme-

diately undermined by these authors ruminations on the traitor-ous nature of huge swaths of white people, most notably EastEuropeans and the working classes. Other authors added womenand effeminate men to this list of suspects (Whetham andWhetham, 1911; Curle, 1926; Champly, 1936; Rentoul, 1906).Even the physical environment could not be relied upon to supportwhite ambitions. Indeed, during the same period academic geog-raphers had become pre-occupied with the limits of white settle-ment 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 consequentmultitude of vulnerabilities made any specific attempt to see a solu-tion to its present dilemmas inevitably inadequate. However, it




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was within the arena of class conflict that the literature of whitecrisis exposed the limits of white solidarity most glaringly andthoroughly.

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 aretreated with suspicion and, often, open contempt. This paradoxprovides the clearest evidence that this is not merely a literatureabout crisis but in crisis: its central category is constantly foundto be failing, to be unworthy. Thus whiteness is, unintentionally,

exposed as an inadequate category ofsocialsolidarity. For if thewhite nation is split between The British sub-man (Freeman,1921) and Stoddards neo-aristocrats, then the idea of whitecommunity necessarily appears, at best, a memory of a bond nowpassed into history.

A related irony concerns the fact that, despite its disgust for thewhite masses, this is a literature that is coming to terms with thelatters claim on whiteness. At no point do any of the authorsdiscussed here doubt that the European heritage working class is

white. The tradition of defining whiteness as a bourgeois posses-sion and of seeing the urban working class (more specifically, theresiduum) as unworthy of the same racial status may certainlybe detected, particularly within the more bellicose commentatorssuch as Curle and Inge. However, by the end of the nineteenthcentury such exclusivity was being effectively challenged bynational and imperial forms of social inclusively, forms that madewhite identity increasingly available to the working classes (seeBonnett, 1998; Hyslop, 1999). Lord Curzons often attributed

remark, made when watching English soldiers washing during theBattle of the Somme I never knew the working classes had suchwhite skins signals the survival of somewhat older attitudesamongst the British upper classes. Yet it is the anachronisticquality of the remark that is of interest here: by the 1910s thepublic articulation of the idea that the working class was less thanwhite had become note-worthy, indeed eccentric. As this implies,the contradictory and self-defeating nature of the literature underconsideration here derives, in large measure, from the difficultiesthat a class inclusive view of whiteness present to those who wishto employ racism as a form of social elitism.

The problem is compounded by the fact that the suspect natureof most white people is not a minor chord within any of the textsunder discussion: indeed, it is usually a key site of argument andevidence. 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 char-acter to the national life, but has not attempted to raise the wholepeople to the same level (p228). Without this superior elementwhiteness is an empty vessel, deprived of intelligence and direc-tion. The brainy and the balanced have always controlled ourworld, says Curle, when they cease to do so, our White Race mustpass into its decline (1926, p213). The elite are represented asan inter-breeding group possessing qualitatively different culturalvalues to the masses; almost a race within a race. Thus the mostprofound challenge for whiteness located by the authors under dis-cussion concerns the weakening of this groups grasp on power.Indeed, the imminent possibility of being swamped by inferior

whites is identified time and again. Soon, I suppose, the masseswill 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 Whiteraces appear to be dying off from the top downwards, adding, InBritain, in especial, the most intelligent people are refraining fromrearing families.7

The difficulty of asserting both white solidarity and class elitismwas resolved, in part, by asserting that the best stock of theworking class had long since climbed upward. Thus the racialconnection to the masses could be claimed to be existent butatrophied. 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 securethis argument. One identifies their geographical and social rootsin the hardy and muscular country life of pre-industrial ruralEngland. The other locates them as the progeny of natural winners,i.e., as being the inheritors of a fighting stock that was able todemonstrate superiority before the struggle for existence was com-promised by luxury and state interference. The former positionis commonly encountered through depictions of the degenerativenature 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) alsonoted that the towns have been draining the life-blood of thecountry districts, the vigorous countryman becoming absorbed




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into the weaker and more stunted specimens of humanity whofill the towns (p1645). Thus the racial gift (Whetham, cited bySoloway, 1982, p158) that rural migrants bring to the town is soonsquandered, an analysis that both roots the elite firmly within awhite, rural past and condemns the process of mechanisation asan enemy of the race (Inge, 1922).

These considerations imply that the discovery of working classill health at the turn of the nineteenth century developed from adiscourse of white decline, rather than the other way round. Thesupposed poor physical state of army volunteers for the Boer War,particularly those from the cities, encouraged and enabled thearticulation 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 reflected less an empiricalreality (since it was both misread and considerably exaggerated;see Soloway, 1982, for discussion) than a class investment in rep-resenting 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 andCurles (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 attitudeof the Under-Man is an instinctive and natural revolt against civili-sation (p22), he suggests. The Under-Man multiples; he bides histimes (p23), waiting for his opportunity. This time, Stoddardconcludes, has now come: the philosophy of the Under-Man is to-day called Bolshevism (p151), which is at bottom a mere ratio-nalising of the emotions of the unacceptable, inferior and

degenerate elements (p203; see also Armstrong, 1927). For Curlethe masses, or the Unfit, although less prey to communism thanStoddard suggests, are equally as primitive. A new class and racialwar is in the offing he notes, between the masses who will soonbe in control of legislation (p215) and who, out of a sense of self-preservation, seek to thwart eugenic legislation, and the one manor woman in twenty-five who possess what is good in the British(p62).

