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

3. An Enemy Is Better Than a Friend

As World War II came to a close in 1945, the major tasks of order-building would still lie ahead. Of course, plenty of order-building had taken place during the war. Besides the crucial agreements and institutions carved out at Bretton Woods, the foundations for the establishment of the United Nations organization were laid in the summer of 1944 at Dumbarton Oaks in Washington, D.C. In the U.S. state center, extensive bureaucratic machinery was set up, under the aegis of the Department of State, for planning postwar political structures, territorial settlements, demilitarization, and "trade and financial relations." ₁ This effort was to a great extent stimulated by the activities of the Council on Foreign Relations. The Council, which comprised business leaders, journalists, academics, and top State Department officials, commissioned as early as 1939 a large-scale study on the potential shape, stakes, and issues of the postwar world. ₂ It was in the Council and the U.S. state wartime planning committees that many of the details of the plans for the U.N., Bretton Woods, and even the notorious Morgenthau Plan to deindustrialize Germany were worked out.

Planners and political leaders were in no position to anticipate how much order-building needed to be done after the end of the war. Few actually thought that, by constructing a United Nations organization and institutions such as the IMF, their order-building tasks were finished. Under Secretary Joseph C. Grew pointed out, in his contribution to the State Department campaign toward the end of the war to "sell" the idea of the U.N., that: "There is one mistake we must avoid at all costs . . . and that is the mistake of thinking that the machinery itself will solve our problems. . . . The way of international cooperation is hard; the process painful and grueling." ₃

Nonetheless, most policymakers assumed that the UN did provide a basic institutional arena for cooperation among the allies, if not all nations that generally abided by international law, in the tasks of making a postwar order. Its two-tiered structure would allow for the type of concentration of agency in the Security Council that the univeralistic General Assembly, reminiscent of the failed League of Nations, could not. The possibility of the UN engendering both dimensions of order-making-arenas and concentrations of agency-was expressed starkly, for instance, in the differences between chapters six and seven of the UN Charter regarding conflict and aggression. In chapter six, parties to a dispute come to the UN to "seek a solution by negotiation, enquiry, mediation," and so on. ₄ In chapter seven, the Security Council takes it upon itself to identify threats to peace and to act accordingly with measures such as blockades or the deployment of military force.

In principle, the UN Charter and the associated organs such as the IMF represented a complex set of mechanisms for addressing the issues of order-making articulated in statements such as the Atlantic Charter that were so clearly the expressions of a liberal moment in history (emphasizing, for example, self-determination and material and social well-being). These efforts were also informed by the security doctrines of the liberal tradition, such as collective security. ₅ But U.S. planners and political leaders did not think that there would be no liberal order-building activities going on outside the context of the UN. Indeed, the UN Charter, in chapter eight, made ample room for "regional arrangements" for the provision of security (an allowance exploited in the making of NATO). More generally, as Grew's statement makes clear, leading planners understood that the UN did not in itself accomplish the orchestration and construction of practices and policies, and the articulation and pursuit of interests that are essential to making an order. The charter had no built-in answers for what to do with Germany, Japan, colonies, or the faltering economies of Europe.

We now take it for granted that the tensions generated by these tasks overwhelmed a still fragile UN that might otherwise have served ably as an arena of cooperation or agent of collective security and agreement. Although there were skeptical voices during the war, by 1946 Hans Morgenthau could comfortably declare that "[w]hat was true of the League of Nations has already proved to be true of the United Nations." ₆ The UN, Morgenthau believed, could not face the basic "political issues" that led to conflict in places such as Greece. Writing in the same year, E.B. White was even more hyperbolic: "The preparations made at San Francisco for a security league of sovereign nations to prevent aggression now seem like the preparation some little girls might make for a lawn party as a thunderhead gathers beyond the garden gate. The lemonade will be spiked by lightening." ₇

From the perspective of our own time, it should be clear that the UN simply become one of a number of arenas and agencies involved in the making of postwar order. For instance, it is difficult to deny the central role the UN has played as a site for the production of international norms, especially in the domain of self-determination and human rights.

But if we focus on the incapacities of the UN as an arena and an agent we risk missing another related point about its role in the making of an international order. U.S. policymakers intended that the Soviet Union would find its place in that order as a reasonably productive member of the Security Council, as an enforcer of global peace, and as a signee to the necessary postwar political settlements. Even as late as September 1946, presidential counsel Clark Clifford could still write, in a hardline report to the president:

The primary objective of United States policy toward the Soviet Union is to convince Soviet leaders that it is in their interest to participate in a system of world cooperation, that there are no fundamental causes for war between our two nations, and that the security and prosperity of the Soviet Union, and that of the rest of the world as well, is being jeopardized by the aggressive militaristic imperialism such as that in which the Soviet Union is now engaged. ₈

Whether or not the Soviet Union had any desire to fulfill the various roles engendered for it by the liberal order-making process, it is obvious that they were willing to become an active member of the Security Council, to enter into negotiations, and to sign agreements with the West. The Soviet Union may well have viewed these activities as instrumental to their security and the strengthening of socialism in their country and around the world. But the point is that they were pursuing these interests through an order-building process that was a project of the West. They were hardly engaging the U.S. and Western Europe in a socialist order-building process, however much they might have wanted to.

In this chapter, I intend to show how the effort to make a liberal order (Clifford's "system of world cooperation") inclusive of the Soviet Union generated tensions that led to the confrontation that became the Cold War. Some of those tensions were directly related to the attempt to include the Soviet Union. Others were tied to the general political dynamics of liberal order-making itself.

Constructing a Liberal Order

In my discussions of liberal order so far, I have paid little attention to how liberal order is pursued. Therefore, let us now examine what is entailed in actually building an international liberal order. At its most basic level, the construction process of any type of social order involves defining boundaries regarding: a) what elements of social life will be ordered; b) how those elements will be ordered; and c) who will be involved in the ordering. These tasks can never be completed definitively by order-makers. All they can do is set out provisional parameters and craft policies addressing certain aspects of boundary-making. Moreover, a stasis would have to be assumed to think they could be completed definitively. These tasks are rather the basic problems of order-making. The contests over them are what render order-making political. In effect, order is never finally achieved, it is only pursued. It is never an outcome, it is only a process.

What makes it possible to generalize about constructing social order in this way is the compelling analogy between order in the domestic and international spheres. ₉ Like international order, the ordering of a domestic realm is likely to occur in the context of significant change: e.g., postwar, postcolonization, and post-revolution. Where international order is distinguishable as an ordering of relations between different states and societies, domestic order analogously involves the ordering of the different geographical or political elements that populate a given state and society. And while in a domestic order we might expect to see the organization of a far wider range of social and political relations than in an international order, this type of ordering can occur at the international level. The most obvious example of it is the ordering of international economic relations.

Parallels between domestic and international order are possible because underlying both notions is the assumption that there exists a common political and social fabric greater than any of the units it comprises. Such a fabric need not just be a field or system of interaction between units, as Kenneth Waltz understands the international system to be. A social fabric can create-and, in turn, be formed by-common interests, identities, and a web of social, political, and economic relations. The obvious designation for this web is a "society." It, of course, has been the central object of analysis for the mostly domestic-focused field of sociology. In the field of international relations, Hedley Bull became famous for his concern with the societal dimensions of international life. For him "an international society exists when a group of states, conscious of certain common interests and values, form a society in the sense that they conceive themselves to be bound by a common set of rules in their relations with one another, and share in the working of common institutions." ₁₀ "Societizing" our conception of international relations has the attractive advantage of emphasizing the normative and historical dimensions of order between states.

