Dilemmas and Pathways of Liberal International Order - Liberal Leviathan: The Origins, Crisis, and Transformation of the American World Order - page 212

The hierarchical character of post-hegemonic liberal internationalism will change. It will,
generally speaking, be flatter—but hierarchy will remain, it simply will not be American-
dominated hierarchy. The hierarchy of a post-hegemonic liberal order will be found in the
expanded grouping of leading states that will occupy positions in the U.N. Security Coun-
cil, the Bretton Woods institutions, and other less-formal international bodies. It is this group
of states that will collectively take over the various functional services previously provided
by the United States—maintaining security, upholding open markets, and so forth. In some
ways, the character of hierarchy will look similar to the Rooseveltian vision in liberal inter-
nationalism. A group of leading states will claim authority and institutional positions to over-
see the stability and peace of the global system. But in this new liberal internationalism, their
leadership responsibilities will multiply to include a wider array of security, economic, and
political governance duties.
The character of the rule of law will also evolve. In some areas, such as trade and invest-
ment, the rule-based character of the order will continue. Indeed, the World Trade Organ-
ization is already a post-hegemonic type of global system of rules. The United States does
not have special rights or privileges under international trade law. The leading trade states do
exercise power in various ways. This is due to their market size and overall standing in the
international order. But the norms of trade law are fundamentally based on notions of equal-
ity and reciprocity. All contracting parties have access to opt-out and escape-clause rights.
Mechanisms exist for dispute resolution. 30 In areas where economic interdependence gener-
ates incentives for states to coordinate and harmonize their policies, rule-based order should
increase. But in other areas where states resist legal-institutional forms of cooperation, less
formal networks of cooperation will likely grow. 31 Such network-style cooperation allows
states to circumvent politically difficult or costly formal, treaty-based commitments. Network
cooperation will appear particularly attractive to the United States as it loses its power ad-
vantages and rights and privileges under the older liberal hegemonic order. The United States
will find itself forced to give up its hegemonic ability to foster cooperation on its own terms.
It was able to dominate rules and institutions, and through weighted voting and opt-out agree-
ments, it was able to reduce its exposure to sovereignty-reducing commitments. In a post-he-
gemonic position, the United States will find informal and network-oriented agreements to
be tolerable substitutes that allow it to gain the benefits of cooperation without offering up
formal, legal restrictions on its sovereign independence.
Overall, the post-American liberal international order would draw on the logics of both
its predecessors. Like the post-1945 liberal order, it would be a governance system that does
a great deal of work. The policy domains in which states would cooperate would be ex-
pansive—indeed, even more so than under the American-led liberal international order. The
breadth and depth of the rules and institutions of liberal order would continue to grow. But as
a nonhegemonic order, the actual functioning of the system would look a lot like Wilsonian-