Crisis of the Old Order - Liberal Leviathan: The Origins, Crisis, and Transformation of the American World Order - page 7

terdependence, there is a widespread view that no one elected the United States to its position
of privilege—or at least that only the Europeans and Japanese did, and other states that are
now rising in power did not. The reestablishment of the United States as a liberal Leviathan
involves the voluntary granting of that status by other states. For this to happen, the United
States again needs to search for and champion practical and consensual functioning global
rules and institutions. In the twenty-first century, this will involve sharing authority among a
wider coalition of liberal democratic states, advanced and developing, rising and declining,
Western and non-Western. It is this liberal complex of states that is the ultimate guardian of
the rules, institutions, and progressive purposes of the liberal order.
In this chapter, I introduce the questions and debates that are explored in this topic. I first
look at the enduring problem of international order. Next, I look at the rise and transforma-
tion of liberal international order. After this, I look at the logic of hierarchical political order
and its imperial and liberal variants. I then follow with a road map for the chapters that fol-
low.
The Rise and Fall of International Order
Over the centuries, world politics has been marked by repeated historical dramas of order
creation and destruction. International order has risen and fallen, come and gone. At periodic
moments, leading states have found themselves seeking to create and maintain rules and in-
stitutions of order. The most basic questions about world politics are on the table: who com-
mands and who benefits? The struggle over order has tended to be, first and foremost, a
struggle over how leading states can best provide security for themselves. It is a search for a
stable peace. But states engaged in order building have also gone beyond this and attempted
to establish a wider array of political and economic rules and principles of order. They have
sought to create a congenial environment in which to pursue their interests. Along the way,
the rights, roles, and authority relations that define the system are established. In all these
ways, struggles over international order are moments when states grapple over the terms by
which the global system will be governed, if it is to be governed at all.
We can look more closely at these underlying questions about international order. What is
international order? How has it been created and destroyed? And how has it varied in terms
of its logic and character?
In every era, great powers have risen up to build rules and institutions of relations between
states, only to see those ordering arrangements eventually break down or transform. In the
past, the restructuring of the international system has tended to occur after major wars. “At
the end of every war since the end of the eighteenth century,” as F. H. Hinsley notes, “the
leading states made a concerted effort, each one more radical than the last, to reconstruct the