The Rise of the American System - Liberal Leviathan: The Origins, Crisis, and Transformation of the American World Order - page 127

dictable and restrained patterns of behavior, thereby making it unnecessary to balance against
those threats. 43
Through security binding, states build long-term security, political, and economic com-
mitments that are difficult to retract. Commitments and relationships are locked in, at least to
the extent that this can be done by sovereign states. The most obvious is through participa-
tion in security alliances. But binding can also be pursued through other institutional forms
of cooperation, such as economic agreements and joint participation in multilateral organiza-
tions. These institutions and cooperative arrangements raise the costs of exit and create voice
opportunities, thereby providing mechanisms to mitigate suspicion, uncertainty, and security
dilemmas as sources of conflict. Security alliances, in particular, allow states to keep a hand
in the national security policy of their partners. 44
The binding strategy of order building was most evident in the occupation and reintegra-
tion of West Germany and Japan. American troops began as occupiers of the two defeated
Axis states and never left. They eventually became protectors but also a palpable symbol of
American superordinate position. Host agreements were negotiated that created a legal basis
for the American military presence, effectively circumscribing West German and Japanese
sovereignty. West German rearmament and restoration of its political sovereignty—made ne-
cessary and possible in the early 1950s by a growing Cold War—could only be achieved by
binding Germany to Europe, which in turn required binding America's security commitment
to Europe. Complex and protracted negotiations ultimately created an integrated European
military force within NATO and legal agreements over the character and limits of West Ger-
man sovereignty and military power. 45
The United States and Europe took other steps to bind the democracies together. The
European union movement explicitly sought to achieve economic interdependence between
Germany and her neighbors in order to make strategic military competition much more costly
and difficult. The first fruit of this effort, the European Coal and Steel Community, effect-
ively pooled these heavy industries that had been essential for war making. In its adminis-
tration of the Marshall Plan, the United States sought to encourage the creation of joint eco-
nomic organizations in order to create economic interdependencies that crossed over the tra-
ditional lines of hostility between European states. The United States also supported the cre-
ation of political institutions of European union, so as to foreclose a return to the dynamics
of anarchy and to create European institutions that were more like the United States than like
the traditional sovereign-state variety.
Western Democratic Solidarity
The American vision of a liberal international order was also anchored in a sense that there
existed a special solidarity among the Western democracies. The principles of liberal or-