Race problems, social issues: The Portuguese empire and the racial equality proposal, Paris 1919

In the aftermath of the Great War, the problems of race and race-based discrimination became particularly contested and internationalised as both social and political issues. In this context, Japan’s campaign for the recognition of racial equality as a guiding principle in world politics, as well as the political controversy it unleashed at the Paris Peace Conference and elsewhere, dramatized some crucial problems of the time, including the internationalisation of colonial affairsand related expectations regarding the European civilising mission. This chapter approaches these debates from the vantage point of a relatively marginal and still understudied player: the Portuguese Empire. Conversations within the Portuguese delegation, I argue, demonstrate that the problem of racial equality had to do not only with anxieties over Asian immigration to white countries, but was also crucially entangled with the politics of empire and concerns with the effects of colonialism on African populations. The defeat of the Japanese proposal, I suggest, points to some of the limitations of the League of Nations and the forms of internationalism it promoted in the interwar period – in particular, the neutralisation of racial equality (and inequality) as a social rather than political concern.

Related Subject(s): Economic and Social Development