The Defence of Western Civilization: Racialized Liberalism and the American Commitment to the North Atlantic Security Community, 1947-1949

The North Atlantic Alliance has been a crucial pillar of American foreign policy since the end of the Second World War. According to conventional accounts, the imperative to defend “free people” from the menace of communism was critical in legitimizing the birth of the North Atlantic security community. However, why then was the defence of “free people” limited to European empires and not extended to populations segregated at home or those colonized by those very “Western democracies”? I argue that racialized liberalism can explain this discrepancy. Racialized liberalism is the everyday popular ideology that sees White people as the natural subjects of democracy. It made White democracies appear as natural allies and made it a sacred obligation to defend White democracies from external threats. This paper shows that racialized liberalism – popularly referred to as “Western civilization” – was crucial to legitimizing American commitments to the North Atlantic in the immediate postwar era and that it was particularly effective at dismissing criticism by isolationists, including dismissing arguments by fiscal conservatives, realists, and liberals. As such, contrary to a race-neutral postwar liberal international order, racialized liberalism legitimized a security community between White democracies while concurrently subsidizing colonialism, in the name of defending “freedom” abroad.