The Great Transformation and the Failure of Illiberal Hegemony - Liberal Leviathan: The Origins, Crisis, and Transformation of the American World Order - page 166

But it was also built on the rules, institutions, partnerships, and political norms about how
states do business with each other, aspects of the system that had been built up during the
Cold War.
Table 6-1
Alliance Partners: United States, People's Republic of China, and the Soviet Union/Russia a
Transformation of the Westphalian Order
The rise of American unipolarity after the Cold War was part of a deeper and multifaceted
shift in the character of power and sovereignty over the last decades—a shift with conse-
quences for American liberal hegemony. Most generally, it was a shift in the underlying lo-
gic of the Westphalian system. That is, it was a shift away from international order organ-
ized around multiple and competing power centers—an order maintained by ensuring an ab-
sence of an overarching power—and the enshrinement of norms of state sovereignty. It was a
movement toward an order with one overarching power operating in a global system in which
norms of state sovereignty were increasingly contested and abridged.
In the modern era, international order has been marked by a diffusion and equilibrium
of power among major states—manifest as either bipolarity or multipolarity. Multiple states
with roughly equal capabilities—the so-called great powers—balanced each other or oper-
ated in concert. Order existed as a sort of rough equilibrium of power. Domestically, coun-
tries have been sovereign, deploying what the German sociologist Max Weber called “a
monopoly on the legitimate use of physical force within a give territory.” 29 This was the clas-
sic understanding of the modern, sovereign nation-state. Together, these two dimensions are
what constitute the Westphalian system: a balance and equilibrium of power internationally
and sovereign states with supreme legal authority in their own territory. 30