Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
the building of this order—particularly the strategic bargains between the United States and
Europe—but the project began before the Cold War and survived its end. Indeed, the Cold
War ended as it did in large part because this Western order was so integrated, dynamic, and
cooperative.
American postwar order building went through several phases, and in the process, the
character of liberal internationalism itself evolved. It was an order cobbled together in a
rolling process in which Washington bargained and compromised with its emerging partners
in Western Europe and East Asia. In this process, the character of the liberal order was trans-
formed from a free-standing system envisaged by the United States during the war to a he-
gemonic order in which America's own political and economic system became part of the
overall liberal international order. In both the security and economic realms, the United States
found itself taking on new commitments and functional roles. America's domestic market,
the U.S. dollar, and the Cold War alliances emerged as crucial mechanisms and institutions
through which postwar order was founded and managed. America and the Western liberal
order became tied into one system. The United States had more direct power in running the
postwar order, but it also found itself more tightly bound to the other states within that order.
It became a provider of public goods—upholding a set of rules and institutions that circum-
scribed how American power was exercised and providing mechanisms for reciprocal polit-
ical influence. In the late-1940s, security cooperation moved from the U.N. Security Council
to NATO and other U.S.-led alliances. The global system of great-power-managed collective
security became a Western-oriented security community organized around cooperative secur-
ity. Likewise, the management of the world economy moved from the Bretton Woods vision
to an American dollar and market system. In effect, Washington's allies “contracted out” to
the United States to provide global governance.
A critical characteristic of liberal hegemony was its Western foundation. The United
States found it possible to make binding security commitments as it shifted from Wilsonian
collective security to alliance security built around democratic solidarity within the Atlantic
region. This shift was twofold. One aspect was the movement toward more circumscribed
and explicit security commitments. Alliance partnerships entailed obligations, but they were
also limited liability agreements. Commitments were not universal and open-ended; they
were tied to specific security challenges with treaty-based understandings about roles and re-
sponsibilities. Second, they were commitments that were backed by a political vision of a
Western security community. The sense that America and Europe were imperiled by a com-
mon threat strengthened the feeling of Western solidarity. But the notion of a Western core
to liberal international order also suggested that unusual opportunities existed—because of
common culture and democratic institutions—to cooperate and build postwar institutions.
The American-led postwar liberal order also went beyond the Wilsonian vision with
its more complex notions of sovereignty and interdependence. Westphalian sovereignty re-
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