Should-Read: Quinn Slobodian: The World Economy and the C...

Should-Read: Quinn Slobodian: The World Economy and the Color Line: Wilhelm R��pke, Apartheid, and the White Atlantic: "The article takes 'white Atlantic' as a useful term to describe the worldview that R��pke and his collaborators cultivated in this period...

...Yet it concludes by identifying a key slippage between the rhetoric of race and economics in R��pke���s texts. As conservatives, whose racism was often open and unadorned in personal correspondence, sought a publicly acceptable way to oppose decolonization movements in the global South, R��pke offered a solution. In his defense of South Africa, R��pke redefi ned ���the West��� not as a racial or civilizational space but one identified by a stable economy, market-friendly social behavior, and a welcoming investment climate. Like Adam Smith before him, R��pke would end by finding interest rates as the most reliable index for an area���s level of civilization.

At a time when the budding civil rights movement was challenging the racial hierarchy in the U.S., the conservative attack on the ���New Deal for the world��� was, I argue, a means of holding the line against what one of R��pke and Buckley���s collaborators called ���the unholy combination of the African Negro question with U.S. Negroes.��� If the demands of non-white populations were becoming harder to
suppress at home, perhaps they could at least be curbed in the larger world before bringing about what R��pke called the ���suicide��� of ���the free world��� that would result in the event of a world government where ���non-Europeans would hold an overwhelming majority.��� Looking at the transatlantic alliances of German-speaking neoliberalism and conservatism makes it clear that world economic issues at the middle of the twentieth century were always also about race...