The Liberal Moment: Modernity, Security, and the Making of Postwar International Order, by Robert Latham

"Stupendous Forces Are Loose"

Liberal modernity has been crucial in shaping post-World War II international life. To demonstrate how and why I need to craft the basic tools of analysis that will be used to register the various dimensions of that influence. This chapter will be devoted to introducing these elements and considering more generally how they build on as well as depart from other analytical traditions relevant to understanding the contours of the postwar period. I will begin with a discussion of the concept that constitutes the title of this study: the liberal moment.

The Liberal Moment

For more than forty years what has often conveniently been referred to as the "settlement" of the Second World War has been central to the study of contemporary international political life. ₁ Although scholars have taken the tumultuous developments of the 1970s and the more recent events associated with the ending of the Cold War in Europe as important points of departure for research, the immediate aftermath of World War II remains for many a baseline point of reference for the analysis of international political life in the second half of the twentieth century. In general, the ending of the Cold War did not represent a wholesale overturning of the structures and relations that emerged after World War II. If anything, it reinforced what is understood to be central to the settlement of the Second World War: a system of multilateral economic exchange and the international leadership of Western powers. At the same time, the end of the Cold War appeared to offer new hope for the principles and institutions of universalistic dimensions associated with the settlement of World War II, embodied most clearly in the UN.

The longstanding resonance of the concept of a post-World War II settlement should be no surprise given the relatively extensive geographical scope, institutional architecture, and range of issues and relations associated with it. The depth and scope of the negotiations and institutional constructions constituting the settlement of World War II is indeed impressive relative to its most recent predecessor, the settlement of World War I. In 1919 the focus was mostly on Europe, an especially probable outcome given the locus of the war and the relatively unshaken commitment to imperial continuity and spheres of influence. While in 1945 a European focus was retained, the war in Asia and the challenges to the European empires, among other things, guaranteed that considerable effort would be made to negotiate the future of the rest of the world in ways that were unimaginable in 1919. Also after the First World War a far more circumscribed institutional foundation was laid within which there were, relative to 1945, more limited options for the construction of practices and orchestration of policies that are central to the making of liberal order. As one recent study of international organizational life since the nineteenth century put it, the "GATT, the Bretton Woods organizations, and the other institutions of the UN system finally began doing what the League never did." ₂ In both 1945 and 1919 more than economic relations were subject to ordering. But in 1945 an unprecedented international politico-strategic and normative infrastructure was established for, among other things, the multiplication of sovereign states across the globe; for the construction of machinery that would codify and institutionalize human rights as never before; and for the establishment of a military system whose scope was the most extensive in history.

The relative magnitude of the two twentieth-century transitions of 1919 and 1945 has not been the only point of comparison. Concern over the relative degree of stability and sustainability of these two settlements has, if anything, been at least as central as their relative scope. ₃ The implications of the collapse of the post-World War I settlement for the future began preoccupying leading international thinkers such as Karl Polanyi and E. H. Carr even before the outlines of a post-World War II order became visible. Carr's title, The Twenty Years' Crisis, 1919-1939, starkly announced his view of the viability of the settlement of the First World War. For him, the "characteristic feature of the crisis . . . was the abrupt descent from the visionary hopes of the first decade to the grim despair of the second, from a utopia which took little account of reality to a reality from which every element of utopia was rigorously excluded." ₄ Those visionary hopes were tied to nineteenth-century liberal principles such as the belief that trade could render international relations more peaceful. According to Carr, these hopes simply did not account for the dynamics of power politics.

Polanyi also pointed to the relatively swift breakdown of an order in which a nostalgic longing for a return to the perceived stability of the nineteenth-century gold standard-which could be sustained only for a few years-was combined with vain hopes of institutionalizing peace through the League of Nations. ₅ Running headlong into economic depression, a relatively isolationist U.S., the collapse of liberal democratic regimes, and increasingly aggressive and antagonistic foreign policies, the states of the West who were the victors of World War I were hard put to locate an Archimedean point from which to sustain the political relations worked out in treaties such as Versailles and Locarno.

In this discussion it is somewhat inaccurate to employ the term settlement and to use the fixed yearly points of 1945 and 1919 to describe the agreements and structure of relations negotiated in the aftermath of the world wars of the twentieth century. The concept of a war settlement conveys a sense of coming to terms with the outcome of war through great treaties such as Westphalia (1648), Utrecht (1713), or those signed in the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars. It is therefore rather mechanical-i.e., a dimension of war itself-and implies that matters can actually be settled. This certainly was not the case in the interwar years as conditions undermined agreements and relations across the 1920s and 1930s. It is also difficult to apply to the post-World War II period, since so much of international relations was contested for years afterward. We can use the term to describe what war belligerents might understand to be their task upon defeat or victory, namely, shaping a peace. But relying only on the term "settlement," risks underplaying the extent to which the project of making a peace is about constructing an international order of a particular form and character. In this sense the concept of war settlement has an air of neutrality regarding the substance of such a construction that is deceiving. It is profoundly underspecified.

This underspecification applies not only to the making of peace, but also to the ramifications of war, which itself is not a neutral and self-contained process with implications only for its victims and belligerents. To a great extent the ramifications of war have been thought of in the field of international relations in terms of the way belligerents might be able to effect large-scale shifts in configurations of power and relations through hegemonic or global wars. In Robert Gilpin's War and Change in World Politics we are shown how a given state, gaining status as an international leader as a result of hegemonic war, can prompt changes in the character of an international system, making it, for instance, more or less liberal. This formulation underplays the extent to which wars in themselves can effect social, cultural, and political transformations. In recent decades a current of political sociology, associated especially with Charles Tilly and Theda Skocpol and inspired by Max Weber and Otto Hintze, has explored the ways that war and military organization have affected state-formation, revolution, and even regime-type. ₆ The same concerns with the transformative impact of war have not escaped the notice of historians such as William McNeill and Arthur Marwick. ₇ While Gilpin is well aware of this impact he mostly links it to the rise of the nation-state as a preeminent political form in international life, rather than the more specific system changes associated with large-scale warfare. ₈ This is actually in line with the political sociology literature in that its primary focus is the influence of war on individual states in a comparative perspective. What has not received the same type of theoretical treatment is the impact of war on transnational social environments, encompassing not only a range of states and societies but also the social and political linkages among them. ₉

I do not intend to offer here an elaborate exploration or even theoretical model of transnational cultural, social, and political transformations effected by war. ₁₀ But I would like to focus on one way to think about such transformation that bears directly on the post-World War II transition and the formation of a liberal order: that is, through the concept of a historical moment. The Depression, the aggressive expansion of fascism, and finally the world war itself were historical experiences that ruptured and even shattered policies, governments, and, of course, many lives. This rupture is what lends credence to the sense of urgency of which Polanyi wrote and to Carr's choice of the word "crisis" to describe the interwar years. Carr, in fact, cites a passage written by British Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden in 1938 that Carr believed expresses the "impression made on the ordinary man":

It is utterly futile to imagine that we are involved in a European crisis which may pass as it has come. We are involved in a crisis of humanity all the world over. We are living in one of those great periods of history which are awe-inspiring in their responsibilities and in their consequences. Stupendous forces are loose, hurricane forces. ₁₁

Even discounting the tone of a propagandistic call to arms inherent in this passage, we can note the sense of rupture that underlies Eden's phrases, a sense that makes it possible to speak in these exaggerated terms without appearing ridiculous.

The responsibilities and consequences Eden invoked refer to the things that must be done to respond to great crises that fall outside the routine policies and forms of agency that we associate with the mundane workings of states. On one level, the rhetoric of heroic action always lies nearby when things are put in these terms. ₁₂ The speeches of FDR, Churchill, and Stalin in this period were full of this rhetoric. On another level, underlying Eden's words is the tension between: periods of history when the relatively routine structures, orders, and relations generally transport us from one week to the next; and periods-or even episodes-when these routines tend to fall away or are smashed, creating the opportunity for the construction of either new relations and structures or the reestablishment of old ones in relatively new terms. ₁₃ The second type of period is what I mean by a historical moment. ₁₄

In one form or another, the basic distinction between order and flux inherent in the above duality has appeared frequently in the thought of major Western thinkers. Friedrich Nietzsche in his exploration of classical Greek culture in The Birth of Tragedy distinguished between Apollonian ordered forms and Dionysian celebratory bursts of energy, and bemoaned the absence of the latter in his own time. ₁₅ Emile Durkheim contrasted the protective religious force of "physical and moral order" with the "evil and impure powers, productive of disorders," which "correspond to the two opposed states through which all social life passes." ₁₆ Sigmund Freud differentiated the unorganized energies and instincts of the id from the severe, censoring prohibitions emanating from the superego. ₁₇ And Max Weber wrote of charismatic leaders who as revolutionary forces could unhinge social orders and stand "outside the realm of everyday routine." ₁₈ In the post-World War II period, Henri Lefebvre pointed to the experience of moments when all things appeared possible which he applied to revolutionary ruptures such as the Paris Commune and the French student movement of May 1968. ₁₉ The anthropologist Victor Turner explored the possibility that groups could move from ordered and structured relations to situations described as anti-structural in which order breaks down and ambiguity and reversals set in. ₂₀

These lines of thought are all highly complex and can be equated only at the most superficial levels. But together they show that the opposition of flux and order has been a longstanding thematic in the conceptualization of modernity. I wrote of flux in the last chapter as a vital element in the experience of a modern existence facing the enduring possibility of reordering and remaking. Weber, Lefebvre, and Turner point to the possibility of communities entering into states of flux at historic junctures when disorder and the opportunities of reordering becomes possible. It is especially here that I see the opposition of flux and order as applicable to the post-World War II transition as a specific historical moment. ₂₁

By using the term flux to describe conditions in a historical moment I do not mean to imply that when a community enters a transformative period its historical contexts of meaning, power, and hierarchy are abandoned. Turner argues that groups return from periods of anti-structure to their structured forms of life, but that life may be transformed to varying degrees. Charles Maier has considered the ways that in the aftermath of both twentieth century world wars, familiar ideas about social organization reappeared, longstanding economic problems resurfaced, certain elites returned to power, and key class relations were reconstituted, however much on new grounds. ₂₂ Indeed, it would make little sense to designate the period surrounding the Second World War as a liberal moment if the continuities with the liberal past described in the last chapter did not exist.

My identification of this moment as liberal calls for three clarifications. First, this identity rests on the proposition that events, developments, and conditions of this period helped precipitate an ordering of liberal modernity that otherwise would have been highly unlikely, given the fate of liberalism in the 1930s. As I will explain below, war-making became liberal order-making. New forms of agency, domestic and international, emerged, especially in the U.S., along with a resurgence of liberal practices. As Eric Hobsbawm tells it, "nobody predicted" this resurgence. ₂₃ And this raises a second point of clarification. I do not mean to assert any teleological claims about the fate of liberal modernity. There was nothing inevitable about the transformation of this moment into a liberal one. Liberal modernity does not have an exclusive hold over the fate of the West, to say nothing of the rest of the world. What emerged in this moment was a fortuitous combination of changing conditions to which surviving elites oriented to liberal modernity could respond and out of which the U.S. could be drawn into the project of liberal order-building. ₂₄

But my third point is that it was not a liberal moment for everyone. Although the effects and ramifications of the liberal moment were global in scope, the changes were not experienced universally as an opportunity to help reorder the world along liberal lines, certainly not for many people, for instance, in Africa and Asia. (It is unlikely Stalin saw it that way as well.) Decolonization would take decades to unfold. Many peoples were perhaps experiencing other types of moments in the 1940s, or no moments at all. However, the reverberations of the liberal moment would ultimately reach nearly everyone through institutions such as the IMF and the charged political environment of the Cold War.

War-Making as Liberal Order-Making

These points of clarification underscore the extent to which the crucial mix of forces in a historical moment is between rapid and rupturing historical changes and new articulations of political and social agency that can reorder relations. The point of making the liberal moment central to this inquiry is that it allows for analysis that captures the play between changes in historical context and agency. That is, instead of initially framing this inquiry with the question of why the U.S. made a commitment to the postwar hegemonic pursuit of international liberalism-a question that tends to focus too quickly on the level of U.S. state agency ₂₅ -we can ask whether there were conditions in the international realm that helped make such pursuit compelling. The answer to such a question requires that World War II not be viewed only as a contingent historical event that projected U.S. power abroad and opened the way for U.S. intervention in Europe (based, for example, on the high levels of wartime devastation). ₂₆ Rather, we might consider the ways that the social and political outcomes engendered by the war were associated with the rise of liberal conditions in the international realm that facilitated the emergence of a U.S. liberal hegemonic agency. In doing so, it will become clearer why this was a liberal moment as opposed to something else.

In the first place, the defeat of fascism led to a resurgence of state sovereignty, self-determination, representative government, and liberal rights in much of Europe. By mid-1947 Kennan had recognized that:

The broad pattern of our recent foreign policy, including the confidence we have placed in the United Nations, has assumed the continuation in Europe of a considerable number of free states subservient to no great power, and recognizing [sic] their heritage of civil liberties and personal responsibility and determined to maintain this heritage. If this premise were to be invalidated, there would have to be a basic revision of the whole concept of our international position. . . . ₂₇

Outside of Europe, World War II has been widely acknowledged as also having spurred the emergence of anti-colonial movements, which cast their claims in terms of the principles associated with national self-determination. ₂₈ In the least, the war made the return to prewar European imperialism problematic.

In the second place, the release of Atlantic economies from the pressures of war-making or fascist economic controls cleared a space for the reconstitution of more open national market economies and removed a major barrier to international exchange. Bretton Woods and the 1945 British loan can be understood not only as responses to an opportunity to remake the international economic realm along more liberal lines-in a manner consistent with U.S. interests and ideals-but also as further steps along a trajectory of developments that constituted a loosening of state-based economic controls. It began with the war itself in 1939, when the old imperial systems were disrupted, and continued into the last years of the war when a postwar end to wartime controls in Britain and France were in sight. These changes marked a new point in the history of Europe which the U.S. could both respond to and help shape if it chose to do so at the end of the war.

In thinking about the impact of the war, it would be inaccurate to portray 1944 or 1945 as "year zero" for the commencement of U.S. liberal order-building. ₂₉ Diplomatic historians, of course, like to locate the "origins" of the Cold War at least as early as 1941, at America's entrance into World War II. Consistent with this periodization, it is possible to locate the emergence of international liberal conditions and the rise of U.S. liberal hegemonic agency well before 1945. In effect, the war, as a conflict between liberal and nonliberal forces, can be seen as an international condition itself that helped move the U.S. toward its role as a liberal order-builder. In that role the U.S. contributed significantly to the emergence of liberal conditions; conditions that, in turn, served further to help propel the U.S. to act as a liberal hegemon.

By 1939, the growing power of Germany and Japan had forced the U.S. to choose between isolation and a more extensive commitment overseas. The disruption of the U.S.'s external realm and relations had reached a point where it had either to begin taking action to preserve those relations or abandon them altogether. Even before the U.S. entered the war, aid to Britain and the symbolic commitment of the Atlantic Charter were two manifestations of this action. It became clear by 1941 that the U.S. would not only defend the survival of Britain, but also try to force it to consider more liberal international practices including the abandonment of the imperial preference system. By supporting the survival of a liberal democratic state against aggressive nonliberal forces and evoking principles of a liberal peace, the U.S. administration already reflected a concern with conditions after the war and the possibilities of a liberal postwar settlement. (I am using the term, as distinguished above, to describe what war belligerents might understand to be their task upon defeat or victory.)