Viewing the world through what Taguieff (1995) calls the reduc-tio ad Hitlerum concerns of contemporary anti-racism, it is tempt-ing to categorise such views as proto-fascist. In this way theopinions of Pearson, Inge, Putnam Weale, Money, Curle et al.,appear to achieve at least partial fulfilment within the neo-aristocratic totalitarian regimes of the 1930s and 1940s. Althoughthis 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 contra-dictions and failure of racial supremacism than about its politicalpossibilities. Once the bulk of whites had been dismissed as, insome way, inadequate, the problem of how to construct a positiveprogramme to save white society became acute. Indicative of theseriousness of the problem is the fact that many of the texts underdiscussion conclude with utopian flourishes; far-fetched procla-mations of racial re-birth. Freemans (1921) and Inges (1922) plansfor experimental communities of superior whites are illustrative.Freeman envisaged such settlements in Britain, whilst Inge warnedthat they would need to be established in remote colonies (he sug-gests, Western Canada, Southern Chile or Rhodesia) in order to

avoid cross-class contamination. In either location, the settlementswould consist of non-degraded whites who could live, work andreproduce in isolation. Such plans clearly suggest that the onlyway of saving the race is to escape white society. In so doing theycondemn whiteness as inadequate to the task of defining a mean-ingful identity for the cultural/racial elite.

The idea of a white race is central to this genre, yet it constantlyfails these authors. Or, rather, they fail to believe in it sufficientlyfor it to be effective and sufficient. It is unsurprising that the lit-

erature of white crisis was soon forgotten, the titles of its key textscoming to look, from the late 1930s onwards, somewhat startlingand eccentric. Yet there is another story running both alongsideand within the texts under discussion. For there are powerful hintsin each of the texts considered of how another category of identity,that of the West, could offer firmer foundations for our identity,particularly for an elite identity. However, before we can considerthe rise of the West, it is necessary to note some of the otherfactors 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 suprema-cism. More specifically, it illustrates the difficulty of sustainingcommitments to racial solidarity, racial supremacism and socialanti-egalitarianism as a coherent and stable belief-system. Such aworld view is not merely prone to crisis but manacled to it. Onecan find evidence to suggest that politicians and other public com-mentators in Britain were loosing faith in the idea that whiteswere natural rulers at anytime in the period under review. However,a reasonable case can be made for the immediate wake of the FirstWorld War providing the first clear expression of a serious collapseof the ideology of white imperial destiny (Irvine, 1972). Pannikar




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(1953, p201) notes of the period that, With the solitary exceptionof Churchill, there was not one major figure in any of the Britishparties who confessed to a faith in the white mans mission to rule.If they had sought to, such doubters could have received intellec-tual support from liberal anti-imperialists, the most prominent ofwhom 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 definition 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 prob-

lems for the future (Hobson, 1972, p244; first published 1910).

The theme that Hobson stresses that racial ideology breeds con-tempt and conflict provided the most potent and influential chal-lenge to the explicit assertion of the white ideal. Rich (1986) hasdetailed how the feeling that race prejudice was in some respectslinked to war encouraged the mood of hostility to it in the 1920sas liberals and socialists hoped for an international order thatwould end all war (p98).

However, the retreat from race and, more specifically from

whiteness, encompassed a much broader political constituencythan those on the left. The feeling Rich identifies also increas-ingly shaped Christian views on race. In The Clash of Colour, themissionary and Christian publicist Basil Matthews (1925) drew onimages of Britains brutish ancient past, to assert that whitesuperiority is of recent growth; it may not persist for long (p135).His solution to the menace of world race-war (p142) rested uponthe assertion of Christian fellowship within the World team.Within the scientific community too, views were shifting. Criticism

of race as an objectively intelligible category may be discernedthroughout the history of scientific racism (see Hannaford, 1996).However, the credibility of race became fatally compromised onceknowledge of genetics had advanced to the point where race wasirrelevant to the scientific classification of human difference (seeBarkan, 1992, for discussion). Britain Hogbens Genetic Principles(1931) and Haldanes Heredity and Politics(1938) provided the firstsustained scientific refutations of racism. It was a position popu-larised by Huxley and Haddon in We Europeans (1939; first pub-lished 1935). Huxley and Haddon suggested that the word raceshould be banished, and the descriptive and non-committal termethnic group should be substituted (p220). The notion that theword ethnic (and, by extension ethnicity) is to be preferredbecause it enables one to avoid implying connotations of homo-geneity, of purity of descent, and so forth (p221), helped to restrict




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racial labels, such as white, to the ignorant terminological cur-rency of everyday, pre-scientific, communication.

