Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
Hegemony and Democratic Community
The last dilemma facing the organization of liberal international order is perhaps the most im-
portant, at least in terms of shaping the choices that face liberal-order builders today. This is
the tension between the dominance of a powerful state in running the liberal order and shared
norms of democratic community. On the one hand, the United States has used its preponder-
ant power to organize and manage the system. Liberal international order did not spontan-
eously emerge. It had to be created and ruled. Taking on this role has given the United States
a privileged position within the order. On the other hand, the liberal order was also built with
a core group of Western democracies that shared norms and expectations of respect, recipro-
city, and consensual rule. The order that emerged was both hierarchical and liberal in charac-
ter. But conflicts have persisted in the awkward reconciliation—or at least management—of
these tensions between hierarchy and liberal rule. And, as I have argued, these tensions have
intensified in the last decade with the rise of unipolarity and the erosion of norms of state
sovereignty.
The postwar American-led liberal international order was built around both hierarchy and
democratic community. As we noted in
chapter 5
, efforts were made during World War
II—as they had been after World War I—to launch a postwar order that was both global and
relatively “flat.” The great powers would operate in concert to uphold an order built around
open trade and collective security. But the exigencies of the postwar years shifted the char-
acter and center of gravity of this liberal international project. Order building came to be
centered in the West—around the Atlantic world—and to be organized and led by the United
States. Liberal order was turned into liberal hegemonic order, with its core institutions and
commitments anchored among the advanced democracies. Hegemony and democratic com-
munity were both added to the more skeletal—and unsustainable—framework of a global
system of open trade, collective security, and great-power concert. In this way, the tensions
and contradictions of the system were built into its foundation.
As a result, for half a century, the United States led the liberal international order. As we
have seen, this order has had a particular logic. The underlying idea was that if America en-
gages in the right amount of commitment and restraint—anchoring its power in partnerships,
alliances, multilateral institutions, special relationships, and governance regimes—the over-
all international system will tend to remain stable, open, and integrated. The world, in ef-
fect, “contracted out” to the United States to provide global governance. The United States
provides public goods, frameworks of cooperation, “good offices,” and an enlightened but
U.S.-centered system of rules and modes of doing geopolitical business. In return, the world
“bandwagons” with the United States rather than resists or balances against it. This spe-
cial type of open or liberal American hegemony was more attractive to leading democratic
states—and to other states inside and outside the West as well—than the available alternat-
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