Race, culture, and economics: an example from North-South trade relations

Abstract

This essay refines the understanding of culture and race – with operational and temporal dynamics – to explain North-South trade outcomes. Following traditions in economic sociology and anthropology, culture is presented as a toolkit of values. The recent rise of racism and xenophobia as values associated with populism can be traced to cultural toolkits that have sedimented histories. The cultural unsettledness of the present times has brought these values to fore. The blindspots in political economy ignored the cultural embeddedness of interests and values as they evolve through time, and therefore missed both the examination of important outcomes and their historical roots. The paper provides an empirical example from racialized values embedded in the history of North-South trade relations.

Keywords:

• Culture
• blindspots
• international political economy
• north-south relations
• trade
• racism
• populism
• economic nationalism

Acknowledgements

I thank the organizers and participants of ‘Political Economy on Trial’ workshop at the Sheffield Political Economy Research Institute, University of Sheffield, UK, especially RIPE and New Political Economy editors Geneviève LeBaron, Colin Hay, Daniel Mügge, and Jacqueline Best. I am also grateful for the extensive feedback from three anonymous reviewers, and from Spike Peterson, Leonard Seabrooke, and Robbie Shilliam.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The annual convention theme at the 2015 American Political Science Association was ‘Diversities Reconsidered’. Not a single panel or paper was presented on race in any of the sections associated with international relations.

2 While this article mostly attends to populist political economies in North-South trade relations, racism has a global presence from Bolsanaro’s ‘Christian’ views of Brazil to Modi’s ‘Hindu’ views of India. The paper’s thesis on mobilization of cultural toolkits and repertoires can be applied to other global examples.

3 Classic contributions include Onuf (1989), Finnemore (1996), Keck and Sikkink (1998), and Wendt (1999). For the norm contestation literature, see Wiener (2008) and Niemann and Schillinger (2017).

4 See Sajed (2016) for a useful introduction to a forum on the extent to which Hobson’s notion of Eurocentric institutionalism in the post-war era was a racist institutionalism.

5 Critical accounts also examine racism (see Anievas et al. 2014; Chowdhry & Nair 2013; Persaud & Walker 2001) but race is often secondary to materialist or class-based explanations in these analyses.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

J. P Singh

J. P. Singh is Professor of International Commerce and Policy at the Schar School of Policy and Government, George Mason University, and Richard von Weizsäcker Fellow with the Robert Bosch Academy, Berlin. He specializes in culture and political economy. Singh has authored or edited ten books, published over 100 scholarly articles, and worked with international organizations such as UNESCO, the World Bank, and the World Trade Organization