Another factor was moving against the rhetoric of white supre-macism. Summarising his assessment of British scholarly andpopular journals of the 1930s, Fredi (1998) notes that a clearcorrelation was drawn between those who were racially consciousand those who were anti-white (p121). What Fredi is highlight-ing is an increasing tendency to associate racial consciousnesswith a consciousness of racial oppression. Thus it became the taskof British colonial policy, not merely to rhetorically deracialisecolonial encounters but, at least to appear, to oppose the mean-ingfulness of the very idea of racial hierarchy. This process was

considerably encouraged by a desire to challenge the globalinfluence of the Soviet Union (the anti-racist credentials of theUSSR were taken seriously within Britian, even by ardent anti-communists; see for example Hodson, 1950). The associationof race hatred with Nazism further consolidated the authority ofanti-racism. There is, noted one senior British official in thewake of the clear opposition to race discrimination offered in theUnited Nations Charter (1945), something like official unanimityof 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 wasboth possible and often profound. The modernisation of Turkeyand China provided two influential illustrations of a process thatclearly questioned the basis of racial determinism. This point maybe evidenced by reference to the literature of white crisis itself,as I explain in the next section. However, non-whites (or non-Westerners) 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 anew world culture, Toynbee (1931) noted that, whilst before 1914,Westernisation was carried out as a minimal programme, after thewar, non-Western peoples, especially in the East, have been seizedby a furore of iconoclasm (p764): Apparently the Turks and theChinese have come to the conclusion that the world of the futureis destined to be unified on a Western basis, not only on the super-ficial economic plane, but right down to the deeper levels of sociallife (p765).

Thus the public legitimacy of the white ideal drained away. Thesecond half of the twentieth century saw the emergence, and cer-tainly the popularisation, of much of the terminology that nowexplains earlier British attitudes to race (for example, the termsracist and white supremacist). I have afforded the diverse forces




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that came to be lined up against the public discourse of whitesupremacist an admittedly minimal treatment. This is, partly,because of the constraints of space. It is also a reflection of the factthat my analysis suggests that, even at its zenith, white identitywas in crisis: with hindsight its decline and eclipse appears fore-told in its propaganda. In addition, I have argued that white iden-tity does not possess a discrete history: contemporaneous with thiscrisis, another form of identity was emerging and gaining accept-ance, both within and alongside the literature of white decay.

Becoming Western

The contemporary idea of the West refers to far more than ageographical entity. It is a social, political and ethnic designationdesigned to evoke those values, practices and people that are, inother contexts, described as one or all of the following: democratic,capitalist, free, modern, developed, Christian, white. The notionthat Western society is a unity (Toynbee, 1923, p4), that the Westhas its own discrete history, that it is an intelligible field of study(Toynbee, 1934, p36); that it is, moreover, a perspective, an

ethno-cultural repertoire, is a late nineteenth century and twenti-eth century creation that far exceeds the terms older, largelyreligious, meanings (cf Baritz, 1961). Indeed, in Britain, an ideo-logically elaborated and defended notion of the West was rela-tively rare until the last two decades of the nineteenth century. Thephrase the Western world is used by Marx (1992, p319; originallypublished 1853) in the 1850s when commenting upon Britishcolonial policy in Asia. The same context, if different politicalconclusions, occasions the use of the term by Macaulay in 1835

(Macaulay, 1970). GoGwilt (1995) notes such usages are merelydescriptive. However, these authors were well versed in stereotypesof Eastern social rigidity and conservatism. These are clichs tothe fore in Marxs depiction, in Capital, of Asiatic unchangeable-ness. The concomitant stereotype of the West was pin-pointed inthe radical British MP, Joseph Cowens depiction, from 1880, ofthe conflicting civilizations of East and the West the one icono-clastic and progressive, the other traditional and conservative(Cowen, 1909, p87). However, where GoGwilt is right is in his insis-

tence on the increased complexity and ubiquity of the idea of theWest in the context of perceived threat to it. He goes on to arguethat

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 mostclearly traceable to early-mid nineteenth century Russia, where theterm formed part of a debate between Westernisers and Slavophiles(Bassin, 1991; 1998; Neumann, 1996). The political commentaryof Danilevsky, especially his bookRussia and Europe(1890; origi-nally published 1869), is indicative of the way that the Russiandebate preceded later Western accounts. Danilevsky developed amodel of the life-cycle of civilisations, and argued that the West hadentered its decadent stage. Both ideas were later to be reinvented

by Western Europeans (such as Spengler and Toynbee). However,although the first British book-length elucidation of Western civili-sation was published in 1902 (Kidd, 1902), the notion of a Westerncivilisation and Western identity only began to achieve ubiquityfrom the 1920s.

