A Global Phenomenology of Whiteness: Turkey, Europe and Institutional Global Racism

Abstract

Contemporary international institutions are often discussed as part of a new liberal international order and a departure from colonial logics of the nineteenth century. While some have discussed the ongoing dynamics of race within international institutions, few have explored whiteness as the positionality embedded in such institutions. This article argues that the racial logics embedded in most international institutions, throughout the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries, are developed in relation to the structures of experience and consciousness of whiteness that circumscribe notions of 'universality' and 'normalcy'. This renders whiteness as an invisible characteristic, or background knowledge and practice, to which racialisation occurs. Using the case of the Ottoman Empire's attempt to accede to the European group of 'civilised nations' and subsequent Turkish attempts to gain membership to the European Union, this article explores how a phenomenology of whiteness is historically produced and embedded as an orientating mechanism in international institutions.