However, for a phenomenon such as international liberal order, as it has been considered here, we ought to be suspicious of the use of the term society to ground our thinking. The term "society" brings with it the implication of an identifiable and extant social fabric that is potentially ready to be ordered and that does not apply to international life. Bull gets around this problem by focusing on the society that forms among states suggesting a limited number of actors and range of (interstate) relations. But as I indicated in chapter 1, liberal order lies somewhere between Bull's notions of international (i.e., between states and societies) and world order (i.e., the totality of human interactions encompassing multiple societies). Liberal order is, therefore, conceptually far messier than Bull's more circumscribed order of a society of states.

This messiness also suggests an important difference between international (liberal) order and the ordering of a society. The central term of that difference is the central term of order-making more generally, the question of boundaries. Of course, geographic boundaries, for instance, are rarely definitively settled for a state and society that is being ordered in the aftermath of war or revolution within its territory. But there are far more discernible limits in comparison to the international realm, which is in part defined exactly by the crossing of boundaries. Boundary markers, such as cultural identities, for determining which and how units are to be brought into the project of order-making are far less automatic in the international realm. Those markers that do exist (e.g. the historic relationship between Europe and the U.S.), are likely to be thinner than domestic markers or more politically problematic (e.g., the historic colonial relationships between Europe and the Third World).

When it comes to the question of which elements of social life are subject to order, boundaries are also far more open in the international than in the domestic sphere. Societies are generally ordered by states, through rather standard repertoires, which have developed over the centuries. From policing and regulating economic activity, to educating and taxing, states create domestic social order usually in predictable ways regarding what is ordered and how it is ordered. ₁₁ In the international realm, there is far less to build on of this sort. In the 1940s, planners could look back on economic orders and international organizations (e.g., the League of Nations), but these models of order-making pale in comparison to the state-society models. Even if there were more models, it is not obvious that they would be able to help answer the crucial questions about which relations are to be ordered, how so, and for whom (across as well as within states and societies). True enough, international order builds on the ordering that occurs in domestic spheres. But the question is which and how much of these spheres are built on and drawn into the making of international order.

Identifying the what, how, and who in the making of a specifically liberal international order is an extremely difficult definitional task, given the complexity of liberal modernity. If, as I pointed out in chapter 1, international ordering is the orchestration and construction of political and social relations, then to a large extent the process of defining liberal order will entail three activities. Actors, institutions, and principles common to the states and societies participating in each domain of liberal modernity must be identified. Relations and principles that facilitate interstate and intersocietal transactions within and across the liberal domains must be constructed. Last, the geographic boundaries of liberal relations on a global scale must be considered. These would in the main be the terms of the what, how, and who of liberal order.

By virtue of their active pursuit of a liberal order, U.S. policymakers placed the U.S. state at the center of this definition process. The U.S. seemed to assign itself the role, as one historian put it, of "interpreter and regulator of changes in the status quo anywhere in the world," ₁₂ for reasons explored in the last chapter.

But even if the mechanism of a U.S. center was available for the definition of liberal relations, the task of defining the contours of the liberal order remained formidable. Heterogeneous forms of liberal practice across different states and societies make difficult the identification of common actors, institutions, practices, and principles. Such identification however was not impossible. For instance, while the British and U.S. states differed regarding the extent to which they would intervene to adjust market outcomes in their societies, they both shared a commitment to market principles, both domestically and internationally. ₁₃ On the other hand, international liberal traditions provide no map as to which institutions and relations are most productive in the establishment of a common framework. Nor do they indicate which liberal principles should receive priority when they clash. As we shall discuss further below, although U.S. policy toward colonies such as Indonesia initially discounted assertions of self-determination made by nationalist leaders-among other things because of the recognized benefits continued colonialism provided to international economic exchange in Western Europe-the U.S. ultimately did support Indonesian independence. ₁₄

Beyond the question of priority, the very extent and nature of U.S. intervention in other countries in the process of defining relations was itself open to definition, rather than being an automatic outcome of liberal order-building. Indeed, as we saw in the last chapter, this role was rather tenuous as hegemony itself emerged only in the actual process of liberal order-building.

The Soviet Union and the Making of Order

From the outbreak of the Cold War until its end, the Soviet Union was generally viewed in the West, relative to the United States, as a rival force. The historian Vojtech Mastny points to a "clash of values" based on "two incompatible notions of world order." ₁₅ Such a view assumes that the Soviet Union was from the start located in some externalized space, outside of the liberal world, attempting to inject its antithetical values and interests into that world. In actuality, there is every indication in the very immediate postwar years that the Soviet Union was viewed as a participant in the order being constructed, an order that in part flowed out of the international relations of the wartime Allied powers. As I pointed out above, facilitating that participation was one of the purposes of the UN. This vision was echoed in the sentiments of leaders such as FDR and Truman and policymakers in the State Department. One aspect of this vision was the desire to avoid spheres of influence. The State Department warned in mid-1945 in a briefing paper for the Potsdam conference: "Our primary objective should be to remove the causes which make nations feel that . . . spheres are necessary to build their security, rather than to assist one country to build up strength against another." ₁₆ Even the early effort of hardliners such as W. Averell Harriman, U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union, to get tough with the Soviets is best understood as an effort to discipline them for challenging the construction of order in which they too were involved.

It was in regard to the difficult tasks of the definition process, i.e., the setting of boundaries of liberal international relations, that the Soviet Union emerged as particularly salient in the building of liberal order. More specifically, the Soviet Union was especially relevant to the demarcation of a geopolitical region in which the liberal order would operate. ₁₇ But it was also crucial for locating, on a nongeographical plane, the scope, range, and character of common relations-be they socialist, laissez-faire, or statist-that would be included inside the domains of the international liberal order.

In this formulation, the Soviet Union is best understood to have been an international force that could alter definitions of liberal relations from a position within the liberal world. True enough, the Soviet Union had a political system that was decidedly nonliberal. It understandably would try to push political and economic outcomes that were consistent with that system. But the point is that the pursuit of many of these outcomes beyond Soviet borders unfolded within the context of negotiations and relations directly bearing on the construction of a liberal order. Many of the contentions between the U.S. and Soviet Union took place in terms of alternative interpretations of agreements such as Yalta, or the potential agreements offered at the Council of Foreign Ministers meetings. ₁₈ Indeed the councils were conceived by Secretary of State James Byrnes as a sort of arena for the avoidance of the spheres of influence referred to above. ₁₉ Such avoidance can be understood, in one respect, as an attempt to keep the Soviets inside of the realm of international relations associated with the West.

For the most part, the nature of the Soviet Union's shaping of the construction of international liberalism was negative. Soviet influence over the construction process bore mostly on the question of which, and to what degree, societies would participate in liberal relations. In this respect, Soviet nonliberal values came very much into play-within the context of international liberalism. George Kennan's 1946 "Long Telegram" captured this negative force by pointing out that-through its illiberal tactics-the Soviets sought "to tear down sources of strength beyond the reach of Soviet control." ₂₀ Communist ideology and political practice were vehicles for altering the scope and boundaries of liberal order exactly because they were perceived as having the power to distance or even cut off societies from the range of application of liberal relations. While this power may have been seen by U.S. policymakers as unstoppable in eastern Europe, it could and was met as a challenge in countries such as Iran, Greece, and Germany. ₂₁ The point is that it was not Communist ideology per se but the Soviet use of such ideology to change relations and political outcomes in a given country that constituted the character of the Soviet challenge to liberal order-construction. ₂₂ It was, for example, the basis for the advancement of an alternative concept of social relations that generated tensions over Germany, at least as early as the 1945 Potsdam conference. ₂₃ Thus, Soviet power mattered exactly because it could impact negatively on liberal order-building.

The notion that the Soviet Union could affect, from 1945 on, the construction process of international liberalism is not in itself a sufficient condition for the rise of the Cold War. After all, France and Britain both deeply affected this process as well. ₂₄ What was different about the Soviet Union was its capacity to affect the definition process to a far greater degree than other leading states based both on its ideology and its sheer power, manifested most clearly in the Red Army's occupation of east and central Europe. This difference was decisive in the context of a set of liberal relations which, as we shall see, could not easily be bent to accommodate the interests of the Soviet Union inside the parameters of the emerging liberal order.