It is true that, for any state, winning a war entails making a peace. For the U.S. this could not be just any peace: the global scale of this war forced the U.S. to confront a global peace. Some historians, among them Lynn Davis, place considerable weight on the U.S. endeavor to postpone discussion of the specifics of a postwar settlement until after the end of the war. ₃₀ However, such a view ignores the conditions inherent in the war itself that had important ramifications for a settlement or order-making. The decisions to concentrate on Europe first, to make a second front in Northern Europe, and to forge an anti-fascist alliance are only a few examples. ₃₁ That the U.S. limited its order-making mostly to wartime activities is understandable given that the will to hegemonic agency was being forged in the war itself. In other words, a commitment to the broad principles of an international liberal postwar settlement made political sense for a state whose agency as a hegemon was being formed only within the process of war-making. Only at the end of the war could international conditions compel the U.S. to seek a specific settlement with all the implications the role of liberal order-builder would entail. ₃₂

The conduct of the war, the concomitant necessity of making a peace, and the conditions associated with a liberal moment, especially in Europe, had placed the U.S. in a position that was open to the assertion of the agency of liberal hegemony. Not only was the historical situation different at the end of World War I, but it is also clear that the U.S. was not able then to locate the political will for hegemonic agency. The question is, how was the U.S. able to organize the political will to continue and even expand its role as a liberal order-builder after World War II?

There is, of course, no simple answer to this important question. It will take much of this chapter to get a handle on it. We can begin answering this question by considering some conditions at the conclusion of the war that helped make the continuation of liberal order-building a compelling course for the U.S. To start, there was a residual extension of the U.S. military in Europe and east Asia as a result of the war effort. This carried with it the political duties of occupation and was applicable, with the aid of the Allies, to the international politics of the pursuit of a war settlement. Also, the allies of the U.S. were unable and reluctant to take on the costs and responsibilities inherent in the leadership of a postwar settlement. France's defeat and occupation by Germany; the wartime drain on resources experienced by Britain; and the concern in both countries with the reestablishment of their colonial empires hardly left these countries in a position to take on the leadership of the postwar settlement. Moreover, in contrast to World War I, the postwar settlement of World War II was not burdened by a host of secret wartime agreements.

An additional factor underlying the U.S. commitment to continue its order-building was formed in a somewhat backhanded fashion. Above all, a multilateral economic system was not just a basic liberal goal in the U.S.'s economic interest, it was the one global economic model that rested on a set of reciprocal multilateral agreements which U.S. policymakers believed might constitute a de facto settlement. State Department historian Harley Notter observed a faith that "the common interests of nations were more generally recognized in the economic than in the political field." ₃₃ Thus, international economic liberalism led not just to peace, but also to conditions that might help minimize the thorny problems of having to construct a peace politically. ₃₄ The U.S. would hardly be able to avoid a politically based peace. However, as we shall see below, U.S. policymakers believed that by promoting state sovereignty, self-determination, democracy, and human rights they could help produce the required independent political strength in the international realm to minimize the necessity of U.S. intervention and ultimately facilitate U.S. withdrawal. Ironically, the effort to achieve such withdrawal and leave in its wake a liberal order became the driving force for a continued U.S. commitment to liberal order-building and intervention. As we shall see, the very pursuit of a settlement by the U.S. that could facilitate a withdrawal from U.S. overseas engagements would necessitate a continuation of those engagements.

Agency and Liberal Order

If one of the distinguishing marks of modernity is the enduring possibility of organizing forms of large-scale human agency, then surely the ordering of relations that occurred in the 1940s counts as a robust modern project. Indeed, one way to understand the stakes of making a peace is to focus not just on the types of relations that are ordered but also on the forms of agency effecting this order. This is one advantage of employing modernity as a category of analysis. It permits us to problematize and historicize the formation of agency and the institutions associated with it.

Along these lines John Ruggie has pointed out that the state as "a particular form of territoriality-disjoint, fixed, and mutually exclusive" represents what came to be "the most distinct feature of modernity in international politics." ₃₅ This mode of modern agency received a considerable boost in the 1940s through a UN Charter that recognized and legitimized the normative and juridical status of the state. The post-World War II period also became home to an extensive web of international institutions associated with liberal practices and a remarkable exercise of international leadership by a preponderant U.S. state in a number of spheres of international life. The U.S. state was at the center of the construction of an extensive global politico-strategic system that bound together, however unequally, the members of what has often been referred to as the "free world." Thus, other types of agency were also being formed besides those associated simply with the territorial state.

In very general terms, agency is a specific status that can be assigned to a subject. In the context of this discussion, agency is an identity we can attribute to those subjects that shape political and social life. (To objectify things, an agent is a force that shapes relations or outcomes.) This way of looking at social actions leads to questions about who will act for whom or be empowered to build or maintain aspects of the social and political order that structure a given social existence. Thus, in a given historical context, the formation of agency can become a serious political problem. The contests and deliberations in the U.S. Congress over the nature of U.S. leadership in the 1940s, which will be discussed below, are pointed examples of this type of problematization. Likewise, the negotiations over the shape and powers of the UN held at Dumbarton Oaks in 1944 are also illustrative. Empowering the Security Council to initiate military operations and ensuring a veto for every permanent member of the Council were controversial issues that shaped the character of the UN as an agent in international relations. And we could make the same point about deliberations, which began in 1946, over the formation of the International Trade Organization, as a body dedicated to the oversight of trade relations housed within the UN. The U.S. Congress, which viewed this form of agency as being, among other things, potentially far too interventionist, ultimately rejected it. These examples show that in the making of international order, weighty contests can emerge over which-or even whether-concentrations of agency and arenas of cooperation will form at a given historical juncture. ₃₆

Notice that the possibility of contests and deliberations over the scope of agency implies purposefulness and deliberate action. That is, the activities of order-making, construction, and organization share the common implication of willful or intentional design. A great advantage to using a category such as agency is that it forces one to become sensitive to the problem of attributing forms of will to actors. It is one thing to observe from the heights of hindsight that a process of order-building has been unfolding, and quite another to attribute to policymakers a consciously defined and identified project of liberal order-construction. Recall points made about the use of the term "settlement." Were U.S. policymakers, in their minds, settling a war or making a world? At the heart of this problem are the difficulties of specifying the terms and limits of conscious action, intentionality, and even motivation. These issues have long vexed social thinkers struggling to interpret meaningful action. ₃₇ For our purposes we need only focus on the question of whether we should impute to policymakers the existence of an explicit intention to construct liberal order, or-far more grandly-to shape the contours of liberal modernity. There is no simple answer to this question. But answering it matters because it provides a basis for understanding the approach of this study.

Many policymakers in the U.S. understood upon reflection that in the making of the UN, multilateral economic institutions, and even NATO, they were fashioning an international order that they assumed would be liberal in character. But they did not consciously work from an explicit concept of international liberal order, nor did they need to be self-reflexive liberal order-builders. Senator Arthur Vandenberg, an important policymaker and articulator of the Republican Party's perspective on U.S. foreign policy, wrote in 1944 to Secretary of State Hull about the UN and the U.S.'s "quest of permanent peace with ordered justice in a free world." ₃₈ Roughly nine months later Vandenberg wrote to FDR to express his "profound conviction that we must organize the postwar world on the basis of effective, collective security [my emphasis]." ₃₉ Thus, Vandenberg, who was initiated into postwar policymaking circles, understood that the stakes of decisions and policies were about making order. It also seems that for him the goals and terms of order were liberty and collective security, concepts well within the currency of the modern liberal tradition. Neither he nor any other policymaker of his time, however, wrote or spoke about liberalism with the same self-reflexiveness we are able to today or with the historical perspective of a Karl Polanyi or John Dewey. ₄₀ Nonetheless, it is clear that the terms Vandenberg used, such as the "free world," were articulations of a contemporary-if not popular-understanding of what I have been calling liberal modernity (democracy, rights, markets, and self-determination). That is, what matters is their deliberate ordering of relations relevant to liberal modernity, not the degree of self-reflexivity about the historical dimensions of their effort.

It is interesting that as one reads through The Private Papers of Senator Vandenberg, published in 1952, there is a marked decrease in explicit pronouncements or judgments on the broad project of order-building. Toward the end of the 1940s, Vandenberg's concerns gradually focused more exclusively on the immediate policy issues and perceived crises of the day. No doubt this change reflected the new circumstances and perceived crises surrounding the rise of the Cold War that will be discussed below. But there is an important lesson to draw from his changing tone. Just as Vandenberg, FDR, and even Kennan could advocate and direct policy toward the building of an international order that was liberal without having to be self-reflexive and critical users of the concept, they could also pursue liberal order without having the project of liberal order-building constantly before them as an explicit issue. Vandenberg seemed to understand at least the basic principle behind this point when he wrote at the beginning of 1945: "A global conflict which uproots the earth is not calculated to submit itself to the dominion of any finite mind. . . . Each of us can only speak according to his little lights-and pray for a composite wisdom that shall lead us to high, safe ground." ₄₁

If we could confront Vandenberg today he would likely agree that there could be no grand, meta-scheme for constructing international order, nor would policymakers need to have it at the front of their minds at all times to be effective order-builders. There was the goal of organization, and specific plans to effect order such as the UN and the IMF. Yes, the immediate post-World War II period was an extraordinary time-a historic moment-which put far more pressure on the question of goals and the making of strategic decisions and designs. But even within the context of those times, policymakers had to face specific issues and problems, which they faced exactly because they had embarked on the project of liberal order-building, whether they were conscious of this project at a given time or not. ₄₂ Anthony Giddens, taking his cue from the phenomenologist Alfred Schutz, has put these points in broader, social-theoretical terms: "A person's cognitive activity can be regarded as involving an interweaving of short-term purposes and longer-term projects. Long-term projects are often 'held in suspense' or lie dormant in the varied contexts of daily life; they nevertheless help give over-all phenomenal 'shape' to the individual's existence." ₄₃

Another way to think about the status of liberal order-building as a conscious project is to go back to Braudel's sense of different time horizons discussed at the conclusion of the last chapter. While liberal modernity emerges in the longue durée, and liberal order is lodged in a particular historical conjuncture, it is on the level of events, Braudel's third horizon, that policymaking is so often trained. ₄₄ One need only read through the State Department archives to see how true this is.

By recognizing the different time horizons in both history (Braudel) and agency (Giddens), we can understand the relationship between liberal modernity, liberal order, and the decisive agency of the U.S. state, embodied, in practical terms, in U.S. foreign policymaking and actions. For example, the U.S. state's construction of a multilateral economic system with institutions such as the IMF and the World Bank helped shape the dimensions of liberal order and the unfolding of the liberal moment. But it also transformed the character of liberal modernity in the domain of international economic exchange, as a new mode of multilateralism emerged. ₄₅

At the same time that state agencies are shaping liberal order and transforming liberal modernity, this example reveals another process at work. The substance and possibilities of agency are being formed to a great degree in the shorter term by the dynamics of the liberal moment and the emerging order, and in the longer term by the historical trajectories of liberal modernity. This dialectical process has been described most famously by Giddens as "structuration." ₄₆ Whereas structures-in this case the liberal moment and liberal modernity-shape the action and practices of agents, those agents in turn are able to shape and transform structures. Moreover, structuration helps us see that it is only in and through the action of agents that structures are produced and reproduced through time. A similar play between agency and structure is inherent in Braudel's sense of historical time, as events, conjunctures, and broad historical structures are mutually dependent upon one another.

I therefore need to qualify the assertion made in the last section that the liberal moment facilitated the emergence of U.S. hegemonic agency. My qualification is that U.S. state agency itself was among the decisive forces shaping the course of the liberal moment (other agencies-such as Western European states-were, of course, also important). Some readers may be tempted to level the charge of circularity here. But I believe that they can do so only by overlooking the significance of my broader argument. It is agency, the liberal moment, and liberal modernity more broadly, that together yield the liberal order-building process. Agency and historical context (or in Giddens's terms "structure") in their interaction produce a third term of analysis, the liberal order-building process. ₄₇

By placing the liberal order-building process at the center of analysis and clearly linking both agency and historical context to it, I have, in effect, cast the U.S. as an agent of liberal order, if not also liberal modernity. It was not the only agent. But it was, by virtue of its material preponderance and its role within the liberal moment able to muster the political will to become an essential agent in the building of liberal order. This is hardly an innocent identification. Although the transformative and dialectical relationship between agency and liberalism that I have established avoids any reification of liberal order or liberal modernity, there are other important issues engendered by this identification. Concepts such as hegemony, interests, configurations of power, and even empire are always close at hand when any pronouncements on the status of the post-World War II U.S. state are offered. They have populated much of the discussion about the politics of the postwar period, and it is to these concepts that I now turn.

Hegemony

The expression, U.S. (liberal) hegemonic agency, has been used rather loosely in this text to denote the extensive and critical role of the U.S. state in the making of post-World War II liberal order. Indeed, the attachment of the label "hegemonic" to the U.S. state, at least as it operated in the early decades of the postwar period, is so prevalent in the field of international relations that it is tantamount to something like an automatic reflex. For decades the most prevalent approach to thinking about U.S. hegemony in the field has been hegemonic stability theory. According to the theory of hegemonic stability, the range of economic, political, and strategic benefits a hegemonic state enjoys in a given international order justifies the costs such a state entails in the establishment and maintenance of that order. In the specific case of the postwar U.S. state, the effort to construct and sustain an international order that was liberal, above all in economic terms, is shown to make sense within the context of the theory based on two factors. An order comprising a liberal economic system, marked by relatively open economic terms, is understood to be highly beneficial to the national economic interests of the U.S. state and society. In addition, such an order would also be consistent with the political and economic organization of the U.S. as a liberal state. ₄₈ Throughout its post-World War II liberal hegemony, so it goes, the U.S. achieved investment, trade, and monetary gains based on an international liberal economic system it protected with a political and security order extended across the globe. Those states with sufficiently developed economies have also benefited from the economic system and international political order established under U.S. hegemony. The character of the order as a public good in turn is rewarded with legitimacy, which limits the necessity of extensive hegemonic intervention and direct control that might otherwise increase the costs and compromise the liberal nature of the hegemonic order.

