• Community and Identity
• Culture
• Democracy
• Global Governance
• Indigenous Peoples
• Property Rights
• Technology
• Trade and Finance
• World History

• Quick Links
• Home
• News/Blog
• South-North Dialogue
• Research Topics
• Glossary
• Bibliographic Database
• Research Articles
• Position Papers
• Globalization Guide
• Academic Volumes
• Advanced Search

• More Information
• Policies and Submissions
• About the Compendium
• About the Project
• Contributors
• UBC Press
• Related Websites
• Contact Us

Analysis Tool Bar      +

List Words ? Concordance ? Pattern: Collocation ? Pattern: Co-occurrence ? Pattern: Co-pattern: Summarizer ? Tokenizer ? Date Finder ? Principal Components Analysis ? Pattern Distribution ? Pattern: Visual Collocator ? Pattern: Weighted Centroid ? T-Bar from TAPoR

All Docs Articles Glossary

Advanced Search

Home > Research Articles > Article

Site Help | Site Map

American Foreign Policy and the Foundations of World Order

Louis W. Pauly, University of Toronto

American Foreign Policy and the Foundations of World Order

Intense debate is underway within the United States and elsewhere on the reconstruction of world order under conditions of rapidly deepening economic and social integration. The debate is not new, but it has lately entered into a more pressing phase. This paper seeks to put that debate into contemporary historical context and examine the implications. One set of implications focuses on the adaptation of novel international economic institutions created in the aftermath of systemic catastrophe in the middle of the twentieth century. A related set concentrates on requisites for stability in the relationship between leaders and followers in a system reshaped by the myriad pressures now conventionally associated with the word "globalization."

Leadership and Followership in the International System

Global economic and social order is not spontaneously generated. Policy shapes it, although not necessarily in circumstances of policy-makers' own choosing.¹ The specific policies of some states are more important than others, and those that today count most are the policies of the United States. The last fundamentally system-reshaping moment for the United States came in the aftermath of world war. It faced its broadest choices in the foreign policy realm, choices that may in retrospect be discerned as occurring through a long process stretching from the early 1940s to the present.

In the international economic arena, the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank — both created at the US-dominated Bretton Woods Conference of 1944 — were two of the clearest institutional expressions of a certain American policy vision for world order.² Once in existence, they and cognate institutions of incipient global governance, like the institution that became known as the World Trade Organization, wandered along a winding and messy path. In the aftermath of the end of the Cold War, it is no coincidence that such institutions now find themselves in the middle of renewed debate about the place of the United States in the world and about the world's place in its own society. The rest of us are implicated in that debate, and our own parallel debates cannot be disentangled from it.

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, a leader is, quite simply, "one who is followed." That quickly gets to the heart of the matter. In his classic book, The World in Depression, 1929-1939 (1973), Charles Kindleberger argued that the catastrophe of the 1930s ultimately happened because Britain proved no longer able to lead the system, and because its only plausible successor, the United States, proved unwilling. The now-conventional story is that the Americans refused in 1920 to embrace their own brainchild, the League of Nations, retreated from Europe, and, after a period of phony peace, sought to resolve an internal economic crisis by raising tariffs and cutting ties to the gold standard. In consequence, the desultory inter-war attempt to resurrect a functioning security structure on the back of a stable global economy reminiscent of the one preceding the Great War collapsed.

World War II is now, of course, widely viewed as the watershed. The commonplace view is that the United States learned its lesson. It came out of the war with a new purpose. It would lead the world, and it would do so benevolently, guided by a liberal vision of open markets, international cooperation, anti-militarism, and at least limited forms of internal resource redistribution to facilitate economic adjustment.³ Nothing better expressed that vision, it was said, than the United Nations, the Bretton Woods institutions, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, and the Marshall Plan.