It may seem strange that the West attempted to incorporate a state organized in such an illiberal form into a liberal order. But as global economic relations were being constructed, the Soviet Union found ample room to attempt to advance its economic interests within the domain of international economic exchange. The Soviet Union was often a willing trading partner with the West and sought a substantial loan ($6 billion) from the U.S. at the end of the war. Although it failed to ratify the Bretton Woods agreements, it came to the bargaining table to negotiate over the terms of U.S. Marshall Plan aid.

Perhaps even more relevant was the domain of self-determination. It was universally understood that the Soviet Union had a legitimate fear of a revived Germany which could once again threaten the Soviet Union on its western borders. As far back as the 1941 Atlantic Charter, the link was made between the right of a self-determining people to set the terms of its existence and the security of that people within the given borders of that existence. The charter stated that in a world of self-determining peoples, the signees "hope to see established a peace which will afford all nations the means of dwelling in safety within their own boundaries." ₂₅ The UN Charter reinforced the notion that a state and its people could find security in the emerging international order either through prevention, self-protection, or collective action. Article 51 was clear about the right of a state to protect its people from any aggression against it through "self-defense." ₂₆ The Soviets repeatedly justified their intervention in Poland in terms of their own right to security. ₂₇ The emerging normative discourse allowed the Soviet Union to make claims that could only reinforce the likelihood that the U.S. would take them seriously, no matter how much the U.S. objected to the Soviet intervention in the political life of Poland. In other words, the connection between security and self-determination established in the postwar period gave the Soviets new grounds and legitimacy for their security claims.

These links have generally been overlooked by historians of the period. John Gaddis has rightly pointed to the tension in U.S. policy between its desire to support Polish self-determination and its inclination, often reluctant, to recognize Soviet security needs. ₂₈ What Gaddis does not consider is the way that both the fate of Poland and the security interests of the Soviet Union were instances of the same intersection of self-determination and security. The Polish people were attempting to secure a social existence on their own terms. The Soviet interference was a threat to that process. A few short years back, the Soviet Union itself had been invaded and occupied by Nazi Germany, suffering a fate that, in principle, was not so different from Poland under the Soviets. Whether or not they only sought to dominate Poland, Soviet leaders were able legitimately to claim that securing themselves against a repeat of that outcome was a matter of self-protection.

The choice the U.S. faced in the end was between the security of Poland and the security of the Soviet Union in the context of constructing a liberal order. What seemed in part to be at stake in Poland was a chance to facilitate the establishment of a liberal democracy. However, there was no intrinsic reason why that possibility should have taken precedence over Soviet security claims and their bearing on the wider political dynamics of order-making within which the fate of Germany and other countries deemed more important then Poland was at stake. It was the attempt to accommodate the Soviet Union in that order that sealed Poland's fate. Soviet leaders would have to give up their efforts to bind Poland politically to them or U.S. policymakers would have to give up on the fight to protect it. The U.S. did exactly that in June 1945, when it settled for a mildly reorganized Polish government that incorporated some politicians sympathetic to the West.

The problem in all of this is that for a liberal order to work, the interests that emerge in the context of order-building and the historical moment more generally must be successfully incorporated into the framework of liberal relations. This must be done without undermining the definition process of order-making itself. Otherwise, the project of liberal order-construction might be severely hampered. If an incorporation is not possible, then such interests must be altered to allow for such an incorporation. In itself, the Soviet domination of eastern Europe did not undermine order-building. But the recognition of Soviet claims regarding its security needs in the eastern Mediterranean or Germany would have upset the U.S. effort to rebuild a liberal international economy, which depended on Western access to resources such as oil and the productive potential of Germany.

The comparison with the accommodation of Britain and France is telling. Although both Britain and France made claims that were perceived by the U.S. as threats to international exchange, especially in their reluctance to surrender imperial preferences, these claims could be accommodated and adjusted through compromises that were based on the dependence of these countries on U.S. economic power. Important agreements such as Bretton Woods rested on this type of accommodation and adjustment. Without this leverage over the Soviet Union the same sort of outcome was unlikely. As a result, the ability of the U.S. and the West in general to accommodate the even more far reaching Soviet pressures on liberal relations through negotiation and compromise was far less elastic than it was for other states.

But one might ask whether the pursuit by the U.S. and the West of something other than a liberal order would have made the Soviet Union more incorporable? This is a very complex counterfactual. It is of limited value, however, because a whole chain of commitments, engagements, and conditions are associated with the construction of liberal order (e.g., the long-term fate of Germany, the economic health of Western Europe, and the broad shifts associated with the liberal moment). Indeed, such a counterfactual is rather absurd since the construction of liberal order did not rest on only one or two factors such as liberal democratic regime-type. ₂₉ Instead, it involved a wide range of factors associated with particular ways of being modern. But we can imagine a far more circumscribed order being established, where outcomes and processes in Europe and elsewhere have far less salience for the U.S. In such an order, the U.S. would chiefly be interested in guaranteeing its territorial security. Indeed, just ten years earlier, the U.S. maintained a rather isolationist posture to do exactly that, despite outcomes in Europe that were unattractive to many of its leaders. In this circumscribed, imaginary order, it would likely be recognized that the Soviet Union could legitimately pursue its own territorial security. Given its economic and military weakness in the aftermath of world war, the Soviet Union would have quite a difficult time dominating all of Europe and Asia. Moreover, such an order might even resemble the nineteenth-century Concert order, where, in the longer term, the U.S. could take on the role of Britain as a balancer on the European continent, helping to prevent any undue dominance of Europe by the Soviet Union. Thus, just as a Russian empire was accommodated in that far more circumscribed nineteenth-century order, the Soviet Union would conceivably have been accommodated in a parallel twentieth-century Concert order. What happened in Germany, Poland, and Southeast Asia would have been far less salient for a U.S. that also had the perceived luxury of being the sole possessor of nuclear weapons.

The Liberal Uniaxis

Post-World War II order was far more complex than any nineteenth-century Concert order-maker in Europe could have ever dreamed. ₃₀ Quite simply, there was a great deal more of political and social life being ordered on an international basis in the twentieth century. The making of order would understandably be a far more complex and intricate enterprise. Whatever the degree of complexity, it is requisite that the units involved develop some kind of common engagement vis-à-vis the project of order-making. In the nineteenth century, the Concert of Europe drew states into a common effort to avoid destabilizing wars through principles such as the balance of power. Although the chief states (or "great powers") involved often had different interests and competing visions of the specific outcomes to be pursued through the Concert, they shared a sense of obligation to one another regarding the mechanisms (e.g., treaties and diplomatic consultation) for the mediation of foreign policies to avoid war. There were remarkably few times this obligation broke down across the century.

The ordering of social and economic relations (e.g., in the area of trade and communications) through different international institutions increased as the nineteenth century came to a close. This ordering of relations grew in the first half of the twentieth century as well. By the 1930s, there were dozens of institutions dedicated to the governance of international quotidian intercourse. ₃₁ Thus, in the making of post-World War II international order, planners could rely on the international organizational reservoir that had been built up across the previous seventy odd years in areas such as international postal service. But they obviously could not rely on the common engagement inherent in this reservoir to settle, in the course of a very compressed moment, the broad range of controversial political, economic, and social issues they faced. That would certainly be a case of the tail wagging the dog. Indeed, the many contentions over order-making that marked the period transcended the inherited hum of international quotidian governance. Something more than the institutional legacy of quotidian governance was necessary to produce a common engagement regarding the controversial issues of the period. At stake was the determination of the boundaries and political and economic character of states, societies, and international organizations ordering large segments of international economic and political life.