This logic, while it shows why liberal hegemony makes sense, does not explain how a liberal hegemon is able to organize itself as a hegemon and muster the political will as an international actor to build a liberal order. The structure of hegemonic incentive is, in effect, underdetermining as an explanation of the "agency" of hegemony, even when it is combined with the condition of preponderance in economic and military power. It does not establish the ability of a potential hegemon to exploit preponderance and pursue incentives, which depends on the marshaling of political forces necessary to legitimate and authorize this exploitation and pursuit. Nor does it show that a state can translate this will into effective international political action. In its deliberate focus on the dynamics of order maintenance and hegemonic decline, hegemonic stability theory has generally paid little attention to the dynamics of "hegemonic ascendancy." ₄₉ As I have tried to show in previous sections, it is in the process of order construction that agency becomes especially salient. What we are left with in hegemonic stability theory is a rather thin basis for understanding how states become hegemonic, and how that "becoming" is related to the emergence and shaping of international order. ₅₀

In contrast to hegemonic stability theory, U.S. diplomatic history has concentrated on America's emergence as the central political agent of the post-World War II international system in the West. Diplomatic historians of all ilks have attempted to identify the specific forces that created and shaped the character of the U.S. postwar overseas commitment. For the most part this effort has yielded a mix of contingent, perceptual, and structural factors that explain specific aspects of the rise of U.S. leadership and its role as a major element in the shaping of the contours of the international system. That is, factors such as World War II, domestic politics, anti-communism, a sense of threat, bureaucratic politics, and the capitalist world economy are called upon to explain particular facets of U.S. state agency located in policies and decisions. ₅₁ I will have more to say about how the arguments in this book differ from some of the relevant traditions of diplomatic history, as well as realist international relations, at the conclusion of this chapter. But for now it is enough to point out that diplomatic history does not really problematize the concept of hegemony, U.S. or otherwise, even though historians such as John Lewis Gaddis, Michael Hogan, and Melvyn Leffler have offered very important insights into the nature of that leadership. Hegemony as a political form remains recessed in diplomatic histories behind the focus on specific aspects of leadership. True enough, at least one diplomatic historian has explicitly adopted the world systems approach associated with Immanuel Wallerstein. ₅₂ Wallerstein stresses-in a way that is consistent with hegemonic stability theory-the benefits of "a maximally free world market" to a hegemon in a world capitalist system based on the competitiveness of its products. ₅₃ But rather than questioning and explore the advantages and stakes in using the concept of hegemony, the adoption of a world systems framework, along with other approaches, only takes the concept for granted as a starting point.

Hegemonic stability and world systems theory have not been the only approaches where the concept of hegemony is applied in the context of international relations. Robert Cox and what is generally understood to be a Gramscian school, because of the inspiration drawn from the writing of Marxist theorist Antonio Gramsci, place the category of hegemony at the center of its analysis of international relations. ₅₄ In general, Cox distinguishes his understanding of hegemony through the notion that it is not a powerful state per se that can be hegemonic but an international or global order itself. Cox describes the former condition as one of "domination," which he sees as the main concern of hegemonic stability theory. Still, for Cox, hegemonic orders rely on the agency of a predominant state to rise to-and remain in-ascendancy.

Cox takes care to point out that it is not just any order that can become hegemonic. We can expect hegemony to emerge for "an order within a world economy with a dominant mode of production which penetrates all countries and links with subordinate models of production. It is also a complex of international social relationships which connect the social classes of the different countries." ₅₅ Bear in mind that hegemony is about more than relations of power and material organization. It also entails "a structure of values and understandings about the nature of order that permeates a whole system of states and non-state entities." ₅₆ In his major work, Production, Power, and World Order, Cox identifies a post-World War II international order centered initially in the U.S. as a global hegemonic order that warrants the label Pax Americana. In this order, U.S. economic, political, and military power, multilateral corporations, visions for the construction of international institutions, radiated outward and were entwined with an ideology of mutual economic benefit, new models of the state (e.g., neoliberal and welfare-nationalist), and specific patterns of capitalist accumulation, class formation, and relations of production. ₅₇ According to Cox, global hegemonies emerge when a social class ascends to hegemony within a powerful state and a shift in interstate power relations favors the international preponderance of that state and class. With this innovative formulation, Cox offers us a sense of the dynamics of hegemonic ascendance that is missing in the other approaches.

Cox's approach to hegemony and order represents an important advance over hegemonic stability theory. His points about order and hegemony's consensual and ideological dimensions, the unfolding of order within a larger macro-historical context (i.e., capitalism), and the possibility of an order itself being hegemonic are provocative departures from more traditional approaches. Cox has clearly informed my own thinking about order in profound ways. In the liberal order that was described in the previous chapter, ideological and consensual forces figure prominently in all the liberal domains. I have also repeatedly stressed the importance of viewing liberal modernity as the wider historical context for the emergence of liberal order.

However, there are some notable differences between Cox's thinking and my own, which were touched on in the last chapter but warrant further clarification. Essentially, these differences revolve around the use of the term hegemony. Cox has viewed the same historical juncture and the making of order in the post-World War II period that I am looking at from the angle of capitalist, rather than liberal, modernity. For him, the starting point is the set of social relations of production, relating to how forms of material life (e.g., work and economic distribution) are organized. From there, Cox goes on to analyze how institutions, perspectives on order, and configurations of power (mostly interstate)-all operating on a global scale-bear on the establishment or maintenance of different "modes of social relations of production." In contrast, I build my understanding of order from the starting point of liberal relations and practices (i.e., liberal modernity). Despite the wide range of social existence comprised by the liberal domains described in chapter 1, liberal modernity is a far more circumscribed macro-historical context than the (capitalist) world economy. Obviously there are lots of overlapping areas regarding, for example, the governance of states and markets. On one level, the difference is one of gaining a perspective on a complex historical juncture that can be viewed from multiple angles, each with their own field of vision.

However, there is another level of difference. I took considerable pains to argue in the last chapter that multiple forms of modernity and even order can coexist in the world, with liberal modernity and order being only one form, however extensive its reach. It therefore makes little sense to attach the term hegemony to a (liberal) order itself. Liberal modernity and order shaped different societies often in very circumscribed ways (e.g., markets in capital cities). In effect, except in the North Atlantic region, the depth of liberal order was limited. Cox recognizes that hegemony, which can be "firmly established at the center of the world order, wears thin in its peripheries." ₅₈ It should be noted, an advantage to Cox's labeling of an order as hegemonic is the emphasis it places on the way that a center can lord over peripheries. But if hegemony fundamentally rests on the permeation of values and understandings throughout the global system, then we have to be careful about claims that an order is globally hegemonic when peripheries make up nearly eighty percent of the planet. This issue is to a great extent an empirical one, and it cannot be settled here. ₅₉ But it can be said that it would certainly be wholly inaccurate to make the hegemonic claim in the case of liberal order and modernity. Perhaps ironically, it is exactly because the liberal order pursued in the 1940s was global in scope and, therefore, thinly spread that it makes little sense to speak of it being hegemonic in Cox's sense.

Thus, rather than seeing hegemonic agency as a function of the rise of an order itself to world hegemonic status, I would prefer to explore how hegemony can emerge within an order, or more accurately, in the process of building an order. On its face, this would seem to be a return to the perspective of traditional international relations approaches associated with hegemonic stability theory, where the focus is on the agency of the preponderant state. In these approaches hegemonic states produce order. However, my approach to agency, order, and the relationship between them opens up a different way to understand the status and meaning of hegemony. In that understanding, the problem of the emergence of hegemony, which generally eluded hegemonic stability theory, is a central concern.

To reach that understanding let me begin by noting that for a hegemonic stability theorist like Gilpin, hegemony "refers to the leadership of one state (the hegemon) over other states." ₆₀ Equating hegemony with the leadership of a predominant state is a usage of the term that extends back to nineteenth-century descriptions of the ancient Greek state system. ₆₁ Despite its pedigree, the equation of hegemony with leadership is a tautology. There is no distinction between an agent's status as a hegemon and hegemony per se. If a state is a leader it is a hegemon and hegemony is simply the condition thereof.

While tautology is not a problem in itself, it becomes one if it limits the scope of analysis. The "hegemony equals leadership" notion renders the state/agent in question an agent for itself, i.e., an agent of its own status as a hegemon/leader. This agent can then pursue its interests in making an international order to its liking, as described above. But what if we treated the relationship between agency and hegemony differently and proposed that a hegemon is a state that is an agent of hegemony? And by hegemony here I do not mean, as Cox does, the predominance of an order per se, but the formation of a specific category of political activity that can be associated with the making of an international order. The category of activity I have in mind is a "constitutive presence." ₆₂

A helpful analogy for constitutive presence is the way that walls, floors, and ceilings constitute the space of a house, but may not determine the dwelling's purpose, decoration, or the daily pleasure and pain that occurs inside that space. Within the context of international relations an analogous constitutive presence is inherent in the establishment of a military base, the opening of an administrative office, the transfer of funds, or the formation of a communication network.

Typically one starts with the assumption that hegemony at its core is about power or even domination over others and things based on the capabilities of the hegemon. ₆₃ This formulation, consistent with the hegemon as leader approach, views resources and organization as something internal to the hegemon that can be turned outward to dominate others. But this view, in effect, equates hegemony with the conventional Weberian understanding of power, i.e., the prospect of an agent achieving its goals in a given social environment. Hegemons, in this view, are thus the most powerful actors, and by virtue of that power they are international leaders. But what actually distinguishes a hegemon from other states is not just its deployment and exercise of great power, but the nature of that deployment and its effects. A hegemon must be able to shape practices and ideas in the international realm, which is an ability that is mostly dependent on the effective presence of institutions, norms, and material resources. This shaping presence is hegemony and the agent that effects it is the hegemon. Such presence is essential to the production of consensual and coercive relations that have been associated with hegemony ever since Gramsci emphasized the distinction. For instance, such shaping occurs when coerced actors are prompted-or merely choose- to react or adjust to a given configuration of relations in their international environment, as when a state is compelled to change its policy in reaction to punitive signals from a multilateral institution. Consenting actors, on the other hand, can adapt themselves to and even exploit the ideational and material sinews of a given presence, making these sinews commensurate with their own needs, interests, and identity. The classic example of this is the small state that takes advantage of the order underwritten by other, more powerful, states. In doing so, such states are likely to acquiesce in or internalize norms and practices in their international environment which they come to view as advantageous. ₆₄ In actuality, coercion and consent are part of a continuum of effects of an ideational and material deployment that is constitutive of practices and relations in the international realm. The same constitutive presence can be both coercive and consensual. A military base can socialize states into an alliance system and it can be used to threaten punishment.

One advantage of viewing hegemony in this way is that it allows us to associate a range of actions and relations with the emergence and operation of hegemony. Hedley Bull, for instance, distinguishes between "dominance" (violent disregard of other states' rights), "primacy" (compelling sway over international relations of a group of states), and "hegemony" (midway between dominance and primacy). ₆₅ But we might imagine that all three types of relations can appear in the establishment or maintenance of a constitutive presence. They might for instance exist coterminously in the same hegemony or characterize different periods of hegemony. In the case of the U.S. it is clear that the type of hegemonic interventions in Southeast Asia differed considerably from those in Europe.

With this conception of hegemony we also gain another way to view the relation between hegemony and imperialism. An empire is a special type of constitutive presence which involves either formal incorporation of colonies or informal modes of dominance in the way Bull uses the term. Michael Doyle differentiates imperialism from hegemony by claiming that "[c]ontrol of both foreign and domestic policy characterizes empire; control of only foreign policy, hegemony." ₆₆ This distinction is one way of communicating the point that, as commonly understood, hegemony operates in the context of juristically sovereign polities and that if, even in that context, there is significant control of domestic spheres, this is likely to be a case of (informal) imperialism. Even so, I feel this distinction is too hard. Hegemony and imperialism for me share the common political modality of a constitutive presence. Differences emerge in a constitutive presence's character (e.g., collaborative versus incorporative) and fields of operation (e.g., independent states vs. "territories"). For example, while the U.S. in the first half of the twentieth century established imperial relations with territories in the Caribbean (e.g., Puerto Rico and Cuba), it had something closer to hegemonic relations with South America. Arguments over whether the post-World War II U.S. external presence has been imperial rather than merely benignly hegemonic miss the point. A constitutive presence can take on different forms in different contexts. Even within the same context one set of relations might be imperial while another is not, which may hold for one period of time and not for another.

By distinguishing hegemony from agency through the concept of constitutive presence we can map more clearly the ways that agency, hegemony, the liberal moment, and the liberal order-building process stand in relation to one another. In the previous section, I argued that the intersection of the agencies of especially North Atlantic states with the liberal moment yielded a liberal order-building process in the 1940s. Hegemony can be understood as a product of this same intersection. Consider once again the depiction of the liberal moment offered in the section above. The historical forces associated with the liberal moment (e.g., the war itself) and the agency of the U.S. and other states shaped the contours of a constitutive presence (vis-ˆ-vis the U.S.) emerging in the aftermath of war. This constitutive presence and deployment-ultimately taking form, for example, in organs that would oversee the Marshall Plan-was essential to the making of international order. At the same time, the dynamics of making order helped determine the character of U.S. hegemony. For instance, the specific political and economic dynamics at play in the integration of European economies after the war shaped the institutions of the Marshall Plan. Moreover, the formation of hegemony has a direct impact on the emergence of various dimensions of order described in the last chapter-orchestration, construction, concentrations of agency, and institutional arenas. NATO is perhaps the most pointed example of this intersection. The agency of North Atlantic states constructed a new form of alliance, allowing for an orchestration of security policies in an unique arena structured by a concentration of U.S. agency that formed a long lasting constitutive presence in Europe. These relationships are depicted in figure 2.1.

In the bottom half of the figure, one sees the intersection of agency and the liberal moment described in the previous section. Looking to the top half we can see the same intersection refracted into the formation of hegemony as just argued for above. The line connecting the formation of hegemony and the liberal order-building process is meant to convey the way that these two processes shape one another. Each line has arrows at both ends in order to emphasize that the forces and processes in play were mutually constitutive. For example, the trajectory of hegemonic formation, shaped most of all by the agency of the U.S. in the context of the liberal moment, in turn shaped the nature of U.S. agency as certain types of action became feasible. For instance, once the Economic Cooperation Administration was formed by the U.S. state to execute the Marshall Plan, the U.S. could push for economic outcomes in Europe in ways that would otherwise not have been possible.

This figure and the discussion of it is set at a very abstract level. The relationships it depicts need to be fleshed out in more concrete terms.

Perhaps the best way to begin doing so is by considering the more specific terms of U.S. hegemony.

The External State

Hegemonic states deploy organizational and material resources beyond their borders that are substantial enough to shape relations and practices relevant to the making of international order. The concept of constitutive presence denotes the effect of this deployment in the international realm. But it does not indicate the actual structure of hegemonic agency itself. In other words, we need to explore the political form hegemonic agency takes and determine how such agency stands in relation to the state that underwrites it. ₆₇ In the more specific terms of the liberal moment, what needs to be considered is the organizational form of the U.S. extension "overseas."

It is tempting to view this extension in simple organizational materialist terms (i.e., with reference solely to the organizational and material resources deployed). Stalin did this when he claimed in an interview: "This war is not as in the past: whoever occupies a territory also imposes on it his social system. Everyone imposes his own system as far as his army can reach." ₆₈ While Stalin may very well have accurately described his intentions in eastern Europe-and his desire to pursue a heavy-handed hegemony of domination or even imperial relations-his statement is hardly an apt description of dynamics of the U.S. presence in Europe. The nature and purpose of the constitutive presence of the U.S. would emerge only as the liberal order-building process unfolded. Indeed, it was hardly clear, as I will show, that the U.S. constitutive presence would be maintained at all. Of course, it is true that in 1945, armies-in the West as well as the East-were the main organs of extension, becoming especially involved in occupation duty in Central Europe, above all in Germany. But it was hardly clear what kind of "social system" would emerge in Central Europe since, as I will discuss, this was a highly contested issue in the U.S. state and in the West more generally. Nor was it clear exactly what role the U.S. should play in the remaking of that system. Of course, the U.S. knew that it did not want Stalin's system. To treat this crude fact as evidence for Stalin's organizational materialist viewpoint on the fate of the postwar world is to ignore the diversity of social and political outcomes that were possible and ultimately realized across the states and societies of Europe. More than this, it ignores the extent to which European populations themselves-especially the middle and upper classes-were choosing and shaping their own social system in the context of a liberal moment and an emerging U.S. hegemony. ₆₉

Although Stalin's organizational materialist statement misrepresents how things would develop in the West, it does usefully convey that one of the outcomes of World War II was the projection of the U.S. and Soviet states into their respective external realms. One way to think about the set of state organs that are literally situated and deployed in the external realm is as simply the external face of the state. J. P. Nettl made famous the concept of the janus-faced state, a state that was oriented both inward toward its sovereign territory and outward toward its external realm. ₇₀ I believe this conceptualization is far too limited. All states are oriented externally in janus-faced fashion, making foreign policy and deploying diplomats and consuls. Any powerful state can pursue its interests aggressively in the external realm. But what distinguishes postwar West Germany or Canada from the U.S., with regard to their presence in their respective external realms, is that the latter externally deploys an extensive array of state organs. At the end of World War II, only the U.S., Britain, and the Soviet Union were in a position to do so. ₇₁ And while Britain spent much of the 1940s rapidly dismantling its external presence, both the U.S. and the Soviet Union made decisions that would expand theirs to unprecedented heights.