One does not need to be a revisionist historian to call this all an oversimplification. But surely something along those lines within the United States helped shape the country's dominant self-image during much of the post-World War II period, and, whether the view was broadly shared abroad or not, it suited much of the rest of the world to follow along.⁴ . By the time the Cold War in Europe ended, that self-image had been put through severe tests, and the rest of the world apparently began having doubts. Not least, the Vietnam War and its disastrous economic legacy prompted renewed questioning among the allies and fellow-travelers of the United States. In its aftermath, the central commitment of the Bretton Woods Agreement — pegged exchange rates — was abrogated, inflation coursed through the international economy, non-tariff barriers to trade multiplied, both conventional weapons and weapons of mass destruction proliferated, and American society itself seemed to be coming unhinged. Throughout the 1980s, many questions were asked inside the country as well as outside. Was it a reliable leader anymore? Was it in its own interests to lead? What vision truly reinforced its claim to leadership? Could it be benevolent — not necessarily altruistic, but at least not excessively selfish? Was it still in the interests of others to follow? Or was it now in their interests to attempt the alternative strategy some countries chose in the post-1945 period, that is, the strategy of resistance?

The euphoria accompanying the end of the Cold War, combined with a broad economic upturn, rendered such questions less salient for a time. But throughout the 1990s, it began to seem that we had retreated to an earlier time. Political realists started warning that Europeans and Americans in particular would soon forget the lessons of the inter-war period. They held that we would all miss the Cold War, which in their view acted to suppress national antagonisms and encourage the degree of cooperation necessary to prevail in a great ideological struggle.⁵ Apparently motivated by similar fears, both Conservative and Liberal governments at the federal level moved Canada more fully under the American economic umbrella, first through freer trade and then with a freer investment regime.

Simultaneously, scholars from a broad range of disciplines began to inquire into the intimate and complex linkage between the domestic economy and polity of the United States and global stability and prosperity. Post-war international organizations were central to theoretical and policy debates on the nature and quality of that linkage. For realists like John Mearsheimer, they were nothing but epiphenomena, reflections of deeper realities. They could be slightly helpful at times, but they could never be particularly important instruments of states pursuing their most vital interests. For liberals like Robert Keohane, conversely, they promised a deepening process of information sharing and knowledge building capable of encouraging collaborative decisions based on common interests and shared long-term goals; they helped cast the shadow of the future on present calculations of interest. For constructivists like John Ruggie, they signified much more — the expressions of a unique linkage of power and legitimate social purpose and the hope of transforming the very identities of citizens and decision-makers as they moved progressively to construct a global polity (Mearsheimer 1994/95; 1995; Keohane and Martin 1995; Kupchan and Kupchan 1995; Ruggie 1995; Wendt 1995). At the heart of all three major perspectives was a sense that global order very much begins at home, and especially at home in the United States.⁶

In such a light, it is timely once again to ask whether the post-war system of governance and the carefully calibrated post-World War II vision of global order within the United States is now yielding to a system and vision ill-suited to the task of effective engagement by the United States beyond its borders. To ask such a question is to inquire as much into the conditions of followership as of leadership. Given its raw power, albeit relatively speaking weaker after 1989 than it had been in 1945, there is no doubt that the United States remains capable of coercing its neighbours, allies, and adversaries. But coercion is costly. As the Romans proved in the heyday of the Republic, the indirect extension of authority in the dominions can work better for all concerned than the alternative mechanism of empire. Raw power capable of being drawn upon is certainly useful. But if it actually needs to be drawn, it can quickly dissipate. A mutually acceptable guiding vision is required to generate willing followers. Followers need to have a sense that the leader's choices are informed not only by short-run and narrow calculations of interest. The claim to leadership, in short, is a claim to legitimacy. Authority willingly acquiesced in is likely to be more enduring that power bluntly asserted. In the long run, right makes might. The United States made such a claim to leadership after 1945, and that claim certainly did generate followership, sometimes in the form of enthusiastic support, sometimes in the form of grudging acquiescence. My question is whether today the foundations of the post-war system are still solid. Let me turn to a more detailed discussion of those foundations.

Foundations of World Order

A decade after the end of the Cold War in Europe, informed by a nagging suspicion that fundamental choices are now again up for grabs, a number of new studies are casting a backward glance at the world order constructed after 1945. As the war was coming to an end, as John Ikenberry explains in a first-rate example of the genre, the political space seemed open within the United States to any number of post-war foreign policy choices, except the discredited one of reverting to the historical norm of isolationism (Ikenberry 2001).