Intuition may suggest that the necessary intersubjective fabric was supplied by the existence of community among the policymakers and elites of participating states and societies. As it is typically used, community can refer to a shared existence in a delimited locale or to the more general possibility of a group holding something in common such as identity, interests, or institutions.

In principle, an international community in this latter sense could engender a degree of mutual obligation necessary for a common engagement in liberal order-building. ₃₂ Policymakers especially in the U.S. and Britain did sometimes use the term "world community" to refer to the assemblage of states in the international realm. This was a rather unreflexive understanding of international community. It generally implied an international public sphere of states under obligation to one another to respect the norms and rules of the international system associated with diplomatic relations and peaceful coexistence. This sense of world community is equivalent to Bull's understanding of international society. It refers to the general operation of the state system. Unfortunately, this type of world community, or international society, is insufficient as an intersubjective basis for the construction of liberal order. There are no obligations for generating a common engagement that is specific to the building of liberal order rather than something else.

This understanding, however, does not exhaust the possibilities of international community. ₃₃ Most relevant to the current discussion is the notion of a "pluralistic security community" made famous by Karl Deutsch. In such a community, states as members manage conflict without resorting to war and yet remain sovereign polities. Deutsch points to numerous interrelated factors constituting such a community including: identity "in terms of self-images and interests;" common values; mutual predictability and responsiveness; reiterative communication; the capacity of members to learn about one another; and finally a general sense of community or "we-feeling." ₃₄ It is possible to conceive of some of these same factors applying to a community associated with liberal order-making rather than just "peaceful change." Deutsch, in fact, treated elements of liberal modernity-particularly democratic governance and a commitment to market economies-as core elements of the common values of the North Atlantic community he studied. ₃₅

But the assumption that a Deutschian community constituted the basis for a common engagement in liberal order-building is deeply problematic for one simple reason. His communities have the benefit of an extended span of time. Predictability, learning, and "we-feelings" are the result of interactive processes that can unfold across many years. More generally, his understanding of political community rests on the existence of mechanisms for enforcement and institutions facilitating interaction, the formation of which in the 1940s is at issue here. Time in the liberal moment was generally very compressed. Compression of this sort stemmed not only from the limited timespan, but also the intensity of change and disruption. Deutsch himself never directly dealt with this problem. His focus was on the emergence of community across the decade from the 1940s to the 1950s. But on his behalf, one might argue that there was the longer term interaction between states especially in the North Atlantic area across the first half of the twentieth century. If we disregard the important point that in the making of liberal order more than this limited-albeit crucial-region of states was involved, there is still an additional problem with treating the pre-World War II period as background to the emergence of postwar community. Many of the states in this region were not even democracies (e.g., Germany, Italy, Austria). And the economic climate of the 1930s hardly lent itself to the generation of "we-feelings," as states imposed beggar-thy-neighbor policies through restrictive tariffs and relatively hostile currency devaluations.

Alternatively, one may argue that the mid- to late-1940s was a period of "nascent community" formation. ₃₆ In this case, the process of community formation itself would engender the common engagement for liberal order building. Developing this concept, Emmanuel Adler and Michael Barnett point to potential "trigger mechanisms"-such as war-that precipitate shifts in material power, the rise of new approaches to order, or great power leadership in making common purpose. The problem with this formulation in the context of the 1940s is that it presupposes as conditions of community emergence the very phenomena that community or its nascent formation might itself be employed to explain (i.e., order-making, hegemony, or responses to shifts in power). Moreover, liberal order-building began with the war itself. A post-bellum community triggered by the war could not generate the common engagement necessary for this wartime order-building.

Looking to community to find the basis for a common engagement is really a matter of putting the cart before the horse. My approach to this issue is different. In principle, I would argue that before any community can exist around the construction of order, agents must confront this construction as a viable project through which the possibilities of political and social order in the future would be defined. While agents-who should never be thought of as abstractions-carry a history of identities, roles, and relationships, these can be seen as shaping the terms of engagement with a project such as liberal order-building. That engagement and history might, in turn, constitute the basis for a community.

In practical terms, we saw in the last chapter that, early on in the making of order, there was explicit attention to articulating that a project of liberal order-making per se existed. When policymakers at that initial stage spoke of a "common interest" in a future, they meant that there should exist a common engagement in shaping a future, rather than a common interest in the specific terms of that future since this question was barely on the table. States would share this task or project in a way similar to a group of workers sharing a project. Cordell Hull made that clear when he stated in 1943 that:

At the end of the war, each of the United Nations and each of the nations associated with them will have the same common interest in national security, in world order under law, in peace, in the full promotion of the political, economic, and social welfare of the their respective peoples-in the principles and spirit of the Atlantic Charter and the Declaration by United Nations. The future of these indispensable common interests depends absolutely upon international cooperation. Hence, each nation's own primary interests requires it to cooperate with the others. ₃₇

Hull was asking policymakers and democratic publics to view their postwar fates in terms of the making of order along the lines he describes. In other words, in contrast to the ruptures and chaos of war and depression, there existed the project of making order, setting the possibilities of an international future. When Dean Acheson was asked in a public interview in 1945 how the Bretton Woods agreements could help the "disorganized and shattered world to function," he answered that the agreements would "point the way out of chaos and economic warfare toward a new system based on cooperative action." ₃₈ That "pointing of the way" was the articulation of common terms for the future opportunities of those participating in-or affected by-the agreements.

In general, states are drawn up into the project of liberal order-building through phenomena such as conferences, treaties, agreements, institution-building, diplomatic relations, economic aid, and even military occupation. Through these phenomena states gain a common orientation toward the range of tasks engendered by order-making. States, in effect, would come into alignment not over the terms of order (a deeply contested set of issues), but over the notion that states were mutually engaged in the setting of those terms (i.e., making order).

Some readers might think that it is wrongheaded to represent states as possessing in common the project of liberal order-construction. They might be tempted to see the project of liberal order-making as something that the U.S. undertook as an "American" project to remake the world. This temptation ought to be resisted. Toward the end of the previous chapter, I argued that it is a mistake to view the making of liberal order per se as a U.S. possession. Likewise, I would argue that, although the existence of the project depended centrally on its articulation by U.S. policymakers, its existence as a project became meaningful only to the extent that the project was recognized and engaged in on an international basis. In the general air of the time, from Bretton Woods to Dumbarton Oaks, few policymakers from Keynes to Nehru could avoid being drawn into the project of liberal order-building. As the Economist had put it in 1942, regarding U.S. economic policy: "Let there be no mistake about it. The policy put forward by the American Administration is revolutionary. It is a genuinely new conception of world order." ₃₉

It may seem somewhat contradictory to claim that the U.S. could be the central articulator of a project that was ultimately held in common. But as the editors of the Economist understood, the project presented possibilities that would engage states in the effort to define the terms of international liberal order and their existence within it. In western Europe states were willing to turn to the economic and military power of the U.S. state in order to facilitate the well-being of their own liberal modern existences. In so doing, they retained their own capacity to affect the liberal definition process through foreign policy initiatives and diplomacy. In this respect, "the empire" of U.S. power in Europe that would be made "by invitation" ₄₀ would be decidedly liberal in both its structure and the substance of its relations.

Outside of Europe, states and societies found themselves drawn up in the project of liberal order-building as well. They also tried to facilitate their own welfare in the context of that project. Whereas Europe and especially the U.S. could endeavor to set the terms for the global operation of liberal order, the rest of the world typically struggled over the terms of their existence within the boundaries of their own states and societies or regions, in reaction to the global deployment of order-making.

States forming what can be labeled a core in the making of liberal order might be thought of as being positioned along a single axis, or "uniaxis," representing the common engagement engendered by the project of liberal order-building. The U.S. is at the center and nonliberal states participating in-or simply drawn up into-liberal relations are at the extremes. Along this uniaxis each state and society shapes the making of order to a varying degree, from the local to the global.