It cannot be claimed that the contemporary notion of the Westemerged out of the literature of white crisis, certainly not in anydirect or simple fashion. However, this old word for a new ideadid represent a partial resolution of this literatures problematic

attempts to marry social elitism with racial solidarity. Usuallydefined as a civilisation, rather than a race, the West couldconnote an enviable and exclusive cultural heritage alongside asense of social commonality. This function of the idea is apparentboth within the literature of white crisis and from the emergingliterature about the West that also developed from the 1890s. Inwhat follows I shall: first, address the role of the West within thestudies of white crisis; second, examine the overlapping and con-temporaneous body of work that privileged the West as its main

object of inquiry; and third, and far more sketchily and specula-tively, consider why the West was taken-up after the exhaus-tion of the white crisis literature in the 1930s. However, beforecontinuing, it is useful to admit that the literatures of white crisisand the West can be difficult to separate. The habit of usingwhite, Western and civilised as synonyms can be found in bothtypes of work. Moreover, certain genuinely hybrid formulationsdeveloped, such as the notion of a Western race (for example,Marvin, 1922; see also Little, 1907). However, in the light of theanalysis provided earlier, what is most striking about the literaturethat employs the West as its principal analytic category anddescriptive focus is its ability to side-step the contradictions ofracial logic, especially the problems associated with the assertionof racial solidarity in a highly stratified society. The West is definedas 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 defined explicitly as a natural unit but as a cultural force;a current of such self-evident sophistication that, whatever itsfuture, it appears as more socially and intellectually advanced thanpotential rival civilisations.

This ethno-cultural reading of the West may also be discernedwithinthe literature of white crisis. It remains there as a marginaldevice, its latent significance overshadowed by the assumptionsand prejudices of white supremacism. Yet, although infrequent, itspresence tells us a great deal about the utility of the idea. It is par-ticularly revealing that when the higher aspirations and culturalachievements 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, phi-losophy and science, we feel justified in holding dominion (p166).Thus, racial power is legitimised by reference to categories andsocial forms that slide away from clear racial designation. Theabstract and lofty terrain of Westerness is also communicated byits association with the grandest scale of international politicalmachinations (Inge, 1919; 1922; Putnam Weale, 1910). When theseauthors 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, asense of frustration with its prosaic, lumpen quality emergesbetween the lines.

A related illustration of the way the idea of the West is used tohelp resolve the contradictions and tensions inherent within racialthinking may be found in the tendency to deploy the term whenthese commentators are trying to grapple with the distinctionbetween European and Asian races as well as between Russia and

Western Europe. The idea of the West is found most frequently inStoddard when he is seeking to differentiate these entities8. It isa distinction that, as I note below, was further popularised bySpengler and his followers. Yet in the studies of white crisis, suchdistinctions are neither rationalised nor explained in terms of theircentral premise (ie., the white ideal). The West is used but leftuntheorised. It appears as a useful device, a quick fix, for whenwhiteness no longer functions.

One of the clearest examples of the usefulness of the idea of theWest, is that it allows these authors to broach the issue of culturalmimesis. The philosophy and social atmosphere of the West,notes Putnam Weale (1910) may be totally different (p130) to thatof the East, but that has not stopped the Japanese from borrow-ing 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 thatimplies that race is fixed but culture is fluid. Yet these authorsalso contend that culture is a racial attribute. Thus Westernisationis a possibility that disrupts their racial logic. It holds a fascina-tion for them but is, fundamentally, theoretically indigestible.Inevitably, Pearson, Inge, Putnam Weale, Money, Curle et al allmaintain that, at root, Westernisation is a sham, a superficialspectacle: non-whites can never acquire the ways of whiteness.Yet this manoeuvre, designed to save race as an explanatory prin-ciple, exposes another aspect of its unsustainability, especiallywhen contrasted with the ability of less racially determinist com-mentators, such as Toynbee (1931), to empirically substantiate

Westernisation as an inescapable aspect of an emerging worldculture.The literature of white crisis contains the seed of its own

intellectual subversion and succession. By allowing the West toresolve the incoherence of whiteness, these commentators may beread as admitting to the inadequacy of their central category. Thusthe studies they produced expose the limits of whiteness at thesame time as they provide brief glimpses of the way Western iden-tity might be cast as radically changing the terms of the debate.

However, to understand how the West emerged alongside andthrough this debate we need to turn to an, initially much smallerbut closely related, body of British social and political commen-tary; the literature of the West or, more accurately, Westerncivilisation. Despite the fact that its political conclusions werenot necessarily less racist, it is a literature whose concerns andterminology are more familiar to contemporary readers.