One proposed vision centered on the notion of "one world," an idea also conveyed at the time by the term "global governance." People like Norman Cousins and Albert Einstein hearkened back to a Kantian dream of enlightened cosmopolitan political design. One could almost hear Beethoven and Schiller in the background, and one could see the nuclear mushroom cloud in the foreground. All men shall be brothers. One people, one government. Alas, the vision had no political traction. The American political system could summon neither the ideological enthusiasm for it nor the will to pay for it. The debate over ratification of the 1944 Bretton Woods Agreement, as well as the subsequent and failed effort to create an International Trade Organization, underlined the durability of American concerns over the locus of ultimate sovereign authority.

Certainly of related parentage, the alternative design which did have some traction — not least because it promised globalism without cost — was derisively called "Hullism" by Keynes (Skidelsky 2000). US Secretary of State Cordell Hull became most clearly associated with a vision of an open trading system, which once established would automatically tie basic national interests together around the world and more or less inexorably work to channel aggressive impulses in constructive directions. Free trade, and underlying markets constructed on liberal principles, would work its magic and cooperative international politics would follow. In the event, the vision proved unrealistic, a mere cover for a US reversion to non-intervention in affairs abroad, affairs that in point of fact desperately required US intervention. The Europeans, and the Canadians, would have none of it.

The third vision was that of Atlantic Union, a vision with a certain constituency in the US State Department, in Whitehall, and in Ottawa. An Anglo-Saxon alliance, militarized, institutionalized, and willingly bearing the burden of reconstructing and civilizing the rest of the world. The vestiges of the British Empire could be implanted into such a vision, but the union would be more tolerant, gradually more open, and certainly more stable. This also proved a dream. The US Congress, the US Treasury, the Russians, the Indians, the Chinese, the French, and more quietly, the Germans and the Japanese, absolutely refused to go along.

A more realistic vision focused on increasingly integrated world regions, spheres of influence reasonably cohesive on their own and capable of balancing one another in a multipolar arrangement. In such an environment, the United States would play the role of ultimate balancer. As we shall see, this is a neat dream that persists, but one that a divided US domestic system was incapable of operationalizing after the war and one that, in any case, profound ideological struggle with the Soviet Union soon rendered untenable.

In the end, a combination of two other more practicable visions emerged at the heart of US foreign policy and in the design of the actual post-war order. The first centered on permanent and deep forward engagement by the United States, both political and economic, in Canada, Latin America, Japan, and Western Europe. The vision countenanced an integrated but relatively open European regional economy, an economy that especially after 1947 had quickly to prove itself capable of being a bulwark against communism. For similar reasons, the vision tolerated, even encouraged, a soft mercantilism in a rebuilt Japanese economy.

In practical terms, this vision necessitated the establishment of a strong-enough but not too strong set of intergovernmental, multilateral economic organizations capable of facilitating mutually beneficial collaboration among states able to nurture liberalism as both an internal and external creed. In addition, that very process of nurturing implied the emergence of distinctive but interdependent social democracies, a process that the US Treasury refused to finance with unlimited overdraft facilities and a process that resurgent institutions on Wall Street eventually very much did want to finance. Within the limits of an increasingly open capitalist framework, the vision accommodated, even celebrated, domestic structural diversity and the intentional blurring of political authority at the global level. Not coincidentally, we find herein the cradle of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. With their lending facilities, their capacity to monitor and referee disputes, and their usefulness as scapegoats in emergency situations, they came to symbolize the new world order and, over time, modestly helped to shape it.

Hegemony is the word that best describes the underpinnings of that order, not empire. Hegemony is traditionally defined as preponderance, predominance, and leadership. As Kindleberger contended using his preferred term, leadership is necessary for modern capitalism to thrive in fact, if not in theory. As a political scientist might add, it also seems necessary at times to obfuscate that fact and to give full credit to parallel acts of followership. In this regard, American policy sometimes succeeded but sometimes failed as diplomatic requirements conflicted with domestic political exigencies.