In contrast, in a unilateral world, agency emerges from a single point or source. Waltz describes a post-World War II world where relations are essentially unilateral in that the only states that really matter in configuring the structure of the international system are the U.S. and the Soviet Union. ₄₁

The plurality of the liberal uniaxis was manifested in the significant European contributions to the U.S.-run European Recovery Program (ERP), and in the more exclusively European endeavors within the framework of liberal relations, such as the European Coal and Steel Community. ₄₂ It ultimately was manifested in the European initiatives to form NATO. The U.S. might then be conceived as occupying a "fulcrum" position at, as NSC-68 expressed it, "the center of power of the free world." ₄₃ Such an image is meant to convey both the leverage the U.S. had in defining and setting the terms of liberal relations, and the fact that its position and the character of the liberal order more generally could be moved by other forces or weights on the axis.

Making an Order Is Making an Other

However much definitions are contested in a pluralistic environment, the definition process and the elements of order-making-its arenas and concentrations of agency-must be taken as legitimate. This closely resembles a rather longstanding requirement of liberal governance: that however much a people may bicker over versions of the good life, they need at the end of the day to accept as authoritative the very constitution that makes this contestation possible. John Rawls has put this question at the center of his recent work by asking: "How is it possible that deeply opposed though reasonable comprehensive doctrines may live together and all affirm the political conception of a constitutional regime?" ₄₄ For Rawls unreasonable persons are those who: "Plan to engage in cooperation schemes but are unwilling to honor, or even to propose, except as a necessary public pretense, any general principles or standards for specifying fair terms of cooperation. They are ready to violate such terms as suits their interests when circumstances allow." ₄₅

What is missing from Rawls's formulation is the assumption that while anyone may choose to be "unreasonable,"the only agents that really count are those with the capability of actually disrupting cooperative schemes. What cannot be accommodated in this type of structure is a force such as the Soviet Union, which could challenge the definition process necessary for making order. ₄₆ Such a challenge would undermine a definitional process that is especially difficult exactly because the order under construction is liberal.

This difficulty does not stem simply from the plurality of agents involved. Any modern international order is likely to face a plurality of independent states. What makes the construction of liberal order especially problematic is the context of that plurality. As argued above, a complex set of political, strategic, economic, and social relations must be defined and established in the same relative time frame. Orders such as the one established formally at Westphalia involved a much more limited range of factors, state sovereignty being for us the most salient. Moreover, in the context of this complexity and range of relations the fact that international liberalism has no automatic definitions of specific relations contributes further to the fragility of order-making. Thus, given the scope of the liberal project, it is vulnerable to challenges to its definitional process such as those presented by the Soviet Union. ₄₇

Although at the end of the war the Soviet Union may initially have had a place on the uniaxis as a powerful agent among nonliberal participants, as the decade progressed this possibility was increasingly closed off. Indeed, the tensions associated with Soviet participation in liberal relations found ample expression in U.S. foreign policymaking. Even as early as 1945, President Truman had articulated the possibility of a Soviet Union that would become increasingly separated from the liberal world. In his notorious dressing down of Molotov, Truman warned the foreign minister that the Soviets must "either approach closely our express policy in regard to Poland or drop out of the Associated Nations." ₄₈

As a debate within the U.S. administration was waged over whether or not to cooperate with the Soviet Union in achieving a political settlement of some sort in Europe, the political stakes of incorporating the Soviet Union became increasingly pronounced. More specifically, in a view associated with George Kennan, which received growing support among U.S. policymakers in 1946 and 1947, it was held that a negotiated settlement with the Soviets of key political problems-such as Germany-was not possible. What is important to note is that Kennan's alternative to a negotiated settlement with the Soviets was not simply a "unilateral approach to postwar Germany" as some historians have described it in an attempt to capture the fact that the Soviets would be cut off from Western settlement efforts. ₄₉ Rather, Kennan's alternative was the dovetailing of German economic and political recovery into a revitalized Western Europe, with which the U.S. could "coordinate" its policy. ₅₀ This coordination clearly was realized in one of the pillars of liberal order-construction, the European Recovery Program. ₅₁ Thus, Kennan's approach encapsulated the three key elements of the liberal uniaxis: (i) the plurality of agency in the context of complex relations; (ii) the emergence of a center; and (iii) the existence of forces capable of disrupting the definition process. ₅₂

Any potential for the Soviet Union to continue participating in liberal order-construction was quickly fading by 1947, when the division of Germany began to take on the appearance of a fait accompli. In such a division the Soviets had in effect defined the eastern half of Germany out of the reach of the international liberal order, and an increasingly tangible boundary was set up between East and West. ₅₃ It would be inaccurate to imply that the Soviet Union's increasing separation from the liberal uniaxis was based on any single diplomatic development. The successive failures of the Council of Foreign Ministers meetings, the suspension of German reparation payments, the Berlin Blockade, and the Soviet rejection of participation in the Marshall Plan are all part of a growing separation of the Soviet Union from the realm of liberal relations. Soviet separation would become especially pronounced by mid-1948, with the formal declaration of an independent West German state. ₅₄

In sum, while we know that nonliberal states such as authoritarian regimes in Latin America can be incorporated within the liberal order, a state capable of disrupting the definition process and challenging the broad contours of liberal relations is unlikely to be housed within that order. Thus, the increasing distance between the East and the West emerged not just because the Soviet Union challenged liberal practices in Europe, but also because this challenge could not be incorporated within the emerging liberal order itself. As I emphasized earlier, whereas both Britain and France had the capacity to shape negotiations and affect the course of liberal relations, only the Soviet Union had the capacity to disrupt the process itself without being subject to effective discipline. As an occupying force at the end of the war, it had the power to make claims especially regarding its security, which, in the negotiations over the fate of Germany for example, threatened to undermine the very possibility of liberal order-construction.

The Soviet Threat

In the previous chapter I tried to touch on the links between modernity, as it is conceived of here, and security. As the possibilities of organized agency are thrown open in modernity, so are the trepidations of profound insecurity. Organized agency not only can serve one in the development of projects, but can also make possible the challenges to those projects by the agency of others. Moreover, in modernity, one's own projects are ever subject to remaking and revision, to say nothing of the risks of facing historical moments of openness and flux. ₅₅ John Stuart Mill raised the value of security above all else when he argued: "Our notion, therefore, of the claim we have on our fellow creatures to join in making safe for us the very groundwork of our existence, gathers feelings around it so much more intense than those concerned in any of the more common cases of utility. . . . [italics mine]" ₅₆

For decades, the term "Soviet threat" was used to depict the perception among Western policymakers that the USSR was a political and military menace to the free world. Such perception has typically been understood as emerging along a single trajectory of development, in which the sense of threat becomes more intense as the Soviets became more hostile to the West, ultimately developing into a full-blown fear of potential war and military attack. The fear for many policymakers was not about physical safety, but emerging ordered life in the West. Thus, the Soviets could be represented as the grand "other" of a Western-centric order. ₅₇ Ernest Bevin, British foreign secretary, in a memorandum to the British Cabinet in 1948 entitled "The Threat to Western Civilization," feared the possible domination of Eurasia by the Soviet Union, "leading either to the establishment of a World Dictatorship or (more probably) to the collapse of organized society over great stretches of the globe. [italics mine]" ₅₈ He was not very specific about what "organized society" meant, but it is likely that the liberal West, the newly independent states in the Third World friendly to the West, and the persevering European colonial administrations were central. However, to take this type of formulation as a summary view of the relationship between the West and the Soviet Union is to treat Soviet pressures on the states and societies defined within liberal order in a monolithic fashion, mimicking the constructions of Secretary of State John Foster Dulles and others in the 1950s. It simply does not go far enough in distinguishing between the different contexts and varying character of pressures at play between 1945 and 1950. ₅₉ The pressures that emerged from a Soviet Union with which cooperation was still possible-despite their capacity to cast a negative influence on liberal order-building-should be distinguished from the pressures that emerged from a Soviet Union that had become separated from the liberal uniaxis. With this distinction, we can fix more clearly what kinds of pressures the Soviet Union exerted on the process of liberal order-construction and how that state came to be viewed as a threat.