As an alternative to the generality of the concept of there being an external face to the state, I would prefer to think of the organs that are literally situated and deployed in the external realm as forming an "external state." An external state is distinguished from those organs which operate inside state borders-i.e., the internal state-as well as those institutions which command authority over the deployment process itself, the state center. This formulation goes further than others in capturing what is distinct about states that are hegemonic in the way I have defined it. It also provides a unique analytical window on the tensions and dynamics at play in the formation of a liberal hegemonic agency.

In general, the positing of an external state permits us to move beyond the portrayal of U.S. hegemony as simply an outward projection of U.S. power, bureaucracy, and interests. As we saw above, this sense of outward projection is typical of hegemonic stability theory. But it also marks two other relevant formulations. One, which emerges out of a neo-Marxist perspective, is that of the "imperial state" associated with James Petras. He defines the imperial state "as those executive bodies or agencies within the 'government' that are charged with promoting and protecting the expansion of capital across state boundaries by the multinational corporate community headquartered in the imperial center." ₇₂ This formulation fails to distinguish between organs at the center that are oriented externally and organs that are actually deployed externally. We can imagine any state fulfilling the role Petras points to, even if their corporate community does not form an imperial center. ₇₃

Another relevant, and far more prominent, formulation is that of the "national security state." It is typically viewed as "a state within a state" comprising the "unified pattern of attitudes, policies, and institutions" organizing the U.S. for "perpetual confrontation and for war." ₇₄ The advantages of the external state over the national security state as a formulation of the structure of hegemonic agency in the postwar period are threefold. First, the latter conception is already prejudiced as to the character and purpose of the state: namely, to produce national security. It does not allow for the possibility, explored below, that the predominance of security concerns emerged through time and after a deployment of external state organs. A second and related advantage is that the external state construct allows for a recognition that organs could serve multiple purposes, with some more oriented to economics while others are more oriented to security. Indeed, in the case of the Marshall Plan's Economic Cooperation Administration (ECA) they could serve both.

A third advantage to the external state construct is its specificity regarding the scope of its actions. What constitutes an external state-in contrast to the mere posting of representatives or sending of troops abroad-is the deployment of organs that administer a range of relations in the external realm. Such relations can bear on states, societies, or multilateral institutions. In this capacity, external state organs move across state boundaries and territories. They are transterritorial.

The external state construct does more than identify what is distinct about hegemonic agency. As I mentioned above, it also provides a unique analytical window on the tensions and dynamics at play in the formation of liberal hegemonic agency. Recently Robert Putnam has argued for viewing "central decisionmakers"-or "the state"-at the junction of domestic politics and diplomacy, facing pressures from both the internal and external realms in both foreign and domestic policy decisions. ₇₅ This conceptualization innovatively conveys some of the dynamics of internal and external interests. But it does not offer an Archimedean point from which to discern what might have been at stake in the making of U.S. hegemony. The external state formulation does. The contest within the congressional arena between "nationalists" such as Senator Taft and "internationalists" such as Senator Vandenberg and Dean Acheson pitted one vision of how to organize the U.S. external realm against another. ₇₆ Isolationist-oriented nationalists-whose main interest was in conditions and relations in the internal realm-resisted building a substantive constitutive presence at the war's end. Their approach to the external realm was to project only military power outward in a string of island bases that could depend on the air delivery of nuclear weapons. They had scant interest in the administration of relations in the external realm, and the little interest that remained was focused on the administration of military aid to Asia. This lack of interest was complemented by general public opinion. Public pressures for withdrawal from the external realm, as manifest, for example, in the domestic demand for demobilization, were clearly in tension with U.S. efforts at liberal order-building. The point is that, while forces associated with the liberal moment may have helped create situations such as the occupations of Germany and Japan that lent themselves to the construction of a de facto U.S. external state, there was no guarantee that this presence would not be dismantled. (As implied above, continuity of commitment rather than establishment per se is the issue.)

In general, the construction of an external state is a rare historical occurrence that depends on a particular conjunction of forces that lie inside and outside a given state. Such building will always face resistance from internally directed agents who do not want to expend resources in the external realm. Given the access internal agents have to the state center in a liberal state-especially in legislatures-the pressures against building an external state are particularly acute. On one level, the tension between the nationalists and the internationalists can be understood in economic terms. A liberal state that becomes deeply involved in the domain of international exchange, as had the U.S. through much of the first half of the twentieth century, must still contend politically with the representatives of economic actors whose scope remains limited to the domestic market domain. In other words, policymakers in the center state who endeavor to build or maintain a liberal external state in the context of international economic exchange must still address themselves politically to the interests of their own internal state, just as they must deal with the domestic interests of other states in the external realm. Nonetheless, some form of legitimacy was required in the state center for so weighty a project as building or maintaining an external state. Cold war historians such as Richard Freeland have argued convincingly that internationalist state-center policymakers offered an exaggerated portrait of the Soviet threat to Congress in order to gain domestic support for external state programs such as aid to Greece and Turkey (the Truman Doctrine) and the European Recovery Program, or ERP (the Marshall Plan). ₇₇

Although I will not focus specifically on the dynamics of the domestic level contest, it remains relevant to the concerns here because it influenced how the contours of the U.S. external state were set. U.S. policymakers faced a basic tension between the call for withdrawal from external commitments and the perceived need for external engagements in the building of liberal order. In the face of this tension, policymakers and Congress chose to shape the character of the U.S. external state as a set of temporary organs and programs. ₇₈ The first manifestation of this outcome was the expected withdrawal of U.S. troops in Europe as soon as necessary occupation duty and a basic war settlement was complete. This pattern continued even when the U.S. increased the scope and range of its external engagement with the ERP. ₇₉ What is important to bear in mind is that the property of temporariness does not belie the notion of an external state; rather the very presence of this property is one factor that helped permit the U.S. to begin to act hegemonically while minimizing domestic pressures against such agency. That is, the temporariness helped allay U.S. domestic resistance to order-building. ₈₀

The external state construct is obviously only a heuristic. Policymakers and legislators did not consciously perceive themselves as engaged in a debate over the formation of an external state. But the same could be said for the political agents who were involved in state-building processes in early modern Europe before the language of the state began to be articulated by thinkers such as Machiavelli. ₈₁ In this light, the main advantage of the external state construct is that it opens up the possibility of considering that what was at stake in U.S. foreign policymaking on one level was the delineation of the contours and character of the U.S. external state. Many of the major policy debates of the period bearing on the nature and extent of a U.S. commitment to Europe, such as those associated with the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan, can be viewed as debates about whether or not-and in what form-the external state should be expanded or ultimately extinguished.

Interests, Strategic Action, and Liberal Order

It is not difficult to imagine that some readers would want to view the external state as simply the organizational projection of U.S. military and economic power and point out that if an order was established, it was a direct function of U.S. political and economic interests, rather than the liberal moment and its bearing on order-building. Hegemonic stability theorists, most often associated with realism, would likely take this type of view. And neo-Marxists, such as James Petras, as well as historical revisionists, such as Gabriel Kolko and Fred Block, might for different reasons do the same, in that they share a common concern with the establishment of a specifically U.S. capitalist system based on a (imperial) global projection of U.S. power. ₈₂ I will explore the differences between realism, revisionism, and my own perspective further below. Here, I would like to confront a skeptical question about the external state, hegemony, and their relation to liberal order-building: Is it not, in the end, economic and security interests that are the real stakes of U.S. hegemonic agency?

This is a somewhat charged, if not problematic, question because it pits interests against other forces shaping agency and political outcomes. Over the last decade, there has been a growing concern in the field of international relations with establishing the impact of ideational factors on political processes and outcomes. Those factors have ranged from sets of ideas and world views to international norms and fields of discourse constituting identities, if not also the very meaning of security. ₈₃ It no longer makes sense to force a choice between interests and norms, culture, or a historical context such as liberal modernity. ₈₄ While it might be tempting for some to take a hard nosed, interest-driven attitude toward international politics, what is far more challenging is the exploration of how interests form a part of a given social context. I will argue in this section that interests are deeply imbricated in the making of liberal order. ₈₅

To start with, the very posing of the question of underlying interests as the real driving forces of agency and international political outcomes rests on an important assumption: that interests and the ideational dimensions of liberal order and modernity can be separated. This commits us to a certain way of looking at the problem. Partly we have E. H. Carr to blame for this view. He made plain for us that underneath the feel-good language of international order and cosmopolitan idealism we are likely to find the real driving forces of national interests. ₈₆ But Carr was no simpleminded instrumentalist, or vulgar realist. He went on to show that we actually need to "feel good." Orders, while being in the interests of the most powerful, need to be legitimated. Power rests on consent as well as coercion or the fear of coercion.

Carr's argument neatly suggests two basic ways of viewing the intersection of interests and what he calls utopianism, the latter of which refers to the ideas about how to organize international relations based on principles associated with justice and a commitment to the effectiveness of international law and institutions. In the first view, ideas cloak interests. For example, among historians of the Cold War, there is a tendency to consider international liberalism (outside of its manifestation as a type of economic system) as simply an ideological or "moral dimension" of U.S. hegemony and rivalry with the Soviet Union. Liberal principles, such as the right to national self-determination, expressed in universalist terms, are viewed as having served as ideological sheaths justifying more calculated real interests and the expansion of U.S. power more generally. ₈₇ The U.S., in this view, would advocate liberal norms only to build up international political legitimacy for, or to deflect attention from, actions dedicated to material and power interests, such as the creation of favorable economic conditions for U.S. multinationals over other economic interests.

A variant of this first view is that liberal ideas are ultimately subsumed by interests. There are three approaches to this variant. The first is associated with both revisionists and historical traditionalists. The latter wrote especially in the 1950s and tended to justify U.S. hegemony on the basis of the existence of a hostile Soviet Union. Where traditionalists see a slightly naive U.S. effort to put Wilsonian liberal principles into practice being corrupted by Soviet ill-intentions, revisionists posit a corruption of liberal ideas by U.S. economic and power interests, including the military-industrial complex. ₈₈ This corruption thesis is also developed along traditionalist lines in the argument that the naive pursuit of liberalism resulted in its failure because of the rise of Cold War power interests. ₈₉ The second approach to this variant informs us that liberal principles in the Cold War were suspended indefinitely for the sake of pursuing them more directly under more secure future conditions. ₉₀ Finally, there also is the proposition, laid out by the revisionist Lloyd Gardner, that liberal principles were bound up in a "covenant" with the real power interests inherent in the U.S.'s global hegemonic role. ₉₁

In the variations of this first view, the intersection of interests and ideas takes form either as harmonious cooperation between interests and ideas (e.g., in the legitimation of interests by ideas) or a clash between interests and ideas based on tensions, or even contradictions, which ultimately lead to the ascendancy of interests. There is, however, a second way to view the status of ideas that is suggested by Carr's formulation. International liberal principles do not just pervade the language of policymaking and public statements-and therefore function as legitimizers-they can shape the character and scope of postwar international political outcomes and relations. For instance, liberal principles such as self-determination might be injected into a strategic situation where the politico-economic status of a state and society is contested. In this capacity, universalist discourses such as self-determination can help strategically dispute the politico-geographic boundaries of an international order. It might help empower one set of actors over another. Such an injection may well have been operative in the U.S. assertion, however unsuccessful, of liberal universalist claims regarding self-determination and democratic governance in Eastern Europe in 1945. ₉₂ Understood in this way, universalism can be seen as a component in a more comprehensive effort to construct a liberal international order that embraced political, social, strategic, and economic dimensions.

Both the first and second views on the intersection of ideas and interests share the following: ideas are generally taken to be normative principles that can be used instrumentally to further interests that are exogenous to those principles (e.g., economic ones). The problem with Carr's formulation is that it is a rather limited vision of what the ideational dimensions of order are about. There is simply a lot more going on than moral claims. For example, there are "ideational ensembles" that organize material and political life and that find expression in media such as law, policy papers, international agreements, ideological tracts, intellectual treatises, and simply observable practices. These ensembles are not merely instruments of consent. The stakes for agents can involve decisions about and commitments to "the basic dimensions that shape their way of life." ₉₃ For example, a well-known ensemble relevant to liberal order was what Charles Maier identified as "productionism." ₉₄ An ideational focus on the technologies and logics of economic growth was part of an effort of Americans and Europeans to reduce conflict over economic distribution and the political polarization of the Left and Right in Western Europe. This would make it possible to establish states governed as liberal democracies which could become stable participants in international economic exchange and institutions, an outcome crucial to the building of liberal order.

Thus, in the context of liberal order-building, the notion that exogenous interests lie beneath a veneer of ideas and represent the true stakes of international action misses the point. Economic forces and interests are part of liberal order-building. There are also parallels in the realm of security. A security interest such as the continued survival of a state as a sovereign political unit in a potentially violent world only exists as a force in and of itself determining international political outcomes in the abstract space of the minds of international relations theorists. ₉₅ States are much more than simply sovereign units. They are places in which lives are made and lived. Survival means continuing to be able to live, and that means living in a particular way. Being able to live in a sovereign state with longevity is one such way. Mid-twentieth-century realist writers understood the stakes of survival in exactly these terms. Arnold Wolfers saw security as a measure of "the absence of threats to acquired values." Walter Lippmann saw security as the ability to avoid "having to sacrifice core values." ₉₆ Indeed, an interest in securing sheer physical survival is predicated on the notion that continuing such existence will allow actors to go on in the particular forms that their lives take, forms that make it worthwhile facing armed and potentially hostile forces in their environment. Such forms might include the continued enjoyment by state actors of a preeminent position of dominance over a society. Whatever those forms are, the conditions that make survival worthwhile are what will motivate a state to hold its own against external threats and risk physical survival in the first place. If sheer, abstracted physical survival were the final word in the stakes of survival, then the best course might as well be to avoid defending against external threats. Surrender, if not outright demilitarization, would be the best course. At least this is what was argued by the Athenians to the leaders of Melos, an island they chose to subjugate, in the famous Melian dialogue of the Thucydides' History of the Peloponnesian War. ₉₇ According to the Athenians, safety should be the highest value for the Melians. Therefore, surrender in the face of overwhelming force would be the most rational course. But states will sometimes avoid surrender and will defend themselves militarily exactly because there is something worth defending, at least for those agents who can determine policy. The Athenians missed the point that the concern with what we may call with Lippmann and Wolfers "values," such as preservation of one's existence and homeland, might also provide the grounds for a will to stand up against overwhelming odds (and, thus, an interest in doing so). As any realist might argue, in a world of states what is worth defending may be independence, sovereignty or, as the Melians put it, "liberty." ₉₈ But on what basis should we stop there in designating the dimensions of social existence (or values) worth defending? The Melians also mention honor and justice, but it could just as easily have been any other of the many dimensions to their form of life. Once we accept sovereignty as one such dimension we have no intellectually honest way to occlude the presence of other dimensions as well. Setting limits to such dimensions can be done only by the agents themselves.

