Crisis of the Old Order - Liberal Leviathan: The Origins, Crisis, and Transformation of the American World Order - page 12

curity body in which sovereign states would act together to uphold a system of territorial
peace. Open trade, national self-determination, and a belief in progressive global change also
undergirded the Wilsonian worldview—a “one world” vision of nation-states that trade and
interact in a multilateral system of laws creating an orderly international community. “What
we seek,” Wilson declared at Mount Vernon on July 4, 1918, “is the reign of law, based on
the consent of the governed and sustained by the organized opinion of mankind.” Despite
its great ambition, the Wilsonian plan for liberal international order entailed very little in the
way of institutional machinery or formal great-power management of the system. It was a
“thin” liberal order in which states would primarily act cooperatively through the shared em-
brace of liberal ideas and principles. 21 In the end, this experiment in liberal order building
failed, and the world soon entered an interwar period of closed economic systems and rival
imperial blocs.
When the Roosevelt administration found itself in a position to shape the global system
after World War II, it initially sought to pursue order building along Wilsonian lines. It em-
braced the vision of an open trading system and a world organization in which the great
powers would cooperate to keep the peace. Beyond this, American architects of postwar or-
der—drawing lessons from the Wilsonian failure and incorporating ideas from the New Deal
period—also advanced more ambitious ideas about economic and political cooperation em-
bodied in the Bretton Woods institutions. But the weakness of postwar Europe and rising ten-
sions with the Soviet Union pushed liberal order building toward a much more American-led
and Western-centered system. As the Cold War unfolded, the United States took command
of organizing and running the system. In both the security and economic realms, the United
States found itself taking on new commitments and functional roles. Its own economic and
political system became, in effect, the central component of the larger liberal hegemonic or-
der.
In these instances, we can distinguish various features of liberal international order. Lib-
eral order can be relatively flat, as it was envisaged by Wilson after 1919, or built around
institutionalized hierarchical relations, as it eventually came to be after 1945. Liberal inter-
national order can be universal in scope or operate as a regional or an exclusive grouping. It
can be constructed between Western democracies or within the wider global system. Liberal
international order can affirm and embody principles of state sovereignty and national-self-
determination or champion more supranational forms of shared sovereignty. It can be highly
institutionalized with formal legal rules, or it can operate with more informally structured ex-
pectations and commitments. Liberal international order can be narrowly drawn as a security
order—as the League of Nations was on collective security—or developed as a more ambi-
tious system of cooperative security and shared rights and obligations. 22
Third, liberal international order—and the successive waves of liberal order building—has
been built upon the modern states system and evolving frameworks for managing great power