As noted earlier, the idea of the West and, more specifically ofWestern civilisation, was closely associated with the delineation

and analysis of principles or values. The intellectually elevatednature of this focus allowed Westerness to be defended whilst, atthe same time, critiqued in its own terms. In other words, a centraldevice of this body of studies is the auto-critique, in which the Westis seen as failing to live up to its own high standards or culturalpotential. As this implies, the West is relatively amenable to thelanguage and politics of reflexive social criticism; a phenomenon ofconsiderable rarity within the British debate about whiteness.Ramsey MacDonalds speech to the West London Ethical society in1901 (The propaganda of civilization), provides a significant illus-tration of the nature and critical possibilities of such auto-critique.MacDonalds argument relies on his account of the two attributesthat define Western. The superior claims of Western civilization,he notes are founded mainly on two circumstances the first isour abhorrence of violent human suffering; the second, the value




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we place upon settled government (MacDonald, 1901, p460). Thefirst of these circumstances may be taken to evidence the con-tinuing influence of an identification of the West with Christianvalues. However, it is also more than suggestive of the possibilityof the detachment of religion from humanitarian discourse and thedevelopment of a concern for human rights. The second attrib-ute of the West Macdonald identifies is rooted in the association ofWestern civilisation with clear systems of legal and accountablejustice. McDonalds argument is that the former circumstanceis not lived up to in practice, whilst the latter is inappropriatein non-Western societies. Although occasionally conflating West-erners with whites, MacDonalds decision to privilege the former

category over the latter is not coincidental or arbitrary. Westernoffered a racially deracinated language amenable to the languageof objective and detached critique. By contrast, the notion ofwhite principles and white values would appear immediatelysuspect, precisely because it appears to by-pass the terrain ofculture and, therefore, of civilisation, thus scuppering the possi-bility of auto-critique.

However, although in many ways highly prescient, McDonaldsinterpretation of the West is not our own. It is notable that he

does not identify a political meaning to Western: it is representedas too broad a term to be associated with creeds such as marketvalues or socialism. Nor does Macdonald permit the possibility ofWesternisation. Indeed, he maintains that [c]ivilzation cannot betransplanted (p463): to be sustainable, he notes, civilisation mustbe organic to a people or race. Moreover, MacDonalds viewscannot 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 fluidity of

the concept at this time is amply demonstrated by the work of Kidd.Although Kidd introduced the notion of our western civilisationin Social Evolution(1894) it is within Principles of Western Civilisa-tion, a lesser known but more intellectually ambitious book, thatthe concept finds its first thorough examination (see also Lishman,1906). It is immediately apparent from this text that the principlesto which Kidd refers are not those that were later to becomefamiliar, at least within the West. The West is not defined in termsof democracy, humanitarianism, or, indeed any liberal value but,rather, as a form of spirit, or consciousness, that is intellectuallysuperior and militarily enforced. Kidd regards the true promise ofthe West to lie in its potential to subjugate the present to the serviceof the future. [T]he significance 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 itsconsciousness beyond the present (p289). Lassiz-faire, for Kidd,was a surviving form of barbarism (p455) because it was unableto look beyond present needs. Kidd predicted the gradual organ-isation and direction of the State . . . towards an era of such freeand efficient conflict of all natural forces as has never been in theworld before (p469). As this implies, Kidds western principlesare those that ensure the Wests victory in a world of ceaselessstruggle and domination: We are par excellence the militarypeoples, not only of the entire world, but of the evolutionaryprocess itself (p458).

Kidds racial vocabulary is vague. It is clear that he sees a

racial content to being Western and that Western civilisationis, inevitably, white. However, notwithstanding his ardent SocialDarwinism, Kidds West is a decidedly non-material entity. It is aform of consciousness or mind. The Western mind, he writes isdestined, sooner or later, to rise to a conception of the nature oftruth itself different from any that has hitherto prevailed in theworld (p309). Kidds focus on ontological abstractions led to hiscontribution appearing marginal to the, more mainstream, debateon whiteness (indeed, Inge (1922, p255) accuses him of being an

irrationalist). But it also enabled him to render irrelevant thekinds of crises that were causing such anguish within that litera-ture. By by-passing direct engagement with race Kidd is able toignore issues of racial purity, solidarity and sustainability and,hence, questions of class character and quality. Western princi-ples and our western civilisation are expressed as transcenden-tal forces whose inherent superiority lies in their orientation tothe future, as well as in their, literally, merciless enforcement. Thesuccess of the West in the modern world-conflict was thus

certain: [i]t is the principles of our Western civilisation . . . and noothers, that we feel are destined to hold the future of the world(p340).

Kidds focus on a conflict of world civilisations, a clash in whichthe superiority of Western civilisation was, at root, founded in therelative and absolute superiority of the Western spirit or mind,emerged as one of his most influential legacies. Although Kiddswork is unquestionably supremacist, it both sustained and sub-verted the more empirical and reductive language of race. Thedifficulty of combing the two discourses is apparent withinHubbards The Fate of Empires (1913), a book which provided asomewhat uneasy definition of race as the sum of the, as yet,unborn generations (p33) in order to marry Kidds theories offuture oriented societies with the dictates of the conventional