We may approach the same point from the other side of the Melian dialogue. The Athenians themselves are absorbed in the project of empire, which commits them to a form of international life that brings them to the shores of Melos. ₉₉ Their interest, as they see it, is continuing in the capacity as an empire and not something else. ₁₀₀ (An interest in a particular form of existence emerges only as a function of the social fabric that gives meaning to that form.) Survival is deeply embedded in the character of our social existence. In fact, modern realists understand this all too well. A collectivity's political life as a state is what throws it into certain types of logics of interaction, such as anarchy. Much of the current debate in the field of international relations is over questions about which logics states are thrown into, why, ₁₀₁ and what other dimensions of social existence beside stateness determine the character of international political life.

These questions are central to the approach here. I am arguing that states and societies drawn up into liberal modernity had, to varying degrees, a number of dimensions through which to view the terms of-and interests in-their survival. ₁₀₂ Such terms could encompass liberal statehood, a market society, a participant in international economic exchange, or a self-determining and sovereign political entity. The liberal moment made these terms possibilities, to varying degrees, for many states across the globe. But these possibilities were contingent on and vulnerable to the unfolding interaction of states and societies. For it is the very pursuit of these terms that throws states and societies into the interaction that can be a requisite for fear. Making the notion of sheer physical survival abstract misses exactly what usually creates insecurities if not the fear of war itself: the activity of state actors and citizens that forces them into the external realm with engagements, commitments, and challenges to and from other states that must be defended. Indeed, Kenneth Waltz has always insisted that interdependence between states can be a potential source of conflict for the simple reason that the more states interact, the more opportunity exists for states to have disputes. ₁₀₃ Whether or not there is any validity to this claim, ₁₀₄ it does underscore that security interests and dynamics can conceivably emerge out of potent international social contexts. In the 1940s, the commitments and engagements that grew out of the liberal moment and drew states in the West into the liberal order-building process generated far more complex political dynamics than interdependence per se ever could. As I will argue in subsequent chapters, these dynamics shaped the strategic relations and interests of these states and ultimately drew them into a Cold War. If anything, the terms and stakes of survival were set by the dynamics of liberal order.

I have argued in this section that liberal modernity and order constitute an ideational context that shapes outcomes, agency, and interests in many ways. In so doing, I have joined a growing community of scholars who are concerned with showing how ideational forces, from norms to discourses, impact international life. However, some of the work in this growing community, exemplified by a recent volume, Ideas and Foreign Policy, focuses on ideas as discrete variables (e.g., as road maps, policy solutions, or as institutional norms). These variables are drawn out of broader historical contexts such as liberal modernity or capitalism, which tend to fall into the shadows in analysis. This "micro-ideational" approach reproduces too much of the type of separation between ideational forces and material interests that was an important dimension of Carr's seminal work. ₁₀₅ It rests on the assumption that ideas are just one more set of factors along with interests and material capabilities determining action. While not denying the existence and relevance of interests, in this study I am emphasizing that we need a "macro-ideational" approach in order to show that interests are part of a given historical context, along with the identity of the agents that assert them (e.g., as liberal states or as self-determining collectivities). Moreover, we need a macro-ideational approach to make sense or interpret the significance of practices, material conditions, and capabilities ranging from economic resource distribution to military power accumulation.

In the end, the decision to adopt a micro- versus a macro-ideational approach will likely correspond to differences in methodological starting points. A micro-ideational approach complements a positivist effort to determine the extent to which ideational variables account for the variance for a given phenomenon. In contrast, building a plausible and comprehensive interpretive framework, especially for the range of history analyzed here, requires a broad macro-ideational context against which to discern the meaning, significance, and force of phenomena ranging from practices and principles to the material "facts on the ground."

Security and Militarization

Today, the notion that survival and security are about more than military defense and war is likely to be far more readily recognized by scholars and policymakers than in the past. Barry Buzan, who was instrumental in articulating this wider view, counts, alongside military security, concerns with political, economic, societal, and environmental security. These other forms bear on the quality of economic life, the integrity of environments, the survival of collectivities, and the stability of our polities. ₁₀₆

Security more generally, as Buzan points out in People, States and Fear, is an essentially contested concept, open to endless debate over its definition and application, not unlike terms such as "imperialism," "democracy," or "liberalism" for that matter. ₁₀₇ Consistent with the discussion in the previous section, security revolves around the question of how threats to contending ways of configuring social existence are identified, mitigated, or governed. In other words, the pursuit of security is about the organized effort of a given social form (e.g., a polity) to contend with what it articulates and identifies as forces (e.g., a military faction, another polity, or economic collapse) that threaten its social existence.

Of course, the intersection between military power and forms of social existence has been of longstanding concern in the history of social and political thought. Raymond Aron, for instance, made sure to point out in the 1960s that "[m]ilitary systems and weapons are . . . the expression of political and social systems." ₁₀₈ More recently, Buzan has argued that the expansion and practices of military defense can create economic burdens and their own forms of risk (e.g., nuclear attack) that might lead to a decrease in a state and society's sense of security. ₁₀₉ This intersection has been at the heart of the literature, discussed above, that has shown how war-making can be a crucial force in the shaping of states and international orders. But the most prevalent locus of concern over this intersection has been the phenomenon of militarism. It is mostly through this conceptual portal that my own effort to probe the intersection between military power and social existence is made below.

Ever since the seventeenth century, a growing number of thinkers have drawn attention to and problematized the status of the military in states, societies, and the international realm. It was not until the second half of the nineteenth century that the term militarism came into increasingly regular use. ₁₁₀ Like security, the concept of militarism is essentially contested, as we might expect any term to be which has been subject to so much debate. There is, thus, no consensus over its meaning. For the most part, the chief reference point for militarism over the last two centuries has been the causes and implications of the ascendancy of military organization and ideology across different societies. Writers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries concentrated on Europe, with a special view to Germany and its Prussian tradition. After World War II, attention in U.S. social science turned to the Third World, where the role of the military as a force in modernization was an especially prominent concern. Across the twentieth century the problem of civil-military relations increasingly occupied scholars. Alfred Vagts wrote his seminal text, A History of Militarism, in 1937 and distinguished between the mere concern with efficient use of human and material resources in war-making ("the military way") and "every system of thinking and valuing and every complex of feelings which rank military institutions and ways above the ways of civilian life, carrying military mentality and modes of acting and decision into the civilian sphere" (militarism). ₁₁₁

For obvious reasons, the study of militarism has not been focused solely on processes unfolding inside given societies. Scholars such as Otto Hintze looked to the international realm and the pressures of war-making for causes of domestic militarism. ₁₁₂ More recently, in the face of the massive military buildup in the Cold War era, attention was fixed on the global dimensions of military power, the international patterns of which some believe formed a "world military order." ₁₁₃

A central category of analysis in this second line of study is militarization. Like militarism, this concept has many meanings but can be generally associated with a process of growth in military power, organization, or values on a domestic or international basis. In a recent well-known attempt to clarify the usages of the terms militarism and militarization, Andrew Ross distinguished between militarization as processes leading to more militarism (behavioral and ideational) and militarization as sheer "military buildup" (force levels, war, and military regimes). ₁₁₄ Ross's goal was to focus attention on fully measurable categories of militarization as military buildup, including such things as arms imports and production levels. But he conceded that military buildup can contribute to militarism and vise versa. Thus, while Ross may have helped identify some of the measures of militarization by concentrating on the second meaning, he has simply occluded the difficult and perhaps most interesting questions about its causes and entwinement with social and political life that are inherent in the first meaning. ₁₁₅ It is with these issues that the real challenge of clarification lies.

One lesson that I take from Ross's effort is that when using the term militarization, one should make sure that it refers to the militarization of something. In Ross's case that something is the production, accumulation, and use of military resources within and across societies in the Third World. At the outset of this study, I made clear that the concern here was with the militarization of international relations: more specifically, the process by which military-strategic issues, relations, and institutions come to constitute an increasingly predominant dimension of the overall international political life of a set of states and societies. This definition of militarization falls within the first meaning distinguished by Ross, i.e., that which leads to more militarism. Thus, in my formulation, militarism in international relations exists when the military-strategic becomes predominant. And like so many of the phenomena associated with the first meaning of militarization, predominance is something that is not necessarily subject to the type of quantifiable measurement that Ross advocates for his notion of military buildup. But there are useful qualitative markers for discerning predominance that also allow for a direct connection between militarization and liberal order.

In a noted essay on militarization in international relations Marek Thee was concerned with, among other things, the world military order and relevant hierarchies of military power across states; the influence of military ideology and organization in domestic life and foreign policymaking; and the proclivity to use force in relations with other states and in domestic affairs. ₁₁₆ I consider all of these factors relevant to the post-World War II militarization with which I am concerned. But what is most relevant here is one specific, albeit highly significant, marker of postwar militarization: the militarization of the U.S. presence in its external realm. By 1958, the U.S. had agreed to train and equip the forces of more than 70 countries, made formal security commitments to 43 of them, and stationed almost 1.5 million troops in hundreds of bases in 35 countries around the globe. ₁₁₇ What is most important for me about the impact of the U.S.'s militarized global presence on international relations is something that is not easily expressed in military deployment statistics: the degree to which the strategic-military dimension came to dominate the international political relations among states in, or associated with, the West. That is the reason for defining militarization the way I have. I want to explore how, from the end of the Second World War to the outbreak of the Korean War, the process of building liberal order, which was so entwined with U.S. hegemonic agency, was tied to a growing militarism. In other words, in the course of those years the U.S. external state that was constructed in the making of liberal order was increasingly configured along military lines. This means that the constitutive presence associated with U.S. hegemony became more and more military in nature. Increasingly, military organs replaced civilian ones and military-strategic issues overshadowed nonmilitary ones. How this happened and why is the focus of chapters 3 and 4.

Structuring the Argument

I have concentrated in this chapter on the initial phases of the liberal moment and have taken the first steps in the development of a conceptual infrastructure for interpreting the remarkable trajectory of international change emerging out of the Second World War. Besides describing the nature of the liberal moment, I have delineated the sinews of hegemonic agency, identified the implications of the formation of an external state, and defined the terms security and militarization. I have also sought to highlight the basic lines of relation among these elements. Before moving ahead, I want to reflect on how the argument I am developing is structured and how it can be distinguished from the main alternative interpretations of the international political and strategic dynamics of the postwar period.

At the most basic level, the interpretive explanation I am fashioning is functional in structure. For me, the militarization of the West and the rise of the Cold War occurred because of their consequences for the liberal order-construction process. The functional relationships can be expressed as shown in figure 2.2.

While Western militarization and the rise of the Cold War had distinct consequences for the liberal order-construction process, developments associated with each phenomenon fed into the other (as depicted by the solid arrow at the bottom of figure 2.2). As I will argue below, the deepening of the U.S.-Soviet confrontation into a cold war was a result of liberal political dynamics, which in turn helped propel Western militarization. An increasing reliance on military force as a means to build liberal order contributed to the deepening of the rising Cold War confrontation. Distinguishing Western militarization from the Cold War reinforces the idea that the militarization of the West was not simply an outgrowth of the U.S.-Soviet confrontation.

Adopting a functional logic is nothing to be ashamed of. Arthur Stinchcombe, long ago, and G. A. Cohen, more recently, have shown that functional explanations can be useful and need not be inherently conservative, teleological, or tautological. ₁₁₈ Functional explanation, of course, must be distinguished from the various forms of functionalism and neofunctionalism associated with anthropologists such as Bronislaw Malinowski, sociologists such as Talcott Parsons, and political scientists such as Ernst Haas. ₁₁₉ These approaches make claims about systemic integration that are not made here.

My primary incentive for setting this interpretation in functional terms is that a functionalist schema serves to underscore the interaction between historical contingency, political structures, and agencies. Much of this chapter has been dedicated to showing how contingency (e.g., aspects of the liberal moment), structure (e.g., constitutive presence), and agency (e.g., that of the U.S. state) interact in different processes, such as the process of hegemonic formation. Indeed, in the functionalist schema set out above liberal order-building is not the only process; militarization and the rise of the Cold War are processes as well. Functional explanation, as I want to employ it, is inherently interactive. There is an ongoing interplay between the elements of explanation (i.e., liberal order, militarization, and Cold War) which are mediated through the consequences these elements have for one another.

For agents, such as those of the U.S. state, who were caught up in the liberal order-building process, the consequences of processes of Cold War formation and militarization mattered in places like Germany. Moreover, conditions change, the unexpected happens, and agents react and change their policies. They, in effect, must reformulate their policies in a way that suggests a logic similar to the Darwinistic natural selection process that unfolds in reaction to changes in creatures' environments. ₁₂₀ As my interpretation moves forward, it will become clear that there were changes in the historical conditions which formed the context of the selection of policies and strategies bearing on liberal order-construction. Sometimes these changes emerged from the very actions and policies that were set in place to deal with previous historical conditions.

As critics of functional explanation have made clear, it is not enough simply to posit agents who can react and formulate action around consequences. ₁₂₁ In an ideal functional universe, we would see agents self-consciously identifying consequences for liberal order and acting accordingly. But as I made clear in my discussion of agency above, U.S. policymakers were rarely self-reflexive about their role in liberal order-making as they devised policies and made decisions, especially once they had embarked upon the task of order-building. Thus, once inside the project of liberal order-building, policymakers were pushed and pulled by the daily, weekly, and monthly tribulations and travails of making order. Sometimes they responded to what they perceived to be constraints in their policymaking universe, including the interests of other liberal states, the resistance of Congress, and the political instability that they perceived around them. Often times they simply tried to remain consistent with what they understood to be the policy they had established in the past for ordering a particular set of relations in a geographical region. Still other times policymakers arrived at policies on a negative basis, i.e., because of the outcomes a given policy avoided rather than what it provided. The avoidance of outcomes that might challenge existing constraints too severely or were inconsistent with defined goals implies that the degree to which a "blueprint" existed for the construction of a liberal order was limited. There were no pregiven markers or directions regarding how to pursue order or exactly what order should look like. Contradictions and tensions were manifold. This too reinforces the contingent nature of the process. ₁₂₂

Altogether, underlying these constraints, resistances, and tensions was the influence of different political structures and logics of operation inside the liberal order-building process. Laying out these structures and logics will take up a large portion of the chapters that follow. We may think of the play between those structures and logics and the agency of U.S. policymaking as the crucial set of mechanisms for turning "consequence into a cause," ₁₂₃ given the limits of self-reflexive, consequentialist agency. This means that, on the one hand, we had policymaking and action that shaped the structures and logics of liberal order-making. On the other hand, the same structures and logics in turn shaped policymaking and action. ₁₂₄

Neorealism and the Liberal Moment

I can imagine that some readers will be tempted to point out that the whole schema makes a fairly bold claim, since they would prefer to look to the external threat of the Soviet Union as the driving force of militarization and the Cold War rather than liberal order-making. They might then argue that even if there were consequences for liberal order-making that does not mean that those consequences were determinative, relative to external threat. My response to this type of challenge-something a realist might pose-is not a simple one. I will begin by describing another way to view the forces that are encompassed by my interpretation.

