Unipolarity and Its Consequences - Liberal Leviathan: The Origins, Crisis, and Transformation of the American World Order - page 105

legitimate. The leading state will also have tangible incentives to make its power legitimate
as it engages in competition with the other pole—it will want to cultivate coalition partners
and keep them as willing members of its bipolar alliance. In doing this, it may use multilat-
eral institutions and commitments to rule-based order as part of its strategy of maintaining its
legitimacy and ensuring the willing participation and compliance of other states. 48 With the
rise of unipolarity, it may be harder for the leading state to maintain a sense of its legitimacy.
If legitimacy is lost or diminished, how will the leading state respond? That is, how costly is
lost or diminished legitimacy to the leading state under unipolarity?
If balancing is removed as a restraint on the leading state—and as a potential sanction on
its uses of power—does a more diffuse and less tangible cost such as lost legitimacy have
any enduring impact as a restraint and a sanction? To the extent it does, the unipolar state will
continue to find advantages in using multilateral institutions and rule-based relations in its
governance strategy. These legitimacy costs are not easy to measure. Decision makers in the
unipolar state may vary in how they perceive lost legitimacy and calculate its costs. But the
greater the costs, the more likely it is that the unipolar state will find itself drawn to support
liberal, rule-based order. 49
The judgments that leaders within the unipolar state make about the country's future
power position are a second factor. If these leaders believe that the unipolar distribution of
power is semipermanent—that is, that it will last into the foreseeable future—they will be less
responsive to the lock-in possibilities of rules and institutions. If, on the other hand, leaders
believe that unipolarity will give way in the decades ahead to a bipolar or multipolar distribu-
tion of power, they are likely to have a different view of the value of these rule-based mech-
anisms of governance. An optimistic assessment of the durability of unipolar power will give
leaders reasons to ignore losses in legitimacy. The normative approval of the international
order led by the unipolar state can decline, but if the material basis of unipolar power remains
in place, the leaders can calculate that they can still achieve their goals without the full con-
sent of other states. The costs of lost autonomy associated with making binding commitments
to rules and institutions can be avoided—at least, to the extent that those commitments are
made primarily for cultivating legitimacy and consent.
But if leaders in the dominant state judge that the unipolar distribution of power will soon
or eventually wane, a different set of calculations about rules and institutions are likely. There
will be incentives for the unipolar state to put in place a set of rules and institutions that can
last beyond unipolarity, creating a favorable institutional environment for the lead state as
its relative power declines. The investment incentive for rules and institutions emerges as a
consideration in the thinking of the lead state. 50 This calculation does not need to stand alone
as a factor that shapes the leading state's views on strategies of rule. It is a consideration that
will presumably weigh in the balance as decisions are made on specific institutional agree-