First, despite a growing sense of pressure being placed on the liberal definition process in the very immediate postwar years before the Soviet Union became separated, it was far from automatic that the Soviet Union was seen as a threat in either political or military terms. I emphasized this point in the previous chapter, in my discussion of realism. It is important enough to bear repeating. It was only in 1946 that the Soviet Union began to emerge more clearly in military plans as a potential "enemy." ₆₀ The strong impact of Kennan's "Long Telegram" and "Mr. X" article shows that the Soviet Union was hardly taken for granted as a threat by the administration even in 1946. As late as the first half of 1947 there was little evidence of a decidedly anti-Soviet stance in U.S. policy in Germany. ₆₁ In addition, many historians of the period have taken pains to show there was never a serious sense of threat regarding war with the Soviets until the Korean War, a point that Kennan had repeatedly made at the time. ₆₂

Of course, there was an increasingly U.S. "hard-line" taken regarding Soviet action by as early as 1946. But it is significant that the hard-line was first directed at an international political pressure that could alter liberal relations in undesirable ways. Only by 1947-48 was the hard-line directed at a force coming from outside the liberal world that was potentially destructive to its relations. ₆₃ In wartime negotiations such as those at Yalta, as John Lewis Gaddis shows, FDR appeared to be willing to tolerate Soviet sway over the political fate of eastern Europe as long as it took a minimum of Western influence in the region into consideration and Soviet hegemony was limited to that region alone. But, as Gaddis also notes, given the capacity and sovereign will of the Soviet Union to actually extend its reach and influence beyond that point, the Truman administration faced-perhaps what FDR already began to see before he died-the stark contradiction of integrating the Soviet Union into a liberal order that the Soviets were willing and capable of seriously disrupting. ₆₄ Thus, the hard-line approach to the Soviets grew harder as the machinery of negotiation such as the Council of Foreign Ministers broke down under the weight of that contradiction, and the Soviet Union was increasingly separated from the liberal world. It was in this context that the Soviet Union began to appear to U.S. policymakers by 1947 as a force, located increasingly outside the liberal order, bent on threatening the security of states and societies within that order.

As such a force, the Soviet Union was capable of placing two types of pressure on the liberal order. The first type was internal pressure (often labelled "subversive"), which may be conceived of as forces pulling social and political forces-or even entire societies-toward the Soviet Union. Given the U.S. administration's belief that war with the Soviet Union was unlikely in the near term, an emerging perception of a Soviet threat was more often based on concern with the internal politics of western European states and societies. ₆₅ Influence over the communist parties in France and Italy as well as the attraction of East-West trade to western Europe were but two of a number of internal forces the Soviets were capable of exercising in western Europe even from a position that was increasingly distanced from liberal relations. ₆₆

The second type of pressure was diplomatic and strategic. Through diplomacy and the political use of military force, the Soviet Union attempted to push states to alter international political and strategic outcomes. These pressures were evident, for example, in the eastern Mediterranean where the Soviet state pushed Turkey regarding access to the Dardenelles and led protests in the UN over the British role in Greece. ₆₇ The Soviets also used military force to pressure countries such as Iran in order to obtain such desired political and economic outcomes as the victory of Azerbaijanian rebels or the securing of Soviet oil rights. The political use of Soviet military force is, of course, typically associated with eastern Europe, where outright political and military dominance over a given state was obtained through occupation.

The push and pull pressures of an increasingly externalized Soviet Union constituted the basis of the U.S. perception of the Soviet Union as a threat to the security of the international liberal order. Although the U.S. had not taken an explicitly anti-Soviet stance in its German policy, by the time the U.S. began planning the European Recovery Program in the spring of 1947, both forms became themselves the basis for a new approach to the Soviet Union that reflected the emerging political dynamics of liberal order-building. ₆₈ That approach was, of course, containment. Although I will have far more to say about containment in the next chapter, a few points are in order in the context of the current discussion.

On a general level, containment can be defined as a strategy "to prevent the Soviet Union from using the power and position it won as a result of . . . [World War II] to reshape the postwar international order." ₆₉ The Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan constituted the first publicized programs of containment. But it is easy to see that the efforts of the U.S. and Western Europe to limit Soviet influence on the liberal order-construction process prior to the development of these programs were a form of containment as well. ₇₀ Indeed, what distinguished the formal policy of containment that emerged in the late 1940s from its more informal predecessor was the way that the formal version explicitly addressed what were conceived as push and pull pressures coming from a Soviet Union positioned outside the liberal world. The West should, as Kennan expressed it in his "Mr. X" article, "confront the Russians with unalterable counter-force at every point where they show signs of encroaching upon the interests of a peaceful and stable world." One year later, in mid-1948, NSC 20/1 articulated the emerging logic of containment even more explicitly by advocating not only a reduction of Soviet power but also a transformation into a more liberal fashion of the very way the Soviet Union practiced its international relations. ₇₁ That is, it was argued that the Soviets might be repositioned in the liberal world along its uniaxis if the nature of their foreign policy, if not their regime, could be changed. As we shall see in the following chapter containment as it was actually practiced fell short of achieving this more ambitious possibility, cascading into an increasingly confrontational posture beginning with the Truman Doctrine and moving on-in the period considered here-to NSC-68 and what is commonly referred to as separate spheres of influence in Europe.

Liberal Order and the Rise of the Cold War

So far two sets of forces have been offered to explain the rise of the East-West confrontation. First are the forces associated with the drawing of states into a liberal moment. For instance, that moment and the liberal order-construction process that emerged out of it made possible developments such as the engagement of the U.S. in the fate of Germany and Iran. Second, there are the forces, described in the sections above, associated with the attempt to integrate the Soviet Union inside that order.

Although both sets of forces may account for the rise of the East-West confrontation, they do not explain why this confrontation turned into a Cold War and why that Cold War took the particular shape that it did. Two questions remain to be answered: First, why did relations between East and West take shape as an increasingly acute confrontation that was not simply diplomatic, but also military-strategic? Second, what accounts for the widening gulf in relations between East and West, which ended in the emergence of two separate spheres of influence? To answer these questions, it is necessary to focus more specifically on relations between states along the liberal uniaxis, rather than the confrontation with the Soviet Union per se. So far, I have situated Soviet pressure as a basic force challenging the fundamental process of making order. But this perspective underplays the extent to which Soviet pressure surfaced as a factor in relations between states on the liberal uniaxis, in the tensions that those relations engendered, and in the U.S. policies designed to contend with those tensions. It is these relations, tensions, and policies that not only explain why the Cold War took the shape that it did, but also clarify why the Soviet state could not be accommodated within the liberal order and how it become increasingly separated from it.

I begin by describing some of the tensions the making of order generated. Next, I look more closely at how tensions in liberal order-building prompted policies and processes that led to the heightened confrontation that marked the emergence of a Cold War. Finally, I consider the ramifications of the Cold War for liberal order-making and our understanding of it.

Tensions in the Making of Liberal Order

Looking back across millennia, Adam Watson observes that "[t]here is in states' systems an inevitable tension between the desire for order and the desire for independence." On the one hand, "order promotes peace and prosperity." On the other hand, "order constrains the freedom of action of communities and in particular their rulers." ₇₂ In Watson's view, the all too familiar binary opposition, order and freedom, is, in principle, a zero-sum situation. The more order that is imposed by an empire or hegemony, the less freedom is available to states, by which Watson essentially means either independence or autonomy. This proposition should be familiar to any realist who considers the capacity to be self-helping and autonomous as a basic concern of states in the international system.