Although the functional schema designates the type of explanatory logic generally guiding this interpretation, it does not provide a complete picture of how the relevant forces impinge upon one another. Above all, it fails to show how the liberal moment and the liberal order-building process stand in relation to one another and the other phenomena that are at the center of this interpretation. But consider the structure of forces depicted in figure 2.3.

Here we see the relation and impact of forces on one another mapped out hierarchically. The liberal moment, as described above, represents the decisive historical shift that precipitated the process of liberal order-building. This process engendered a specific set of political dynamics which, in turn, prompted the emergence of a confrontation between the U.S. and Soviet Union. This confrontation ultimately led to the Cold War and the militarization of the West as well. Analyzing those political dynamics will be the main task of subsequent chapters. But it can be pointed out here that the relationships articulated in the functional schema (figure 2.2) map onto the inner three boxes of figure 2.3. Indeed, this is why the arrows in figure 2.3 move in both directions. The rise of the Cold War and the confrontation that preceded it had consequences for liberal order-building. This relationship is part of a wider set of feedback effects that occur across the different dimensions. As we saw, there were feedback effects between liberal order-making and the liberal moment.

Figure 2.3 lays bare the terms of difference between my approach to the Cold War and that of the most predominant approach to security in the U.S., neorealism. Neorealism distinguishes itself by its emphasis on structures and dynamics operating at the level of the international system as forces shaping security outcomes. This was a departure from its predecessor, realism, which looked mostly to the play of power politics manifest in the foreign policies of states in pursuit of their interests. We have already encountered the neorealist approach in the discussion about survival. One of the distinguishing turns of neorealism is its claim that it is a concern with survival that is a core motive of state action relevant to security rather than the pursuit of power per se, as earlier realists such as Hans Morgenthau would have it. ₁₂₅ Another key principle is the imperative to self-help. States will rely on themselves to provide for security in an international system that has no ultimate authority to protect them (i.e., one that is anarchical). Moreover, the effort of one state to protect itself does not lead necessarily to a sense of safety but often to increasing levels of insecurity. Others are provoked to increase their security efforts, prompting yet another round of increases. This has become known as the security dilemma.

The wider realist tradition has an extensive literature and set of analytic tools that I cannot hope to adequately address in these pages. ₁₂₆ My more modest aim is to consider the validity of the neorealist interpretation of the Cold War against the background of my own, so that the challenge posed at the start of this section can be addressed. I will use Kenneth Waltz's Theory of International Politics (1979) because, in the words of one realist, it "shaped much of the theoretical debate during the 1980s" and continues to "reverberate in the literature of the 1990s." ₁₂₇

Although Waltz never pretended to offer anything like a theory of the Cold War, he did discuss the post-World War II period in a fashion that implied his approach could explain the rise of the Cold War. If Waltz were to construct his own set of boxes they might look something like figure 2.4. He would likely situate the war-as the signal event precipitating change-in the outer box, rather than a liberal moment. The war reduced the number of great powers from five or so to only two. And these two were grossly predominant relative to the capabilities of other states. ₁₂₈ This structural shift changed the operating logics of the system so that it was in accord with two superpowers in competition for survival. These logics would constitute the second box. Although Waltz discusses a number of logics bearing on the operation of a bipolar world, those that seem to count as relevant to the rise of a Cold War are: (1) the expansion of the arena of security competition to include the entire globe; (2) an increasingly comprehensive concern on the part of each superpower with the other's capacity to produce power (e.g., the application of technological and economic forces within each state); and (3) a tendency to overreact to changing political conditions as crises. The first logic (globalization) flows from the principle that each superpower is so big that the fate of the entire system affects it more than any other state. Thus, the gain of one in that system is a loss for the other. The basis for the second logic (relative power concern) is the notion that since each superpower can hurt the other the way that no other state can, they become fixated on each other's disposition. Finally, the third logic (overreaction) emerges out of the sheer desire of the superpowers to avoid the miscalculation of underestimating the importance of events and developments-overreaction is more prudent. ₁₂₉

It is easy to envision the heightened tensions, sense of impending crisis, and obsessive fixation on the other that marked the Cold War emerging from Waltz's logics. (Thus, the inner box appears.) Why would we ever need the extensive ideational and macro-historical baggage that goes along with a liberal moment and order? To answer that question we need to unpack the assumptions of the Waltzian interpretation.

On its face, the way Waltz lays it out seems like an ironclad logic. But it holds only if we are unwilling to enter into an engagement with the history of the period. Even in terms of raw capabilities, by Waltz's own criteria of "superpowerhood" (military, economic, and technological supremacy), the Soviet Union did not qualify with the decimated economy and inferior military it took out of the war. ₁₃₀ Even its massive manpower permitted the Soviet Union only to maintain its occupation duties, especially given its lack of equipment. The U.S. military clearly recognized these limits. ₁₃₁

And yet across the second half of the 1940s, the Soviet Union did come to be viewed increasingly as a threat. However, as I will show below, the basis of that threat stemmed to a great extent from the pressures the Soviets could bring to bear on the political process of building an international liberal order in Western Europe, rather than the physical safety of the U.S. Although U.S. policymakers did not on balance take a Soviet invasion of Western Europe seriously as a prospect that was likely in the near or intermediate term, fear of invasion in Europe had important political ramifications. The Soviet army, deployed very near to Western Europe at the war's end, mattered to the U.S. to the extent that it provided a means to challenge and contest the outcomes of the liberal order-building process. ₁₃₂

Waltz in actuality was reading history backward. He assumed that the operating logic of an up-and-running Cold War could explain its emergence. ₁₃₃ This is the reverse of the genetic fallacy, in which one mistakes the processes involved in the emergence of something for its operation in its extant form. The war did leave two states clearly above the others (however unequal that predominance was). But we have no basis to conclude that the predominance of these states led them into the kind of security competition Waltz describes (precipitating the logics described above). If the Soviet Union in the 1940s or even the early 1950s was recognized as being incapable of destroying the U.S. or threatening its continued survival as a state why should we assume the logics would be operative? The fear that, in an invasion of Western Europe, the Soviet Union would garner a resource-rich region to exploit and thereby enhance its relative power could only emerge once the thinking of U.S. policymakers had become zero-sum. ₁₃₄ But this is exactly what needs to be explained. To merely assume it makes the theory less interesting. (Moreover, as we shall see below, it is the U.S. investment in order-building that makes the region particularly valuable in this regard.)

What I think is happening here is that Waltz is painting with very broad strokes which cover over the many processes that help move things from one historical point to another. Historians call this the telescopic fallacy to denote "interpretations that reduce an extended trend to a momentary transformation." ₁₃₅

As we saw with hegemonic stability, just because something makes sense does not mean it explains why things emerge as they do. The extent to which Waltz commits this and the other fallacies mentioned above can also be appreciated by briefly considering his understanding of the emergence of U.S. hegemony and its bearing on the making of international order. The way Waltz sees it, these forces impinge on one another as follows: The war precipitated the preponderance of the U.S. state based on its capabilities. This made it compelling to be engaged on a global basis (see logic number 2 above). Order, within which the U.S. would be globally hegemonic, was pursued because a functioning, stable system is in the interest of a state that has the most to lose or gain in the system. That the order would be liberal follows from the need of the U.S. to justify its global actions and is anyway consistent with its interests as a liberal state and vision of how the world should work. ₁₃₆

This formulation is quite different from my own. For me the forces lined up above affect one another as follows: Coming out of the liberal moment, the project of liberal order-making drew a preponderant U.S. into a global engagement, whereupon it increasingly deployed itself in its effort to build an external state that could effect a constitutive presence or hegemony in the context of that project. The problem with Waltz's approach is that it assumes up front, as a matter of principle, the very agency and global engagement that would emerge only in and through the order-making process. Moreover, capabilities would be shaped as military, economic, and political forces were deployed and constructed across the 1940s. I have already shown how tentative the external commitment was. As I will argue below, its character and extent would become known only with time and effort.

What is necessary is some sort of historical process within which hegemony can form. Interestingly, Waltz hints at such a process in his conceptualization of power. He tells us that "[w]hether A, in applying its capabilities, gains the wanted compliance of B depends on A's capabilities and strategy, on B's capabilities and counterstrategy, and on all of these factors as they are affected by the situation at hand." ₁₃₇ Waltz is emphasizing the interactive nature of power, the play back and forth between agents in a given context or "situation at hand." He is contesting the straightline equation of power with control that was underlying arguments at the time that U.S. hegemony was declining, evidenced by the increasing lack of U.S. control over outcomes. He rightly politicized power by emphasizing the "give and take" inherent in political situations, shaped by capabilities as well as projects or strategies and contexts. But for some reason he did not think through the implications of his conceptualization. Waltz intended to apply his understanding of power to a circumscribed set of events or outcomes. However, there is no reason why we cannot apply it to a wider context of historical time. Specifically, we can think of the whole period of 1945-1950 as exactly the type of emergence of power (in this case U.S. hegemony) based on the interaction of states over the fate of Europe and other relevant regions. The strategies were the play of interests in the making of international liberal order (i.e., the situation at hand).

The extent to which neorealists recognize this gap in their theory is evident in Robert Gilpin's distinction between power defined in materialist terms as "the military, economic, and technological capabilities of states," and "prestige," which he equates with a kind of sense of authority where others will actually take the dictates of a hegemon seriously out of "respect or common interest." ₁₃₈ Gilpin points out that a lag can emerge between the actual possession of preponderant power by a state and the perception on the part of other states. ₁₃₉ Gilpin avoids the question of whether power as he understands it can actually be shaped in the process of constructing prestige. This is the way I am arguing U.S. "power" was formed in the 1940s. It involves, as we shall see, far more than prestige. Again, the interesting political historical questions about the formation of hegemony-even in Gilpin's sense of leadership and control based on power plus prestige-are passed over and deposited in the "black hole" identified as a "lag."

The same appeal to lags is made by Stephen Krasner in his attempt to understand why the U.S. did not become a hegemon in the interwar years despite being economically preponderant. ₁₄₀ He argues that a "catalytic external event" such as World War II was necessary and even then it would not be until the 1950s that a U.S. capacity to manage the international monetary system would emerge. At the time, Krasner was taking on the interdependence school in the field of international relations that emphasized the importance of nonstate actors. He wanted to show the continued centrality of the state in shaping international relations. But the story he did not tell was the centrality of the historical contexts in which both state and nonstate actors played a part, including the war. In Krasner's interpretation the war reorients the U.S. state in a manner that makes hegemony possible. Yet so powerful an affect is treated as a mere intervening variable. We are left to guess as to how central it was, why World War I was not central, and what the full extent of the impact of the war was for shaping the postwar world as well as U.S. hegemony.

I find it odd that neorealists such as Gilpin and Krasner recognize the formative nature of hegemony and yet still insist that the hierarchies of "raw" material power are the ultimate shapers of much of international political life. What is at stake in all of this is the meaning and significance we want to assign to power, war, and other phenomena that help make international political life what it is. That is why I have explicitly adopted the language of interpretation. As a way to understand the rise of the Cold War, neorealist interpretations, unfortunately, end just where they should begin.

Diplomatic History and International Liberal Order

Far more attuned to the value of interpretation is the field of diplomatic history, where, in contrast to international relations, the history of this period has been engaged extensively. Much of what is central to the interpretation I am developing here has been profoundly informed by the work of historians of U.S. foreign relations. For instance, a work such as Gabriel Kolko's The Politics of War has illuminated the impact of World War II and how it shaped directions in U.S. policymaking. Specifically, Kolko shows how concerns with potential worldwide social upheaval, the impact of the Soviet Union, and the future of Britain were important elements in the making of U.S. wartime policy that was directed at the possibilities of postwar international order.

What diplomatic historians have to say about the period is extensive. The field has formed into different schools which can be differentiated by the varying social forces that focus their interpretations. Where revisionists have drawn our attention to the ways that the capitalist economic system and the interests and world views of economic actors-many of whom served in key positions in the U.S. state-have shaped foreign policymaking, postrevisionists have stressed the concerns of state actors with national security and the difficulties they faced in making security policy against the background of sometimes hostile domestic and bureaucratic politics. Other scholars, inspired by the revisionist turn, have taken what is termed a corporatist approach to U.S. foreign relations. They stress the effort of capital, the state, and, ultimately, segments of labor to establish liberal capitalist forms of political and economic governance and order across the West. Still others have adopted the world systems approach associated with Immanuel Wallerstein.

I do not wish here to enter into a review of the many strands of this field as they have emerged in the post-World War II period. ₁₄₁ Since so much of my interpretation builds on the rich empirical and analytical traditon of diplomatic history, the many ways I engage diplomatic history will become clear only as I go along and build my own interpretation. I have already had occasion to do this in the above discussion. At this point, I want only to set out the most basic lines of distinction between my own effort and those that are the most proximate to it in diplomatic history.

To start, my differences with diplomatic historians are not either/or propositions. No one set of forces should be seen as determinative, no one paradigm can be thought to work best to the relative exclusion of others. And no one approach could inform us of the full import of the Cold War and its emergence against the background of questions of interest here about modernity, international order, and liberalism. If we take interpretive knowledge seriously, then we need multiple perspectives so that there can be arguments over rival interpretations.

The connections I am trying to make in this book between hegemony, the state, and the external realm in the context of a particular macro-historical context (i.e., liberal modernity) would not have been possible without the critical efforts of historical revisionists such as Joyce and Gabriel Kolko in making connections others would or could not. Well-known revisionists, among them William Appleman Williams, Walter LaFeber, Fred Block, as well as the Kolkos, have been anything but vulgar economic determinists. ₁₄₂ They all appreciated the contingent play of forces within and between domestic politics, hegemonic construction, and international political life.

There are, however, important differences between the analysis of this book and revisionism. For much of revisionism, the goal has been "to place the Cold War in the context of the American effort to create a certain type of economy." ₁₄₃ Revisionists have a tendency to focus on the dynamics of U.S. capitalism establishing an economic order for its benefit as a set of forces shaping policy and outcomes. I have stressed that I want to treat as the primary political and social, as well as economic, context of analysis not capitalism per se, but liberal modernity. Moreover, I have emphasized that such a context was international, not just "American." The centrality of the U.S. in the making and maintaining of order does not necessarily imply such an order was the equivalent of an American lake. To point to liberal order as little more than the "U.S. interest writ large" is to identify the actors caught up in this whirlwind, including not just Europeans, but also colonial peoples struggling for self-determination, to a great extent as objects or victims, rather than witting and unwitting agents themselves in a profound historic moment. Revisionists have rightly been especially sensitive to the fate of these peoples as well as of labor in the West. And the agency of non-Americans has been prominent in their work, ranging from British negotiators at Bretton Woods to Indonesian rebels. But in an endeavor to critique U.S. power and interest they have exaggerated the "Americanness" of international order. Many other interests have operated through the postwar order. It has been their order as well, whether they have liked it or not.

