The Great Transformation and the Failure of Illiberal Hegemony - Liberal Leviathan: The Origins, Crisis, and Transformation of the American World Order - page 174

feature of the liberal ascendancy. There are several ways this worldwide democratic com-
munity might be labeled, such as the Western security community, the democratic complex,
or simply the community of democracies. This alliance has been around for most of the last
century, but it has been evolving, expanding, and deepening. Indeed, the most powerful and
rich countries in the world are now all democracies.
This fact of democratic community has two important implications for world politics.
First, it has the effect of creating a stable, cooperative, and interdependent core of major
states. Democracies are unusually willing and able to cooperate, at least with other liberal
democracies. As argued in chapter 5 , the United States and the other Western democracies
built an international order around multilateralism, alliance partnership, strategic restraint,
cooperative security, and institutional and rule-based relationship. The institutional underpin-
ning of this order made America's power position both more durable and less threatening to
other states—rising, declining, or otherwise. It is the order that came to dominate the global
system for half a century, surviving the end of the Cold War and other upheavals.
Second, the fact of democratic community sets some constraints on how powerful states
can operate within it. Put simply, coercive domination and realpolitik behavior have their
limits and liabilities in a world of democracies. Attempts at bullying or strong-arming fellow
democratic countries are likely to backfire. As Robert Cooper argues, “power with calcula-
tion and restraint is no longer sustainable in democratic age. Nor is the exercise of hegemony
by force, which has been the other source of stability in the international system. In a demo-
cracy, domination by the ruthless use of force ceases to be an option in the international field
as it is in domestic—as Gandhi well understood when he began the process of dismantling
the British Empire.” 51 This environment of democratic community has paradoxical effects
on American foreign policy. On the one hand, it gives the United States the ready access to
partners and the ability to pursue complex forms of cooperation. American power itself is
seen as more benign and accessible. The United States is surrounded by affluent, capable,
and friendly states. On the other hand, these democratic states are not likely to respond to
domination or coercion by the United States. Indeed, they will expect the United States to
operate within the rules and institutions of the democratic community.
Overall, the global system has evolved away from the Westphalian order. It is no longer
a system built on equilibrium and balance among the great powers. The unipolar distribution
of power and the spread of democracy have made this older model problematic as an organ-
izing logic. The building of a liberal international order was more successful—and during
the Cold War, largely unnoticed—than anyone in the 1940s really imagined was possible.
But the erosion of the old norms of sovereignty, the spread of international norms of human
rights, and the rise of new sorts of threats of collective violence have generated problems
with the functioning of that liberal order.