The second vision able to be translated more consistently into effective policy focused on the creation and maintenance of a nuclear deterrent force centered in the World War II alliance, but spreading its area of commitment to encompass Japan and eventually other parts of Asia. The overarching image was of bipolar stability, with the United States, Canada, Western Europe, and Japan organized around one pole and the Soviet Union and, after 1949, China organized around the other. Translating this image into policy without turning its political system into a garrison state was a core test for American society. Radical critics contend that it failed that test. At various junctures in post-war history, it's is not hard to see their point. But the overall picture, thus far, seems closer to that recently painted by Aaron Friedberg (2001). The separation of powers in government, an instinctive distrust of concentrated power in the economy, and an anti-statist tradition of thought appear to have helped the internal US system adapt remarkably fluidly to bipolarity. It is also arguable that this adaptation was facilitated by the fact that American society is more cohesive than it sometimes seems. National resolve may have been easier to sustain than is often supposed.

During the inter-war period, the United States held itself together partly by shutting out the external realm, thus reinforcing an ultimate slide toward global disintegration. A generation of policy-makers came out of the experience with a firm belief that their prime task was to avoid a repetition of that experience. The romantics among them held onto the hope that they could eventually remake the world in the American image. Their pragmatic colleagues settled for making the world safe for American society. The dual vision of world order — an interdependent, growing, and managed world economy and hierarchical stability in the security sphere —accommodated both. The post-war international economic institutions, together with North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), reflected a coherent strategy, but the domestic American economy and American military power linked the strategy to feasible, workable policies.

Perhaps we survived and even prospered in the post-1945 period by chance. Blind, dumb luck should never be discounted as a dominant force in human affairs. It is at least arguable, however, that this complicated dual vision of world order actually conformed to broad expectations of the best that could be achieved under the circumstances — both inside the United States and among its main followers. In any case, the dual vision proved politically feasible. Despite its highly problematic domestic governing structure, its anti-statism, and its nativist traditions, it is just possible that the United States truly led the world in a constructive direction for over fifty years. (I understand that "constructive" is a contentious term, but it has the advantage of forcing us to confront the counterfactual. It is undoubtedly the case that many people and many countries were left behind in that world, but those left behind have not managed to gather enough power to move in a system-destructive direction.) It is also possible that many other states willingly followed, that is, acquiesced in and even supported the global extension of American authority because the majority of their citizens believed that such acquiescence and support was in their own interest. In such an environment, the international economic institutions and the markets they helped govern promoted core American interests, gave others a limited voice in the definition, articulation, and expression of those interests, and, in general, served as a useful political buffer between leader and followers (Pauly 1996).

Contemporary Challenges

If it is true that the dual vision succeeded, a couple of questions now press upon us. To what extent did that success actually depend upon a sense of clear and present danger, such that the tendency for Americans to turn inward was capable of being resisted? To what extent was a widely shared perception of crisis essential to the bipartisan consensus needed to make the awkward machinery of government work in the United States and for much, if certainly not for all, of the world? To what extent was the reality of international political and ideological challenge required for American economic elites to repress their narrower interests and, most importantly, to countenance the creation internally and externally of stabilizing redistributive mechanisms — social democracy, which would and did distort the operation of international markets? To what extent did the collapse of the Soviet Union change all of that and bring the Americans, and by extension the rest of us, straight back to the foreign policy debates of 1945? Did the United States really want to lead any more? If so, where? And did the followers still want to follow?

With such a question in mind, Richard Haass, who headed the very slightly left of center foreign policy program at the Brookings Institution, speculated as follows when the Bush administration came to power in 2001. Opportunities and challenges likely to face the United States from abroad will center on China, Russia, Japan, Europe, and India.

The emphasis is only natural, as these are the actors with the greatest capacity to buttress or frustrate U.S. efforts to bring about a world to its liking, one characterized by market economic policies and democracy as well as open trade, a reduced resort to military force to settle disputes, and fewer weapons of mass destruction in fewer hands. This is not to suggest we live in or should aspire to a multipolar world. To the contrary, this is and will likely remain a world of distinct American primacy. No country or group of countries will be in a position to balance American economic, military, and cultural power for the foreseeable future. But primacy is not to be confused with hegemony, and the United States will be unable to realize the bulk of its ambitions without the support or at least tolerance of others.(Haass 2000, 2)