Those who interpret postwar history through the lens of the world capitalist system, while retaining a focus on economic contexts, certainly do not suffer from the same Americanization of contexts. As I have already pointed out, the world-systems approach has been essential for my appreciation of the importance of looking at broad historical modalities. Beyond this, the ramifications of the historical moment described above and the Cold War more generally for the unfolding of the world capitalist system in the twentieth century has been thoughtfully analyzed by Thomas McCormick in America's Half-Century. But, as indicated in chapter 1, since much of the ordering that was going on took place more immediately in the context of liberal modernity-however much the making of markets and states was entwined with capitalist outcomes-I prefer to view the period through the lens of that context. It is indeed interesting that McCormick must refer to visions or blueprints for order that are very much about the liberal order-making I am focusing on here (e.g., principles of free trade), in order to discuss what policymakers were actually doing. ₁₄₄ But by keeping his analytical vision trained on the world system, McCormick fails to provide a framework for analyzing the dynamics and impact that were specific to that liberal order-making.

If anything, the ensuing analysis of the postwar period has its closest affinity with corporatism. This is not the case because of any overarching commitment to corporatist analysis as described above. Rather it stems from the effort of corporatist historians such as Michael Hogan and Charles Maier to place the making of social, political, and economic order, both domestic and international, at the center of their analysis. They have underscored how, in the midst of the outbreak of a Cold War, phenomena such as the construction of markets and the setting of terms for liberal democratic governance were unfolding with strong lines of continuity relative to the earlier decades of the twentieth century. And they have given considerable attention to non-U.S. agencies, both public and private. In general, corporatists have purposively set themselves up as counterpoints to the more traditional focus on international strategic processes that has marked much of diplomatic history. Instead, corporatism "is far more concerned with the globalization of economic, political, and social forces; with the connections between state and society and between national systems and foreign policy; and with the interaction of these systems internationally." ₁₄₅ As will become apparent below, corporatists such as Hogan have drawn out important links between security and order-making, especially regarding the question of the integration of European states and its ramifications for regional security. What they have not done-and what distinguishes my own effort-is to show how order-making actually precipitated the formation of the main strategic configuration of the postwar world, the militarized Cold War.

The other major school mentioned above is postrevisionism. It emerged-most forcefully in the work of John Gaddis-as an antidote to what was judged to be a too-excessive focus on economic forces on the part of revisionists. ₁₄₆ Postrevisionists stress the multiplicity of factors explaining the historical developments of the postwar period. They point to the impact of domestic political factors, such as public opinion and congressional and bureaucratic politics. Also, they generally concentrate on policymakers' security concerns and perceptions of threat in a postwar world marked by a new configuration of interstate power.

Like that of other historical schools, the work of postrevisionists has been extremely useful in this study. Gaddis and Robert Pollard, for instance, have explored how dimensions of liberal order-making, both political and economic, became deeply entwined with the pursuit of security. Despite the important links they make, there are notable differences between the postrevisionist approach to the postwar period and my own that turn exactly on the question of security. Consider Leffler's recent monumental historical study of U.S. security policy in the immediate postwar period, which crystallized the security-centric approach of postrevisionism. ₁₄₇ Leffler argues that immediately after the war a state as powerful as the U.S. could secure on a global basis its physical, social, economic, and political existence and configure relations in its external realm in a fashion that is supportive and consistent with that existence. In the name of security it would exploit its existing power base to gain a preponderance of power in the international system.

In his conceptualization, Leffler does not really use the language of social existence, as I have articulated it in my discussion of security above. Rather, he adopts the traditional language of students of national security policymaking during the Cold War, which "encompasses the decisions and actions deemed important to protect domestic core values from external threats." ₁₄₈ The operative phrase here is "core values," which allows Leffler to incorporate such things as economic interests in the configuration of national and international markets and commitments to political principles associated with national self-determination. Making an international liberal order or "world environment hospitable to U.S. interests and values" was what preponderance allowed. ₁₄₉

There has been much material to mine in Leffler's work over the last decade, most of which has gone into the making of his massive study. ₁₅₀ However, I have reasons for not viewing the period through the lens of national security, reasons that illuminate my differences with postrevisionism. To start, the overlay between national security and my own definition of security is far from perfect. Security for Leffler is ultimately about the security of the state and the society contained within it. I find this too confining. The reason I defined security in terms of threats to modes of configuring social existence is exactly to leave open the possibility that the entity which is to be secured (i.e., the social existence) can be an international order and the various states, societies, and actors caught up in it. In Leffler's construct, such a configuration is a subject of security only to the extent that it forms a part of the security of U.S. core values. He must, in effect, nationalize it.

Thus, Leffler is put in the odd position of viewing external phenomena such as political economic instability in the U.S.'s external realm only as national security issues (i.e., in terms of the U.S. need to stabilize its environment in a mode that would be to its liking). While this was consistent with the way many U.S. policymakers expressed things in policy papers, it only tells us part of the significance of such developments. The question that I would put to Leffler is why a national security perspective so broadly conceived along social, political, and economic lines, had so much salience for policymakers. While Leffler magisterially shows "how core values emerge in the policymaking process," ₁₅₁ and what the elaborate schemes for securing these values were, he does not show why it is these values that are in need of being secured. To say they are simply a reflection of U.S. identity (i.e., it is liberal democratic capitalist) is to only restate the question. In order to get beyond the restatement, we need to step outside the auto-referential paradigm of national security. It is a paradigm where the stakes of U.S. agency can be only what policymakers themselves say they are (i.e., their core values defended by their security systems). These issues hark back to my comments at the beginning of the first chapter on Tony Smith's work, America's Mission. The question for me focuses on the position of the U.S. state and its policymakers within historical forces and contexts. Despite the great preponderance of the U.S., it was not a liberal state in and for itself. It was part of the changing fabric of liberal modernity. Illustrating this has been part of the task of my study up till to this point. A central task of the ensuing chapters is to show that the forces associated with that modernity-its order-making and historical moment-generated dynamics and structures that shaped U.S. agency, including its tendency to treat tensions and problems in the external realm as security issues in the first place. ₁₅₂

Leffler might remind me that the international system had changed so much through the war that power vacuums appeared and the Soviet Union could, despite weaknesses at the time, in the future come to fill them, rendering "Eurasia" a hostile and threatening landmass to the U.S. ₁₅₃ The way out would be to secure these regions and put in place systems that were consistent with U.S. core-liberal, democratic, capitalist-values. This formulation is quite consistent with Waltz's. I do not dispute the formidable evidence Leffler marshals to show that its logic came to dominate the way many presidential policymakers came to view the world. But it is not the whole story. ₁₅₄ That is, the formulation holds only if we keep our view trained on the making of security and power such that the making of order appears to be function of the former. That is why I am so drawn to the corporatists, who train their view on order-making per se. The fate of Eurasia mattered, and has significance and forms part of the fate of the U.S. exactly because there is an engagement in order-making in the first place. This is, as I have argued above, what the Second World War itself became. To see it otherwise puts us in the uncomfortable position of claiming it matters only because policymakers say it matters. That is problematic, as my discussion of agency above shows.

Ultimately, the difference between Leffler's analysis and my own is that he is focusing on the making of power regarding its extent, its purposes, and its ramifications for the character of agency within the U.S. state and outcomes abroad. I, of course, take that focus seriously, and see much to exploit in it for my own interpretation. But, in the end, I am coming at the period from the opposite side. I focus on the making of order and the role of power therein; and on how making liberal order shaped not just power but the international system.

There are other historians, like Bruce Cumings, who do not easily fit into one school or another, but who have influenced my own view considerably. In general, I believe that much of diplomatic history, although it has often been telling other stories, offers crucial insights and knowledge about the story of making liberal order and its relation to the emergence of a militarized Cold War. I have drawn liberally from that body of insights and knowledge in order to help tell that story, a task to which I now return.

This chapter has brought into view the range of concepts and attitudes which together make up the intellectual and historical starting point from which further analysis can proceed. The understandings of the liberal moment, the external state, hegemony, security, and militarization developed in this chapter will enter explicitly or underlie implicitly the discussion of the rise of the Cold War and the militarization of the West that follows. The complexity of this starting point for analysis should make clear to readers that this study does not rest on or advance a single proposition about the impact of liberal order-making. Rather, what is being argued for is the consideration of an analytical perspective that is complex, variegated and, it is hoped, useful for asking questions about postwar international life.

Notes

Note 1: G. John Ikenberry, asks straightforwardly, "how does one explain the Anglo-American postwar settlement?" in Ikenberry, "Creating Yesterday's New World Order," p. 58. Back.

Note 2: Murphy, International Organization and Industrial Change, p. 226. Back.

Note 3: Maier, "The Two Postwar Eras," pp. 327-52. Back.

Note 4: Carr, The Twenty Years' Crisis, p. 224. Back.

Note 5: Polanyi, The Great Transformation, ch. 19. Back.

Note 6: See Hintze, The Historical Essays of Otto Hintze; Weber, General Economic History; Downing, The Military Revolution; Giddens, The Nation-State and Violence; Mann, Social Power; Shaw, Post-Military Society; Tilly, ed., The Formation of National States; and Skocpol, States and Social Revolutions. Back.

Note 7: Marwick, War and Social Change; and McNeill, The Pursuit of Power. Back.

Note 8: Gilpin, War and Change, pp. 116-23. Back.

Note 9: The point is a comparative one. There has been significant discussion of this type of impact in the histories of postwar periods and in treatments of the transformative dimensions of apparent historical breakpoints such as Westphalia. But it has been more modest compared to the study of domestic impact. Also, in a recent essay, "Westphalia and All That," Stephen Krasner cautions us to be weary of claims regarding supposed breakpoints such as Westphalia. Back.

Note 10: One initial thrust along these lines is made by Ruggie in "Territoriality and Beyond," through a differentiation of the international political ramifications of various types of war. Back.

Note 11: Carr, The Twenty Years' Crisis, p. 40. Back.

Note 12: The relationship between heroic rhetoric and liberalism is briefly considered in Latham, "Liberalism's Order / Liberalism's Other." Back.

Note 13: See also Ikenberry, "Creating Yesterday's New World Order," pp. 82-83. Back.

Note 14: David Kennedy, "The Move to Institutions," traces a quite similar experience of a historical moment around World War I, where the rupture and chaos of the war is followed by the establishment of a new type of (institutionalized) order around the settlement of the war and the founding of the League of Nations. Back.

Note 15: Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy. Back.

Note 16: Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, pp. 455, 460. Back.

Note 17: Freud, New Introductory Lectures, p. 65. Back.

Note 18: Weber, Theory of Social and Economic Organization, p. 361. Back.

Note 19: Lefebvre, La somme et le reste. See also Zolberg, "Moments of Madness." Back.

Note 20: Turner, Dramas, Fields, and Metaphors, ch. 7. Back.

Note 21: Maier, "Empires or Nations?" also draws this parallel. Back.

Note 22: Maier, "Two Postwar Eras." Back.

Note 23: Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes, p. 141. Back.

Note 24: The role of surviving elites is central to arguments made in Maier, "Two Postwar Eras." Back.

Note 25: Larson, Origins of Containment, pp. 22-23, 328, incorporates in her discussion of the advantages of including variables from the international level the point made by Eulau, "Multilevel Methods," pp. 47-48, that placing a given entity at one level in the wider explanatory context of a 'higher' level is more productive. She also incorporates the advice to consider the "operational environment" of policymaking offered by Harold and Margaret Sprout, "Environmental Factors," pp. 41-56. While Larson in my view corrects the Sprouts by holding that factors of which policymakers are not necessarily conscious can form part of an environment, her criticism of international level explanations as underdetermining fails to consider the possibility that such explanations can, as in this study, be cast in more substantive terms and be more directly linked to the level of agency and the specific ways that such agency unfolds. In general, Larson wants to explain the "timing" of the emergence of cold war thinking; I am more concerned with the character of postwar international politics and its militarization. Back.

Note 26: On the effects of World War II see Kolko, The Politics of War, pp. 618-26; and Steel, Pax Americana, pp. 5, 21. Back.

Note 27: PPS 4, July 1947, in Etzold and Gaddis, eds., Containment, p. 109. Back.

Note 28: See the discussion of "the revolt against the West" in Jackson, Quasi-States, pp. 82-85. Back.

Note 29: Grosser, The Western Alliance, ch. 1. Back.

Note 30: Davis, The Cold War Begins, pp. 5-6, 12, 370-71. Back.

Note 31: See, for example, the discussion in DePorte, Europe Between the Superpowers, ch. 4. Back.

Note 32: In contrast, Kolko, Politics of War, pp. 252, 624-25, sees the postwar order as a failure of liberal principles. I would rather see the compromises of liberal principles as exactly what a liberal order is about. Back.

Note 33: Cited in DePorte, Europe Between the Superpowers, p. 81. Back.

Note 34: Ikenberry, "Origins of American Hegemony," p. 382; and Gardner, Covenant with Power, ch. 4, emphasize the "self-regulating" nature of liberal multilateralism as the basis for minimizing U.S. direct involvement in Europe. Such a view underplays the extent to which the U.S. was involved early on to an unprecedented extent. It thereby tends to read history backward from a point later in the 1940s when the U.S. appeared to be much more engaged via the ERP and NATO. That there was an ultimate goal of a minimizing, self-regulating international economy that made involvement more palatable domestically is consistent with the arguments here, but it does not emphasis sufficiently the forces that were brought to bear on this involvement by the necessity of a war settlement. Back.

Note 35: Ruggie, "Territoriality and Beyond," p. 168 Back.

Note 36: Many arenas-especially international organizations-are simultaneously agents, depending on the dimension under consideration. States exhibit this duality as well in that they can act in the international arena and also be the site for groups to contest and cooperate regarding policy-formation. On the dual character of states see Wendt, "The Agent-Structure Problem," p. 339, n.6. Back.

Note 37: On this see Weber, Social and Economic Organization, ch. 1. Back.

Note 38: Vandenberg, Private Papers, p. 97. Back.

Note 39: Ibid., p. 149. Back.

Note 40: . Polanyi, Great Transformation; and Dewey, Liberalism and Social Action. Back.

Note 41: Vandenberg, Private Papers, p. 132. Back.

Note 42: See Ruggie, "International Structure," where he points out, p. 32, that "the fabric of international life is made up of micro cases. . . [I]f change comes it will be the product of micro practices." Back.

Note 43: Giddens, A Contemporary Critique, p. 35. Back.

Note 44: Braudel, On History, pp. 74-75. Back.

Note 45: See, for example, Ruggie's edited volume, Multilateralism Matters. Back.

Note 46: Giddens, A Contemporary Critique. p. 27. Wendt, "Agent-Structure Problem," surveys the numerous scholars who have developed structurationist approaches. What is being suggested here is the possibility of a dialectical relationship between international conditions, or structures, and U.S. hegemonic state agency. Back.

Note 47: . Carlsnaes, "The Agency-Structure Problem," stresses the dimension of time as an important element in the play between structure and agency. Clearly the unfolding of the liberal order-building process as the terrain of the structure-agency interaction renders time as an essential element. Back.

Note 48: For a discussion of hegemonic stability theory see Gilpin, Political Economy of International Relations, pp. 72-80. See also Keohane, After Hegemony, p. 32. On the consistency of a liberal order with the U.S. liberal state and society see Ikenberry, "Origins of American Hegemony," pp. 382-83. Back.

Note 49: Ikenberry, "Origins of American Hegemony," p. 375. Back.