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white crisis debate. A similar problematic may be seen at workwithin Spenglers studies, which were to have a considerableimpact in Britain in the late 1920s and early 1930s. Spenglerand his proponents within Britain, such as Goddard and Gibbens(1926), share with Kidd a sense of western civilisation as a set ofhistorical forces and values. However, the Spenglarian traditiontakes the non-rationalist agenda apparent within Kidd evenfurther, leaving aside evolutionary theory to distinguish WesternCulture as an autonomous form of being or Destiny. In this waythe empirical concerns of the study of white crisis are made toappear clumsy and irrelevant. Yet, whilst undermining race asscience, this approach allows its further mystification as an expe-

rienced social fact. For, example, whilst Spengler (1926) is conde-scending about racial science as soon as light is let through it,race vanishes suddenly and completely (p129) he concludesthat race is not accessible to a science that weighs and measures.It exists for the feelings with a plain certainty and at first glance but not for the savants treatment (p130).9

Toynbees opposition to the racial content of Spenglers thinkingallowed him to develop a more thoroughly cultural vision of whatconstitutes a civilisation. This deracialisation came to be essen-

tial, in the latter half of the century, for the legitimacy and author-ity of histories of the West (see, for example, Fukuyama, 1992;Roberts, 1985). However, Toynbee shared with Spengler an insis-tence that Russia and Western Europe have little in common.Spengler (1926, p16) differentiated between what he called themeaningless empty sound of the word Europe, and the moremeaningful terms East and West. It is thanks to this wordEurope alone and the complex of ideas resulting from it, he com-plained, that our historical consciousness has come to link Russia

with the West in an utterly baseless unity. Goddard and Gibbonsconcured: not only does Russia not think like Western Europe butit never has done (Goddard and Gibbons, 1926, p48). Such state-ments were designed to provide a sense of historical depth to a sen-sibility that, in fact, had much shallower roots. More specifically,they offered an explanation of the success of communism in Russiathat connected it to the primitive and Asiatic qualities of thecountry. It was through this process of association that the Westbegan to take on a far more specific political meaning than it hadso far acquired. The idea that to be Western was to be capitalistor, at least, non-communist, did not emerge suddenly. However,during the 1920s the equation of the West with capitalismbecame a common rhetorical device within both the West andthe Soviet Union. From this association a number of other con-notations grew, connecting the West with the free market, demo-




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cracy and an open society. This chain of association was furtherstrengthened by the casting of both fascism and Nazism as, likecommunism, authoritarian and inhumane and, therefore, notauthentically Western ideologies.10 In Our Threatened ValuesGollancz (1946) provided one of the clearest articulations of thisposition, repeatedly drawing communism and Nazism together asnon-Western: For Nazis, western values are, I repeat, evil,Gollancz writes, for communism they are, for the time being atleast, irrelevant (p623).

Such formulations helped to render further redundant the kindsof crisis of class character and solidarity discussed in the previoussection. Within a world divided between authoritarianism and

Western open society, the whiteness of Russia or the Nazisbecame an irrelevance, a racial commonality that merely obscuredthe real differences. As the cultural content and definition of theWest became further elaborated, the degraded nature of the whiteworking class, already side-stepped by Kidd, was made to appearan archaic concern. The working class are notable for their absencein the discussions of Kidd and Spengler and, despite his contentionthat the post-Modern Age [is] marked by the rise of an industrialurban 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 emerg-ing literature on this topic. Their sights were higher and certainlymore abstract. They had found a language through which to talkabout us that appeared to marginalise problems concerning whoexactly, empirically, we were. Even more remarkable, the Westbecame a comprehensible collective identity that connoted acertain group of people, who just happened to be of European her-itage, 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 beingWestern and a cosmopolitan and relativist world-view. It is reveal-ing to note, in this regard, that in her account of the way rural lifein the West has been depicted in Western works of fiction through-out the twentieth century as a kind of interior non-West, Nadel-Klein (1995) suggests that the real west has been represented aspossessing urban, bourgeois, cosmopolitan values (p111). More-

over, there exists a tendency to symbolise the truly Westernperson as one [who] must think, live and act independently of localcustom and kinship, free from the parochial constraints of any par-ticular community (p111). The deployment of the urban cos-mopolis as the real West, Nadel-Klein implies, demands itsassociation 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, incontrast to communist societies and non-European societies, asopen and democratic, yet the idea of the West appears lesssocially inclusive than more explicitly racial categories, mostnotably whiteness. This problem appears to have been partiallyresolved by the emergence, not of a new phenomenon, but of a newsite ofemphasiswithin the meaning of the West in the second halfof the last century; namely the association between Western andcommercialised popular culture. This development has meant, forexample, that Western music could come to be conflated with pop

music and, by association, Western dynamism, freedom and toler-ance seen as incarnated albeit sometimes self-consciouslyperversely in Western youth and celebrity (see, for example,Simpson, 1993; Creighton, 1995). And yet despite the ubiquity ofthese associations, evidence of popular affiliation to the categoryWestern in the West is unclear. Moreover, whilst an assertivewhite identity may have become marginalised within public dis-course, within private and everyday forms of interaction and com-munication it still has considerable currency (Back, 1995;

Frankenberg, 1997). Its continuing utility reflects the maintenanceof racialised power relations and gives the lie to the idea that therhetorical deracialisation of public life, including the move from thelanguage of whiteness to the idea of the West, reflects the fact thatracism no longer matters.