I think what Haass meant was that the United States does not aspire to empire. Hegemony, conversely, is primacy. It also entails the notions of leadership and willing deference, as opposed to coercion. But of course, neither did the Romans aspire to empire until they were pushed by defiant rulers in the dominions who would no longer bend implicitly to Roman hegemonic will on issues that were important to the Romans. On issues that were not so important, the Romans during their pre-imperial phase were only too happy to allow the dominions to manage their own affairs as they saw fit (Kallet-Marx 1995).⁷

The distinction between more or less willing deference and defiance on the part of those a leader aspires to lead is essential. It certainly became clear after the events of 11 September 2001, events indicative of a threat that many if not most respected analysts of US foreign policy had underestimated. Partners, allies, and friends immediately let it be known that they deferred to whatever measure the United States chose to take in the aftermath of the attack on New York and Washington; some went even further by offering active support. On the other hand, those actively displaying defiance immediately called forth upon themselves the American legions or the direct threat of future deployment of those legions. Not for the first time in American history — witness the experience of many Latin American neighbours during past centuries — the movement from hegemony to empire became directly observable.⁸

With this important corrective, it remains the case that Haass spoke early in 2001 for the still-mainstream view within the United States that the original dual vision underlying the country's foreign policy after World War II needed to be maintained, despite the end of the Cold War that, in effect, drew out the final phase of that larger conflagration.⁹ A solid, mainly Western core tending toward American-style economic openness and democracy needed to remain intimately conjoined with an American-led military alliance of universal scope. In this light, the main immediate challenge is to hold the internationalist wings of the Democratic and the Republican parties together, maintaining the domestic support required for the active engagement of the United States in world affairs. This is surely where the Bush Administration's early talk about China as strategic competitor, the danger of rogue states, the continued danger of terrorism, and the heightening problem of protectionism both at home and abroad — came from. Some of its spokespersons had clearly long ago concluded that the United States cannot lead unless it has an enemy. They likely also concluded that reinforcing liberal foreign economic policies within the United States, and not coincidentally building a stable governing coalition within the Congress, sometimes required an exaggerated focus on protecting narrowly defined national interests. Hypocrisy, as the old saying goes, is the price vice pays to virtue. But the main point here is that their central vision for world order continues not to differ very much from that of previous administrations. Hegemonic stability is what political scientists called it in decades past (Keohane 1980).

It is true that some right-wing realists are beginning to toy with the fourth vision rejected after World War II, that is, the vision of a true multipolar balance of power with the United States holding the balance and assertively defending a narrowly defined set of interests. But as soon as they move in a unilateral direction, that is, as soon as others, like the Europeans, begin to indicate serious inclinations toward reasonable counter-measures, they back off. Witness the fraught debate within the United States on the establishment of a seriously autonomous rapid reaction force in Europe. Not unconnected to that debate, listen carefully to the reactions of neighbouring states to demands that Germany and Japan directly or indirectly assume regional "responsibilities." Observe the response of US capital markets and their overseers to any serious weakness in the US dollar now that the euro exists. Concentrate on the historical depth of the tension with the American polity between seeking stability abroad and promoting universalist values. No, even right-wing Americans enamoured of Bismarck soon shy away from putting balance-of-power theory clearly into contemporary practice.

More visibly creeping up on the moderate left and moderate right consensus regarding the wisdom of the status quo are two more radical challenges. The first also has both a left variant and a right variant. On the left, proponents appear to want to recover and revive the first vision of world order rejected in the aftermath of World War II. They seek global governance with a democratic and progressive face. World federalism, a global state, confederation, participatory economics — one world, one people. The spirit of Albert Einstein, not to mention of Friedrich Schiller and Immanuel Kant, lives again on the streets wherever G-8 members choose to hold a meeting. Post-modern criticism aside, the new idealists are tapping into a deep vein. The Enlightenment surely lives on to some extent in Europe and North America; most of us cling to the hope that progress is possible in human affairs and that freedom can be meaningful and meaningfully creative. In the end, however, the extreme idealistic vision remains a dangerous illusion. A panacea that substitutes for thought. A retreat from history. A naïve and pious hope. The challenge is, however, obviously politically important. The energy of the street will either be channeled in a positive direction or an unintentionally destructive one.

