Unipolarity and Its Consequences - Liberal Leviathan: The Origins, Crisis, and Transformation of the American World Order - page 109

18 See data presented in chapter 2.
19 Robert Gilpin, War and Change in World Politics (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981).
20 As A.J.P. Taylor notes, from the perspective of Europe during this period, “The United States seemed . . . not
merely in another continent, but on another planet.” A.J.P. Taylor, The Struggle for the Mastery of Europe,
1848-1918 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1957), xxxiii.
21 A.J.P. Taylor, The Course of German History (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1945).
22 See G. John Ikenberry, “American Unipolarity: The Sources of Persistence and Decline,” in Ikenberry, Amer-
ica Unrivaled , 291-93.
23 A state takes on the position of a pole within the larger system if it possesses an unusually large share of re-
sources or capabilities and if it excels in all the various components of state capabilities, including, most importantly,
the “size of population and territory, resource endowment, economic capacity, military strength, political stability
and competence.” Waltz, Theory of International Politics , 131. For a critical survey of the polarity literature, see
Barry Buzan, The United States and the Great Powers: World Politics in the Twenty-First Century (London: Polity,
2004), chap. 3.
24 Hedley Bull, The Anarchical Society: A Study of Order in World Politics (New York: Columbia University
Press, 1977).
25 As Barry Buzan argues, “Polarity can be used to move forward into realist assumptions about conflict of in-
terest, balance of power, and war, but it can just as easily fit with international political economy concerns with
leadership and the provision of collective goods, Gramscian ones about hegemony, globalist ones about a domin-
ant core, world system ones about world empires and world economies, and English school ones about great power
management and international society.” Buzan, United States and the Great Powers , 32.
26 I use the term “pole” to refer to states with aggregated material power capabilities, which is the standard defin-
ition. I use the term “hub” to refer to the political and organizational character of leading states in the international
system. The imagery of polarity often includes organizational features of states—their ability to build alliances and
spheres of influence, and thereby compete against other poles. And indeed, the power of a state—and its ability to
be a pole—is at least partly defined by its ability to aggregate material capabilities and organizationally engage in
power politics. But it is useful to distinguish between the two terms. See Emilie M. Hafner-Burton and Alexander
H. Montgomery, “Power Positions: International Organizations, Social Networks, and Conflict,” Journal of Conflict
Resolution 50, no. 1 (February 2006), 3-27.
27 These features are discussed in Ikenberry, After Victory .
28 Anne-Marie Slaughter, “America's Edge: Power in the Networked Century,” Foreign Affairs (January/Febru-
ary 2009). See also David Singh Grewal, Network Power: The Social Dynamics of Globalization (New Haven, CT:
Yale University Press, 2008). For a discussion of networks and international conflict, see Zeev Maoz, Lesley Terris,
Ranan D. Kuperman, and Ilan Talmud, “Network Centrality and International Conflict, 1816-2001: Does it Pay to
Be Important?” working paper, November 2004.
29 For an interpretation of American foreign policy along these lines, see Dan Drezner, “The New New World
Order,” Foreign Affairs 86 (March/April 2007), 34-46.
30 Stephen Walt explores the logic of alliance relations under conditions of unipolarity, focusing on the ways that
a unipolar state might use alliances to manage relations with other states and the strategies of weaker states to influ-
ence the unipolar state. Walt, “Alliances in a Unipolar World,” World Politics 61, no. 1 (January 2009), 86-120.
31 This section and the next draw on Ikenberry, Mastanduno, and Wohlforth, “Introduction.”
32 See Mancur Olson, The Logic of Collective Action: Public Goods and the Theory of Groups (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1971 [1965]).
33 Kenneth Oye, ed., Cooperation under Anarchy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986).
34 See literature cited in chapter 3.
35 See Charles Kindleberger, The World in Depression, 1929-1938 (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1973).