Note 50: For different, but not unrelated reasons, Larson, Origins of Containment, p. 20, criticizes the realist international systemic explanation as well for being underdetermining because "it cannot explain how particular states will react to the pressures and possibilities inherent within the structure of the system." Back.

Note 51: Post-revisionists explicitly are committed to a "multicausal" approach which takes history, politics, structure, and perceptions into consideration. See Gaddis, "Post-Revisionist Synthesis." They purposely avoid setting these factors in an overall systemic explanation to which one might otherwise ascribe some determinism. Back.

Note 52: McCormick, America's Half-Century; and idem, "World Systems." Back.

Note 53: Wallerstein, Modern World System II, pp. 38-60. Back.

Note 54: On the Gramscian school see Gill, ed., Gramsci, Historical Materialism and Inter-national Relations. Back.

Note 55: Cox, "Gramsci, Hegemony and International Relations," p. 171. Back.

Note 56: Cox, "Toward a Post-Hegemonic Conceptualization," p. 140. Back.

Note 57: Cox, Production, Power, and World Order, ch. 7. Back.

Note 58: Ibid, p. 150. Back.

Note 59: Ling, "Hegemony and the Internationalizing State," has also questioned this sense of hegemony through a consideration of alternative models of order in East Asia. Back.

Note 60: Gilpin, War and Change, p. 116. Lea Brilmayer adopts this definition of hegemony straight away in American Hegemony. Back.

Note 61: Compact Oxford English Dictionary, p. 753. Back.

Note 62: Interestingly, prior to the nineteenth century hegemony was sometimes understood to mean a preponderant presence that could set the terms of existence. The Compact Oxford English Dictionary, p. 753, shows from 1567, "Aegemonie or Sufferaigntie of things growing upon ye earth." See also Williams, Keywords, p. 144. Back.

Note 63: See, for example, Gilpin, War and Change, p. 13. Back.

Note 64: Ikenberry and Kupchan, "Socialization and Hegemonic Power." Back.

Note 65: Bull, Anarchical Order, pp. 214-16. Back.

Note 66: Doyle, Empires, p. 40. Back.

Note 67: Hegemonic stability theory does not face this issue because it collapses state agency and hegemony into one another. Back.

Note 68: Djilas, Conversations with Stalin, p. 114. Back.

Note 69: This point is made very well by Maier, "The Two Postwar Eras and the Conditions for Stability in Twentieth Century Western Europe." Back.

Note 70: Nettl, "The State." Back.

Note 71: France, by virtue of its colonial empire and occupation duty also qualified, but to a far lesser degree than these three states. Back.

Note 72: Petras, et al., Class, State, and Power, p. 3. Back.

Note 73: Indeed, Robert Cox's concept of the "internationalization of the state" points to the way that states of all types can become "transmission belts" between domestic spheres and the increasingly globalized forces in the external realm. Cox, "Social Forces." Back.

Note 74: Yergin, Shattered Peace, pp. 5-6. See other formulations in Schurmann, Logic of World Power, p. 105; Barnet, Roots of War, p. 25; and Neu, "National Security Bureaucracy." Back.

Note 75: Putnam, "Diplomacy and Domestic Politics." Back.

Note 76: See most recently Snyder, Myths of Empire, ch. 7, for an analysis of the contours and ramification of this battle. While Snyder, ibid., pp. 257-58, does recognize that domestic politics is only one contributor, he does not take into specific consideration the extent to which the U.S. was caught up in the process of constructing a global international system based on principles as well as interests which I call international liberalism. For earlier formulations of the nationalist versus internationalist contest regarding the immediate postwar external commitment see Schurmann, The Logic of World Power, part 1; Cumings, Roaring of the Cataract, pp. 23, 90-91; Eden, "The Diplomacy of Force," pp. 180-89; Justus Doenecke, Not to the Swift, chaps. 3-5, 8; Hartmann, Truman and the 80th Congress, p. 162; and Block, Origins of International Economic Disorder, pp. 70-93. Back.

Note 77: Freeland, The Truman Doctrine. As we shall see regarding liberal relations in Western Europe, the exaggerated Soviet threat may have helped achieved a domestic political closure through consensus that avoided submitting the terms of policy to democratic debate with each change in international conditions and Soviet policy. Thus, program was emphasized over process. See Gaddis, Long Peace, ch. 3, on this point. Back.

Note 78: Some of the ramifications of this temporariness from the perspective of national planning are considered in Lowi, The End of Liberalism, pp. 161-74. See also Hartmann, Truman and the 80th Congress, p. 162. Back.

Note 79: Arkes, Bureaucracy, p. 203, explores many of the dimension of the temporary status of the ERP. Back.

Note 80: The implications of this format for external state-building are considered in chapter 4. Back.

Note 81: This conceptual "catch up" is conveyed nicely in Dyson, The State Tradition, part 1. See also the argument in Krasner, "Westphalia and All That." Back.

Note 82: See Joyce and Gabriel Kolko, The Limits of Power, and Block, Origins. Back.

Note 83: Some notable works in this area are Goldstein and Keohane, eds., Ideas and Foreign Policy; Klotz, Norms and International Relations; Katzenstein, ed., Culture and National Security; Lapid and Kratochwil, eds., The Return of Culture and Identity in IR Theory; and Campbell, Writing Security. Back.

Note 84: Sociologists such as Ann Swidler, "Culture in Action," have questioned the notion of explaining social life by locating underlying interests as the "engine of action" associated with the Weberian tradition. Instead, Swidler and others would have us look at the "strategies of action" through which people organize their lives and sometimes even construct their interests in the first place. Back.

Note 85: This argument will be mostly focused on the relationship between interests and ideational forces that emerge directly out of discussions about the Cold War, international liberalism, U.S. hegemony, and post-World War II security. For more general theoretical and methodological discussions on the relevance of ideational factors see the works cited in note 83, above. Back.

Note 86: Carr, The Twenty Years' Crisis, pp. 86-87. Back.

Note 87: See Gaddis, "The Corporatist Synthesis," p. 361, where he questions the lack of opportunity in corporatist historical approaches for viewing moral dimensions as anything more than a cloak. Also see idem, The Long Peace, p. 51, for a discussion of American wartime idealism in part "as a way to sanctify the wielding of power." However, Gaddis, ibid., p. 59, does go on to recognize that the commitment to self-determination had a substantial dimension to it in postwar relations in that it was consistent with the development of strong allies-a point that will be explored further below. The notion that liberal principles are moral cloaks is also advanced by historians more closely associated with revisionist tradition: see Cumings, Roaring of the Cataract, p. 66; and McMahon, Colonialism and Cold War, p. 305, where he describes the American commitment to independence in Indonesia as rhetorical. The idealistic basis of U.S. expansion is one of the main themes in Kennan, American Diplomacy. On the notion that collective security principles in the U.N. were used by Roosevelt as a cover for military base appropriations see Dallek, The American Style of Foreign Policy, pp. 152-53. Back.

Note 88: Lundestad, "Moralism, Presentism, Exceptionalism," pp. 534-35, draws this connection between the two positions, represented on the one hand by Herbert Feis and on the other by William A. Williams. See also Freeland, Origins of McCarthyism, pp. 57-58. Back.

Note 89: See Davis, Cold War Begins, p. 392; and DePorte, Europe Between the Superpowers, pp. 78-80. Back.

Note 90: This argument is made by Rotter, Path to Vietnam, pp. 1-9. Back.

Note 91: See Gardner, Covenant with Power; and Gaddis, Long Peace, p. 220, on the Wilsonian endeavor to "integrate power with morality." Back.

Note 92: The most thorough exploration of the role of liberal principles and practice in Eastern Europe is Lundestad, The American Non-Policy. Back.

Note 93: Connolly, The Terms of Political Discourse, p. 63. Back.

Note 94: Maier, "The Politics of Productivity." Back.

Note 95: Mearsheimer, "The False Promise," informs us that "the most basic motive driving states is survival. States want to maintain their sovereignty," p. 10. Back.

Note 96: Lippmann, in Wolfers, Discord and Collaboration, p. 150. See discussion of these in Buzan, People, States and Fear, pp. 16-25. Back.

Note 97: Thucydides, Peloponnesian War, pp. 341-48. Back.

Note 98: Ibid., p. 347 Back.

Note 99: See Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars, pp. 5-12, for a discussion of whether underlying the "necessity" of attacking Melos is a set of moral questions. Back.

Note 100: The notion, advanced by Waltz, Theory of International Politics, pp. 26-27, that power imbalances precipitate the pursuit of empire is similar to the notion that natural fathers of small children dominate the latter as parents. Despite the obvious links of natural fathers to their children and their grossly unbalanced power advantages, everything depends, first and foremost, on a given father's engagement in the project of parenthood. A project of this sort is not merely an internal attribute of a given father, it is an external engagement in a social context and this is not subject to the charge of reductionism that Waltz is so apt to level against nonsystemic or systematic explanations. Of course, physical preponderance is a (necessary) factor for fathers and empires. But it is not decisive in that what counts is the actual engagement in the project of fatherhood or empire. Back.

Note 101: See Wendt, "Anarchy is What States Make of It." Back.

Note 102: I can imagine some readers jumping up and proclaiming that this writer has missed a-or even the-paramount lesson of twentieth-century security. Nuclear weapons transport the concern with physical survival into the heavens. After being forced to dive under my desk in primary school nuclear attack drills hundreds of times, I understand the appeal of this claim. But this emphasis misses the point. What nuclear weapons do is increase the socially embedded stakes of survival by threatening the very existence of a society, a "civilization," or even a species, humankind. A sniper at my door is a threat that is far more circumscribed to the physical realm than nuclear war, which is on the other end of the spectrum, given its potential to destroy an entire society, if not global civilization. The connections between individual, national, and international security is explored cogently by Buzan, People, States and Fear. Back.

Note 103: Waltz, Theory of International Politics, pp. 138-46. Back.

Note 104: Ruggie, "Continuity and Transformation," p. 138, finds it dubious. Back.

Note 105: Goldstein and Keohane, eds., Ideas and Foreign Policy. As implied in chapter 1, the essay by Krasner, "Westphalia and All That," does engage the historical context of an emerging Western modernity in Europe. However, because Krasner sets sovereignty up as a discrete ideational variable relative to changes in material conditions as well as practices, his approach is consistent with the framework of that volume, which is decidedly micro-ideational. Back.

Note 106: Buzan, People, States and Fear, pp. 19-20. Back.

Note 107: Buzan, People, States and Fear, p. 7. On essentially contested concepts see Gallie, "Essentially Contested Concepts," and Connolly, The Terms of Political Discourse. Back.

Note 108: Aron, Politics and History, p. 177. Back.

Note 109: Buzan, People, States and Fear, p. 272. Back.

Note 110: See V.R. Berghahn, Militarism, pp. 7-8. Much of my understanding of the history of the use term is owed to Berghahn's book. Back.

Note 111: Vagts, History of Militarism, p. 17. Back.

Note 112: Hintze, Historical Essays. Back.

Note 113: See, for example, Kaldor and Eide, eds., The World Military Order. Back.

Note 114: Ross, "Dimensions of Militarization." Back.

Note 115: The occlusion of societal, political, and ideological militarization in Ross's formulation is criticized by Shaw, Post-Military Society, p. 13. Back.

Note 116: Thee, "Militarization." Back.

Note 117: Stambuk, American Military Forces Abroad, pp. 4-6. Back.

Note 118: Stinchcombe, Constructing Social Theories, pp. 83-106; and Cohen, Karl Marx's Theory of History, chaps. 9, 10. Back.

Note 119: See Malinowski, A Scientific Theory of Culture; Parsons, The Social System; and Haas, The Uniting of Europe. Back.

Note 120: Contingency and agency intersect. Both Stinchcombe, Constructing Social Theories and, of course, Cohen, Marx's Theory of History point to the consistencies of historical and functional approaches. Back.

Note 121: Elster, "Marxism," p. 82. Back.

Note 122: Burley, "Regulating the World," draws a picture of U.S. wartime planning that should be treated as only a starting point for a liberal order-building process that was shaped by events and negotiations that are the focus of historians such as Michael Hogan. Back.

Note 123: Unger, False Necessity, p. 334, struggles with similar issues. Back.

Note 124: A basic reason why this functional explanation differs from functionalism per se is that the latter tends to assume the stable existence of society or order and then goes about explaining the presence of specific social elements (e.g., the raindance) in terms of their contribution to that stable existence. If they do not so contribute they are dysfunctional. Back.

Note 125: See Morgenthau, Politics Among Nations. Back.

Note 126: See for example, Gilpin, "The Richness of the Tradition," and Buzan, et al. The European Security Order Recast. Back.

Note 127: Buzan, et al., The European Security Order Recast, p. 1. Back.

Note 128: Waltz, Theory of International Relations, pp. 170-71. Back.

Note 129: Ibid, pp. 168-173. Back.

Note 130: Lebow, "The Long Peace," p. 257-58. Back.

Note 131: See Evangelista, "Stalin's Postwar Army Reappraised," and below. Back.

Note 132: A neorealist who does enter the history and focuses exactly on that proximate army is Wagner, "What is Bipolarity?" Wagner, however, does not distinguish between a concern with the political ramifications of a perceived threat in Europe and the perception on the U.S.'s part that a threat existed. He also tends to assume a U.S. interest in the fate of the region. This is something that must be explained. Back.

Note 1332: In "Continuity and Transformation," Ruggie has shown how the logic of Waltz's approach emphasizes the reproduction of a system, not its transformation. Back.

Note 134: On the zero-sumness of the relationship see Waltz, Theory of International Politics, p. 1. Back.

Note 135: Fischer, Historians' Fallacies, p. 147. Back.

Note 136: Waltz, Theory of International Politics, pp 199-202. Back.

Note 137: Ibid., p. 191. Back.

Note 138: Gilpin, War and Change, pp. 13, 30, respectively. Back.

Note 139: Ibid., p. 33. Back.

Note 140: Krasner, "State Power and the Structure of International Trade." Back.

Note 141: See Eden, "The End of U.S. Cold War History?," Cumings, "Revising Postrevisionism," and Hogan and Paterson, Explaining the History of American Foreign Relations. Back.

Note 142: Williams, Tragedy of American Diplomacy; and LaFeber, America, Russia, and the Cold War. Back.

Note 143: Block, The Origins of International Economic Disorder, p. 10. Back.

Note 144: McCormick, America's Half-Century, p. 48, tells us U.S. policymakers "had a vision of how to reorder and manage the world-system." Back.

Note 145: Hogan, "Corporatism," p. 235. Back.

Note 146: Gaddis, "The Emerging Post-Revisionist Synthesis." Back.

Note 147: Leffler, Preponderance of Power. Back.

Note 148: Leffler, "National Security," p. 203. Back.

Note 149: Leffler Preponderance of Power, p. 19. Back.

Note 150: There is Leffler, "The American Conception of National Security," "Adherence to Agreements," and "The United States and the Strategic Dimensions." Leffler's perspective, however, changed over that decade. Back.

Note 151: Leffler, "National Security," p. 91, 205. Back.

Note 152: The dynamics of "securitizing" issues is explored by Waever, "Securitization and Desecuritization." Back.

Note 153: Leffler, Preponderance of Power, pp. 3-10. Back.

Note 154: For a different sense of why it is not the whole story which stresses the capitalist economic interests often occluded by Leffler see Cumings, "Revising Postrevisionism." Back.

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The Liberal Moment