Whatever its practicability, this left vision of a new world order remains much less dangerous than an alternative vision now becoming dominant on the right. In essence, it recalls the second vision rejected by the Americans after 1945. It is a vision of global markets, automatically adjusting, self-governing — markets that will encourage by their very operation peace and spreading prosperity. The less romantic of its adherents again also seem to be toying now with uniting such a vision with multipolarity, or spheres of influence — Europeans taking care of Balkan problems, China recognized as hegemonic in East Asia, Russia taking care of itself and a now-smaller group of satellites, India dominating a sub-continent stabilized by nuclear deterrence, the United States paying particular attention to the Americas but keeping a hand in all the regional blocs, which would in any case be conjoined by ever more integrated markets. Of course, those markets would require no central regulatory authority. They would supersede intergovernmental regulatory structures, and the great global economic machinery would go of itself.

The basic problem with this entire scheme is the same as the problem it faced over five decades ago. The multipolar balancing part cannot be managed by the American polity, even if it were acceptable within the various regions, which it is not. As even Henry Kissinger came to realize, the American political system cannot long maintain a truly realist foreign policy.¹⁰ That system has never shown itself capable of permitting the systemic engagement required of it in the absence of some sort of liberalizing, world-transforming sense of manifest destiny (Stephanson 1995). Conversely, followers expecting the exercise of legitimate authority at the global level have never shown themselves for long to be willing to accept American leadership unguided by some idea broader than American self-interest.

The other, and much more immediate, part of the problem has to do with the illusion that markets can ever work automatically.¹¹ The hyper-romantic notion, ironically often held by economists and business people who consider themselves to be hard-nosed, that democratic governments can actually stand back while markets work their magic has been continually contradicted by experience since 1931. Confronting crisis, governments have learned to bail markets out, and bail out frequently. With that bailing, unavoidably comes moral hazard, unavoidably comes the need to warn that bailouts will not be repeated, but, since they must be repeated, unavoidably comes the necessity for regulation and supervision. Does anyone actually believe that the US Treasury and the US Fed will stand back to let markets work when large US banks fail again, as they periodically do and will? Does anyone seriously believe that the US Congress will actually step back and let the vast majority of the American workforce not currently saving adequately for their retirement bear the full burden of their short-sightedness in the fullness of time? Does anyone seriously believe that the US government will retreat from an activist industrial policy, with its selective protectionism and its massive market interventions in the defense industrial base, in health and technological R & D, and in education? Not likely.

Karl Polanyi's insight remains as blindingly clear today as it did in 1944, the self-regulating global market is a chimera, a beautiful flower bearing the ugly seeds of social and political catastrophe if we ever begin seriously to believe that such a market can actually exist. Post-war international economic organizations, like the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and the World Trade Organization, have always signified an alternative; however opaque the foundations of world order have become, however much they each have evolved over time, they continue to symbolize a common international economic life — and to the extent economic logic implies it, a common international social life — under US leadership. More practically, and perhaps only for the moment, they still hold the promise that adjustment and development can be mutually reinforcing. True, given the vagaries of power as it exists, they also accommodate and all-too-partially compensate for the fact that most of that adjustment has always been borne by the weak, while most of that development has tended to benefit the strong disproportionately. Without requiring even lukewarm supporters to relinquish any realist priors, their very existence speaks to a less-than-transparent broader objective: a stable international economy built around notions of efficiency friendly to American national interests but an economy in which a degree of legitimacy is accorded to rising demands for social justice. It seems no coincidence that rising tension between principles of economic efficiency and social justice at the international level parallels a similar and enduring struggle inside American society, a struggle only periodically masked by booming markets.

