Should-Read: Quinn Slobodian: The World Economy and the Color Line: Wilhelm Röpke, Apartheid, and the White Atlantic

Should-Read: Quinn Slobodian: The World Economy and the Color Line: Wilhelm Röpke, Apartheid, and the White Atlantic: “The article takes ‘white Atlantic’ as a useful term to describe the worldview that Röpke and his collaborators cultivated in this period…

…Yet it concludes by identifying a key slippage between the rhetoric of race and economics in Röpke’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, Röpke offered a solution. In his defense of South Africa, Röpke 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, Röpke 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 Röpke 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 Röpke 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…