Of course, states may pursue a form of order to preserve their freedom. In the nineteenth century, Lord Palmerston argued they could do so through the balance of power principle underlying the operations of the Concert of Europe: " 'Balance of power' means only this-that a number of weaker States may unite to prevent a stronger one from acquiring a power which should be dangerous to them, and which should overthrow their independence, their liberty, and their freedom of action." ₇₃

Palmerston is pointing to the freedom that states may gain, in concert, by avoiding hegemonic or imperial domination. This closely resembles the classic story told in Western political philosophy (especially by Hobbes and Locke) of how societies can form as individuals move out of the state of nature in order to avoid dangerous threats to their security and form societies where their freedom can be protected-however more circumscribed it is in society relative to the state of nature. Watson recognized that such voluntary systems of order can arise in the making of international societies examined by Hedley Bull, such as the European one, where the hope would be that Palmerston's balance of power would indeed work.

Even though this preservation of freedom through voluntary order moves beyond Watson's initial zero-sum binary opposition, both logics share a common sense of what is at stake in the preservation of freedom. The freedom of states that Palmerston spoke of encompasses what Isaiah Berlin identified as negative liberty, where the issue is: "What is the area within which the subject-a person or group of persons-is or should be left to do or be what he is able to do or be, without interference by other persons?" ₇₄ But it also encompasses Berlin's sense of positive liberty, where the issue is not simply to be left alone in one's own space, but also to be capacitated as an actor that is "self-directed," and master in one's own house. ₇₅ For realists such as Watson, if not also Palmerston, states are left to be states, sovereign externally and internally, setting the terms of their own existences as best possible and with as many degrees of freedom in the interstate system as is feasible.

This view of the relationship between freedom and order is too simplistic. In the order supplied by a Watsonian international society, states are empowered as relatively autonomous and self-directing units within the context of the international system. Although they may operate as such in other contexts (e.g. the capitalist world economy), the concept of international society per se provides no way of knowing what those contexts are, nor of discerning the relationship between them and international society. This is not the case when things are viewed from the perspective of liberal order. A liberal order, in principle, facilitates and empowers states and other agents in contexts ranging from their own societies to the capitalist world economy. In the domains of liberal modernity, the agency of states, as well as corporations, groups, and individuals becomes active in social spaces, domestic and international, that are organized-to varying degrees and in divergent ways-along liberal lines. Liberal order, therefore, helps to organize the mediums that shape social terrains (e.g., markets and democratic governance) within which it should be possible for states and other agents to act. Through liberal order, modes of existence and lines of interaction and movement are constructed. This type of freedom is not simply a matter of self-mastery (however much this is realized, for example, via self-determination or democracy). It is also a matter of constructing the very social spaces within which both negative and positive liberty can be realized.

Thus, ideally, international liberal order can be viewed as a potent way for states to organize the international relations of a complex set of actors which, besides themselves, include peoples, corporations, and international organizations. In the space that it opens up, actors are invested with a greater capacity to determine the character of their social existence and practices than would otherwise be possible without the operation of international liberal principles, practices, and institutions. ₇₆ One need only think, counterfactually, of an epoch marked by closed, protectionist borders, within which rights and democratic practices are subordinated to the dictates of a state in fierce competition with other states for security, resources, and influence over weaker states.

The problem is that, in practice, the basic tension between order and freedom that Watson's international society lays bare gets recast in far more complex terms and contexts across and within liberal domains. Despite the opening up of potentially new terrains of freedom with liberal order, these new terrains also create possibilities for a range of conflicts and tensions that extend beyond the basic terms of state autonomy in the context of the international system. Tensions in liberal order emerge out of the very multiplicity of actors, practices, principles, and institutions which take form unevenly within and across the states and societies drawn up into the emerging liberal order.

Perhaps the tension of liberal order that has been most prominent in the study of international relations in the U.S. has been the one between international exchange and the sovereign state. While this tension, in its basic form, goes back centuries to the mercantilist era, it became particularly robust in the making of liberal order. ₇₇ As pointed out in chapter 1, the norms and principles associated with collective self-determination, enshrined in texts such as the UN Charter, provided a powerful legitimacy, externally and internally, to the claims of states as sovereign polities in the international system that otherwise would not be available in the absence of a liberal moment. This was only reinforced by the salience of the domain of democratic governance, whose institutions and principles were concentrated within the limits of a sovereign state. The making of liberal order, moreover, legitimated the widening scope of the sovereign agency of states that had been developing across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The most obvious instance is the intervention of the state in its domestic economy, which, within the context of liberal order, was shaped and legitimated by the individual and group claims of economic rights, the welfare of democratic publics, and the perceived requirements of reinforcing market relations. ₇₈

But the development of international economic exchange took place based on a very different logic-one resting on an elaborate process of multilateral cooperation and institution-building for its operation. Focusing on such processes and institutions, many liberal economists in the post-World War II period echoed the Cobdens of previous eras in their belief that the sovereign, autonomous state had become relatively anachronistic in the context of international market structures. ₇₉

The tension between international exchange and state sovereignty emerged, in one instance, in the resistance of Western European states to the perceived encroachment of the Marshall Plan on their control of their political economic destiny. Paradoxically, it was a program that was designed to accommodate and even facilitate the sovereign integrity of European states, especially if such integrity could help resist the pressures of the Soviet Union. And even the Soviet refusal to participate in the Marshall Plan-a program designed among other things to facilitate economic exchange-was cast in terms of an appeal to the principle of state sovereignty, which it believed would have been violated by the procedures of the program. ₈₀

The resistance of Western European sovereign states to the forces of international exchange that potentially would diminish their sovereignty cannot be dismissed merely as a function of the resistance to the reverberations of U.S. hegemonic power. While Britain's rejection of the establishment of any form of supranational authority over transnational economic relations appeared first as a reaction to some of the goals of the European Recovery Program (ERP), the same form of resistance was replayed in reaction to the Schuman Plan which evolved into the European Coal and Steel Community; the latter did not entail any direct U.S. role. ₈₁ In both instances the British reluctance to participate was based in part on its disinclination to place the emerging socialist elements of the British state under the constraints of an international economic institution that was designed solely to facilitate market outcomes, with little regard to their social ramifications, especially vis-à-vis labor. ₈₂

Britain's resistance to supranational authority illustrates another fundamental tension in liberal relations, the tension between the commitment to the viability of national economies and the pursuit of international market exchange. ₈₃ On the level of the individual state, the ramifications of this tension have historically emerged in the politics of foreign policymaking as interests tied to the national economy have vied with those tied to the international economy. ₈₄ On the level of the international system, the tension has taken shape as an effort to arrive at mechanisms that facilitate international exchange while minimizing the violation of the interests associated with national economies. Of course, such is the logic of "embedded liberalism."

Another complex set of tensions in the construction of liberal order can be observed when the scope is widened to take in the relations of the U.S., Europe, and what came to be called the Third World. In the reestablishment of European colonialism and its ultimate collapse in the face of decolonization movements, competing claims and interests, which often took violent form, clashed within and especially across the domains of collective self-determination and international economic exchange.