Can the United States lead today, and can institutions emanating from its society and its polity adapt themselves to a new world? Yes, if a critical mass of American citizens do not yield to the ever-present temptations of one-worldism and market globalism. Yes, if American interests deepen their engagement in the world beyond the Western hemisphere. Yes, if broad awareness remains in the United States of global dangers to national security in the absence of an American commitment to a more just world order. Yes, if the social base required to support an enlightened foreign policy within the United States is not simultaneously undercut by the exaggeration of external threats to narrowly defined US interests. Yes, if US leaders can remain creative in their efforts to rein in the historic impulse radically to remold the world in the American image, or alternatively to retreat within national borders when that impulse is thwarted or rebuffed. Yes, if the United States can nurture among follower states a continuing sense of the legitimacy of its hegemony. This latter task, to return to an earlier theme, would be extremely difficult to accomplish in the absence of actual instruments capable of promoting compromise between efficiency and justice objectives at the global level. But can American primacy last forever? Unlike other questions posed in this chapter, this question is an easy one in the light of history and of the rational contemplation of feasible alternatives. How about, for as long as possible?

If non-American readers can read that line without wincing, one further step is warranted. The idea that others can do much more than ameliorate the worst mistakes of US foreign policy and modestly reinforce its best aspects is fanciful. American society, where that policy is grounded, is comparatively resistant to external pressure. While hoping for the best, the citizens of follower states, the members of follower societies, would be wise to rebuild their own capacities to adjust as effectively as possible to changing circumstances. In short, they will not be able either, in the best case, to take limited advantage of their place in an American-led system or, in the worst case, to find limited shelter from the consequences of ineptitude, hubris, or lack of wisdom in the United States, without a strong enough state of their own, a reasonably cohesive state capable of designing and implementing smart policies. Are societies outside the United States willing to pay a small price for the ability to determine the precise degree of their followership and for the ability to play a modest but constructive role in reshaping world order? If leaders require wisdom and effective tools for putting principles into practice, so do followers who seek the benefits of world order at the lowest economic, political, and social costs.

Acknowledgement

Continuing research and writing on the themes outlined in this paper are supported by grants from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. A version of the paper has also been published as a chapter in Globalization and Society: Processes of Differentiation Examined (2003), edited by Raymond Breton and Jeffrey Reitz and published by Greenwood Press in 2003.

Works Cited

Notes

1. As Karl Marx famously put it in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, "Men make their own history, but not just as they please. They do not choose the circumstances for themselves, but have to work upon circumstances as they find them, have to fashion the material handed down by the past."

2. For further background, see (Pauly 2002).

3. Without wading too deeply here into a rapidly burgeoning literature on the failure, reconstruction, or resilience of the democratic welfare state, the notion of the long-term rise and potential durability of US-led social-democracy-within-internationalizing-capitalism remains soundly rooted in empirical research. See, for example, (Ruggie 1982), (Burley 1993), (Garrett 1998), (Doremus et al. 1998), (Weiss 1999), and (Greven and Pauly 2000).

4. One only needs a passing familiarity with American popular history to encounter this view. Observe, for example, the veritable industry spawned in recent years by Tom Brokaw's book, The Greatest Generation (1999).

5. For a contrary view, see (Lebow and Stein 1994).

6. For a recent attempt to build an analytical bridge along precisely these lines and across all three perspectives, see (Nau 2002).

7. I am grateful to Professor Timothy Barnes of the Classics Department, University of Toronto for his guidance on this theme.

8. See, for example, (LaFeber 1963).

9. Within the American-dominated field of security studies, lively, if historically well-precedented, debate continues on specific policy options within such an overarching strategic environment, options that most prominently include selective deep engagements abroad, reducing the forward presence of American troops, supporting liberal elites in follower states, promoting open markets, and refraining from definitive confrontations with relatively strong ideological opponents. See, for example, (Posen 2001), (Walt 2001), and (Owen 2001).

10. "The American refusal to be bound by history and the insistence on the perpetual possibility for renewal confer a great dignity, even beauty, on the American way of life… A country with America's idealistic tradition cannot base its policy on the balance of power as the sole criterion for a new world order" (Kissinger 1994, 833-834).

11. The point has a long and distinguished pedigree in the field of international political economy. See, again, (Ruggie 1982) as well as its antecedent (Polanyi 1957).

Contents

Glossary Terms

• International Monetary Fund
• World Bank
• global governance
• World Trade Organization
• League of Nations
• World War II
• democracy
• General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade
• identities
• empire
• cosmopolitan
• International Trade Organization
• Free trade

   G & A Home | Contact Us | Site Help | Site Map
Copyright © MCRI Globalization and Autonomy. ISSN 1916-5579