I noted earlier the temptation to read the transition from whiteto Western as a transition to euphemism, a shift to the obfusca-tion of racism. The mismatch between public and everyday racialrhetoric mentioned above is certainly suggestive of such a con-

clusion. However, this public/everyday disjunction should not beover-emphasised, especially if it leads us to the erroneous idea thatthe Westernsiation of the West was a merely semantic process.The true significance of this transition is, unfortunately, cloudedby the unceasing appetite for narratives announcing The Triumphof the West (Roberts, 1985), or Why the West has Won (Hanson,2001) or The west has won (Fukuyama, 2001) or, indeed, attempt-ing to re-ignite the conflict of civilisations thesis (Huntingdon,1997). Huntingdons position strikes an especially anachronisticnote since he racialises the West, noting that a significant cor-respondence exists between the division of people by culturalcharacteristics into civilizations and their division by physical char-actersistics into races (p42). Indeed, in The Clash of Civilizationshe 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 cleftcountry (p205).

The meaning and meaningfulness of the idea of the West has,moreover, become inseparable from the way that various forms ofidentity are, to a lesser or greater extent, constructed as anti-Western or non-Western (Asian values and what is commonlytermed, at least in the West, Islamic fundamentalism are twonotable examples). In this context, the Wests history becomes evermore elusive: it has passed through so many hands, has so manyowners and inventors, that claims to have discerned its originsshould always be treated with suspicion. My focus in this article hasbeen less upon who gave us the idea of the West than upon how

it worked within and against the literature of white crisis. This spe-cific focus is designed to open-up the limits of the latter discourse,to expose its tensions and inadequacies, as well as to show how theidea of the West represented a partial resolution of these tensionsas well as a response to the new context and pressures of the latenineteenth 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, TomBuchanan, the wealthy cad at the heart ofThe Great Gatsby, ismoved to exclaim Civilizations going to pieces. The startledguests are treated to Buchanans particular view of world events:If we dont look out the white race will be will be utterly sub-merged. Its all scientific stuff; its been proved. F. Scott Fitzger-ald has his character cite as evidence a book called The Rise ofthe Colored Empires by this man Goddard. On one level this inci-

dent is evidence merely of Fitzgeralds familiarity with one of themany incendiary racial tracts of the early 1920s (namely, TheRising Tide of Color Against White World Supremacyby LothropStoddard) However, Buchanans opinions are clearly designed toevoke something bigger. They are employed by Fitzgerald to createa tone of moral panic, a pessimistic atmosphere sustained by theexistence of a far-reaching and influential debate on the collapseof white prestige.

One of the distinctive attributes of this debate, in the USA as inBritain, was that it signalled both a crisis and the zenith of whiteidentity as a public ideal. Whiteness was celebrated before 1890but rarely with such concerted fervour and never with such anelaborate repetoire of scientific and social justifications. Whitenesswas celebrated after 1930 but, increasingly, those who did the




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celebrating were not drawn from the leading social and politicalcommentators of the day. That white identitys moment of triumphshould also be its moment of peril is no coincidence. Havingbecome established as the symbol of extraordinary achievementand superiority, as the talisman of world-wide social authority,whiteness was vulnerable to any sign of challenge or social dis-turbance. The fact that white supremacism relied on the authorityof the natural, of biological fact, compounded its unsustainability.For once the white race is accepted as an objective reality its attrib-utes must be represented objectively, without the interference ofsocial factors, such as class prejudice. In other words, all whitepeople have to have the characteristics of whiteness: they must all

be superior, they must all be fit to rule. Yet there was no subjectthat the white supremacists discussed in this article felt morestrongly about than the inadequacy of the masses. Their racismdemanded social egalitarianism; their social elitism demandedsomething quite different. Something like the idea of the Westperhaps? There is some truth in the latter contention but it is alsotoo neat, too glib. We cannot assume that, because it was in thecontext of the crisis of white identity that the idea of the West beganto become attractive, that this crisis therefore produced or led

to the idea of the West. This point needs to be insisted upon, whilstat the same time the contemporaneous and novel character of theconcept of the West that was emerging is recognised. Somethingnew was being born. The literature of white crisis illuminates someof the reasons why, as well as nearly all the reasons why white-ness 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 ideaof the West was a move away from using nature, and, more specif-

ically, race, as a way of differentiating people and towards a socialand political definition of community, it represents a form of dera-cialisation. Yet this process was a partial one: the term Westernremained racially coded, burdened with the expectation that theworld will never be free, open and democratic until it was Euro-peanised. The attacks on the USA on September 11th 2001appeared to many to re-open traditional debates about the Westversus the Rest. However, these debates are, for the most part, tra-ditional only in as much as they refer back to the work of com-mentators from the period under review, the period when not merelythe discourse of a clash of civilisations was first fully elaboratedbut the contemporary idea of what the West means was introducedand developed. This article has argued that this idea cannot beunderstood, at least not well, if Western civilisation is understoodas a discrete tradition. More uncomfortable material must also be




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engaged: material that suggests that the success of the idea of theWest was mirrored by the failure of the idea of whiteness.

Notes1 Although this article concerns the idea of the West, the terms West,

Western and Westernisation are not placed in inverted commas unlessthe demands of clear expression necessitate it. This does not signal theunproblematic nature of these constructs but, rather, a desire to neitherpatronise the reader nor create a division between problematised and non-problematised terms, a division which would have the effect of naturalis-ing all the geographical and ethnic categories employed in this article notplaced between scare quotes.

2 The clearest testament to this process is the assertion that white-

ness is now invisible within public debate (see, for example, Delgado andStefancic, 1997; Fine, et al., 1997; Lpez, 1996).

3 The period 18901930 contained the rise and fall of the literature ofwhite crisis, as well as the rise of the idea of the West. However, the yearsat either end of this span have no special significance. In support of thisperiodisation we may refer to Gogwilts (1995, p221) conclusion that theidea 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 litera-ture of white crisis was uniquely British. In particular, a similar genredeveloped in France and the USA. Pearsons racial pessimism was echoedin France by Faguet (1895), whilst the regeneration of whiteness is themain theme ofLAvenir de la race blanche (Novicow, 1897) and Le destindes races blanches (Decugis, 1936), a theme given an anti-feminist twist

by Henry Champly in works translated as The Road to Shanghai: WhiteSlave Traffic in Asia(1934) and White Women, Coloured Men(1936). A largeand diverse body of white crisis literature was produced in the USA, theprincipal 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 havelittle interest in the Anglo-Saxon, as either a racial or national group. Thedecline of this identity may be taken to reflect the exhaustion of the impe-rial fervour of the 1880s and 1890s, a process that may, in turn, haveencouraged the celebration of whiteness precisely because, as a supra-national identity, it was less intimately bound to the increasingly uncer-tain 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 beyondthe confines of class, particularly through the critique of the atrophyingeffects of comfort and luxury. Thus, for example, in Degeneration: AChapter in Darwinism(1880), Lankester offered the example of the life cycleof the sea-squirt in which the animal throws away its tail and its eyeand sinks into a quiescent state of inferiority as a warning to the whiterace of Europe, who were liable to degenerate into a contended life ofmaterial enjoyment (p62).




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7 A concern with the low birth rate of the middle classes has beenclaimed to be the primary motive behind the eugenics movement (Searle,1976; MacKenzie, 1976). As Stone has recently explained, this positionhas been used by contemporary historians to justify a view of British

eugenics as a class, rather than a race-based, ideology. Whilst agreeingwith Stone that there is plenty of evidence to the contrary (p418) thispaper is suggestive of the mutually subversive tension between theseconcerns.

8 It might be expected that those contributors to the white crisis liter-ature, such as Inge and Stoddard, most concerned to assert the impor-tance of racial divisions within whiteness, would find the terms the Westand Western too loose and homogenising. However, it is revealing that,as with Money, Stoddards (1922), otherwise constant, anxieties about theracial and class composition of whiteness fade into the background whenhe adopts the terminology of western civilisation (p6). This process isallied with an appropriation of the tradition of casting Christianity as

Western and Islam as Eastern and the, also well established, extension ofthis practice to allow East to mean Asia. Thus, Inges (1922) extreme sen-sitivity to the divisions within whiteness is allowed occasionally to besalved by knowledge of the unending dual between East and West (p211).

The same process may be seen at work in the, less militantly suprema-cist, contributions of Putman Weale (1910), whose depiction of the con-flict between East and West as the oldest of problems (p3) belies hishighly contemporary usage of both terms. For, despite these claims on his-torical depth, all these authors use the idea of the West, not as a religious

term, nor even as one defined in relation to the East but, rather, as a cul-tural entity variously synonymous with military might, industrialism,progress, and the modern.

9 That the mystification of race allows the re-introduction of the lan-guage of white identity and white supremacy is apparent from SpenglersThe Hour of Decision(1934).

10 Arthur Keith (1946) noted the assertion so often made in our Pressand in our pulpits: We are fighting this war to save civilisation some-times specified as Western civilisation; at others as Christian civilisation(p92). The difficulty of accepting fascism and Nazism as Western was con-fronted by Toynbee in volume six of The Study of History, published in1939: Italy and Germany are no alien appendages to the Western bodysocial; they are bone of its bone and flesh of its flesh; and it follows thatthe social revolution which has taken place yesterday in Italy and Germanyunder our eyes may overtake us in France or England or the Netherlandsor Scandinavia tomorrow (p57; also Toynbee, 1953: tyranny . . . hasraised 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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