Many factors were relevant to post-World War II decolonization, including the specific histories of colonial domination, of decolonization movements, and of wartime occupation and resistance. Without underplaying the impact of these forces, it is possible to consider how the decolonization process was imbricated with liberal order-construction. In part, contests over the reinstitution of European colonialism pivoted around the tension inherent in the clash of the self-determination claims of colonized peoples with the claims of already sovereign European states, and ultimately with the perceived necessities of using colonial resources to aid international exchange demands in Western Europe. It was in Asia where these tensions first became acute in the immediate postwar period. In Southeast Asia, in contrast to the Indian subcontinent, the U.S. played an increasingly important role beginning in the late 1940s between European states and colonial peoples which brought liberal tensions to the fore. This is apparent most of all in the case of Indonesia. ₈₅

Prior to the U.S.'s role in the "roundtable talks" in mid-1949, which were ostensibly dedicated to negotiating the independence of Indonesia, the U.S. sought to reduce the tension between Indonesian nationalist claims to self-determination and the claims of the Dutch state to colonial rule over the East Indies by pushing for a liberalization of Dutch colonial rule. Such a solution, however, was hopeless because there were no mechanisms to compel the Dutch to follow through on such a policy line. The U.S. and other states, such as the newly independent India, could bring complaints against the Netherlands in the UN Security Council, but ultimately it would be necessary for the Dutch state to live up to any promises it made to move forward with liberalization, if not also decolonization. Efforts were further complicated by the perceived benefits colonial revenues brought to the recovery efforts in Europe. Given the importance of the Netherlands to the European Recovery Program (ERP), there was a distinct limit to the extent to which the U.S. was willing and able to pressure the Dutch state economically to follow a more liberal line, as was desired by a U.S. Congress that even threatened-if it was not satisfied-to cut off Marshall Plan aid. In effect, the attempt of the Dutch state to set the terms of its own postwar political fate-in particular through the two postwar Dutch military incursions, called "police actions," against Indonesians-could not be balanced with the aspirations of self-determination.

The intransigence of the Dutch forced the U.S. to begin considering increasing support to the Indonesian independence movement or risk-as NSC 48/1 later put it-exposing it as "a fertile field for subversive communist activities." ₈₆ Since the U.S. and U.S. multinational corporations (MNCs) had their own interests in Indonesian resources (i.e., oil), the chief U.S. goal was to keep the East Indies within the borders of the liberal order. Indeed, an independent Indonesia, outside the confines of colonial preference systems, would perhaps be in a better position to assure U.S. access to resources than a colonial East Indies. Once Indonesian nationalist forces showed themselves capable of maintaining their independence from communist forces by executing communist leaders in 1948, the U.S. was willing to support Indonesian independence openly. The old imperialist relations, which frustrated nationalist aspirations, were judged by the U.S. as undermining efforts to avoid communist and potential Soviet pressures. They also limited the possibilities of opening up economic exchange by hindering the access that non-Dutch interests had to local resources.

The positioning of Indonesian independence as a move favorable to the goal of anticommunism dovetailed more generally with the increasing dominance of Soviet containment issues with regard to the Netherlands in Western Europe. Under the single strategic umbrella of containment, even the Dutch post-independence presence and influence in Indonesia (aiding in the fight against communism) could be integrated with the backing of an Indonesian anti-communist nationalist movement under the leadership of Sukarno.

The U.S. concern with the pull of communism ultimately translated into a strong commitment to an Indonesian anti-communist program that was militarily-oriented and dependent on high levels of military aid. This effort did more than maintain the integrity of the Western definition of the boundaries of liberal order in Asia. It also confronted two tensions inherent in the postwar colonial situation. One was the tension between Dutch independence and Indonesian self-determination. By placing Indonesian independence in the context of anti-communism, the U.S. put both Indonesian self-determination and Dutch sovereign interests within the same strategic dimension. Thus, pressures applied to the Dutch took form less as violations of their sovereign independence, and increasingly as attempts to get them to serve the best interests of global containment in Southeast Asia and Europe.

A second tension associated with the decolonization process emerges in the question of whether, through the exercise of its right to self-determination, a people may in effect define itself out of international liberal order. Albert Hirschman made famous the options available to agents in economic and political contexts of exiting from social relations altogether, of remaining loyal to them, or of protesting (or exercising "voice") in the hope of changing the character or terms of relations themselves. ₈₇ By recognizing the placement of Indonesian self-determination in the context of anticommunism, the U.S. could help set a boundary to the exercise of exit that was consistent with the U.S. effort to define Indonesia within the boundaries of the emerging liberal order. In contrast, in Indochina no comparable effort was undertaken, despite the history of Vietnamese wartime cooperation with the U.S. and the French against Japan and a conscious effort to gain U.S. support for independence after the war. Whatever potential tension regarding self-determination there was in Indochina in the immediate postwar years, it was allayed through French colonialism rather than through a challenge to it.

Although it may be hard to see in the aftermath of the Vietnam War, prior to 1950 Indochina received, relative to Indonesia, little diplomatic attention from the U.S. ₈₈ For one thing, unlike the case in Indonesia the U.S. had no appreciable economic interests in Vietnam. But even the advocacy on behalf of Ho Chi Minh's fight against French colonialism by newly independent states, such as India, was nearly negligible (and these states had far stronger political interests in decolonization than economic ones). In part, Ho's communist credentials-which he tried to soften early on-limited the sympathy his movement could generate especially among U.S. policymakers and Asian governments facing communist opposition in their own countries. Ho had crossed the line laid out in NSC-48/1.

Interestingly, the Soviet Union also provided little support, diplomatically or materially, for Ho's effort until the end of the decade, deferring instead to the decolonization efforts of the French Left, which it hoped would ultimately triumph. ₈₉ Indeed, the relative position of the French in the emerging postwar order might have been the key to the different outcomes between Indonesia and Indochina. The French state was a far more powerful and important agent in the new order, especially as a member of the UN Security Council, than the Dutch state. France was more engaged in and essential to the liberal order definition process inside and outside of Europe, a fact recognized by the U.S. and states such as India. Indeed, for a Waltzian structural realist, the French state in the 1940s could be viewed only as weak to inconsequential relative to the new superpowers. But at the core of the liberal uniaxis, with capacity to help set the terms of liberal order, the French state had considerable power, although it was far less than the Soviet state. Relative to the Dutch, for instance, the French state had a greater capacity to deploy material organizational power, especially for colonial administration. Thus, there was little protest to the French state's dealing with Indochina as it saw fit, and Vietnam, in the context of the emerging liberal order, became for U.S. policymakers and others in the international community an appendage of the French state.

In the end, Ho had little choice but to pursue the option of exit from the liberal order in order to work toward independence for all of Vietnam. His moves toward exit permitted the U.S. conveniently to reconcile backing the French sovereign claims to empire with failing to support self-determination in Vietnam. The sense among U.S. policymakers of what the stakes in Vietnam were would change only when a state of far greater salience in liberal order-making-China-exited abruptly from the liberal order under far different circumstances in 1949. But that is another quite familiar and bloody story.

These tensions are related to another tension that was inherent in the making of liberal order inside and outside the West. We have seen how, in principle, the freedom opened by an international liberal order is universal to the extent that agents can pursue diverse interests and forms of social existence. Yet the cases of Indonesia and Vietnam show how, in practice, U.S. policymakers felt compelled to set limits on the exercise of self-determination. Of course, the effort of a collectivity to define itself out of liberal order is an extreme instance of the exercise of self-determination. Far less extreme is the setting of limits to the political wills of national and democratic actors in a Western Europe that was in the process of building and re-building liberal democratic states. The tension between the universal liberty promised, in principle, by liberal order and the tendency to posit boundaries to what and who shall be included in that order has recently been observed even within the doctrinal history of liberalism itself. Uday Mehta shows "how Locke presumes on a complex constellation of social structures and social conventions to delimit, stabilize, and legitimize without explicitly restricting the universal referent of his foundational commitments." ₉₀ Political participation for Locke, which at first glance appears to be based on a universal, open, and natural equality, turns out to depend on exclusionary elements such as "breeding," "discretion," and the "capacity to reason" that restrict political life.

In practice, the actual genesis of this tension in the making of international liberal order begins with a simple notion on the part of U.S. policymakers. In constructing a liberal order, it was understood that political relations and outcomes based on the principles of self-determination and liberal democracy are more viable and, therefore, better anchor international liberal relations than those that are not. Assistant Secretary of State Willard Thorpe claimed, in a memorandum illustrative of this type of thinking at the time, that to end instability in Europe and the appeal of communism required two things:

One is an economic and political system that works well enough to satisfy the legitimate needs and aspirations of the great majority of the population in each country. The second is a burning faith in and enthusiasm for democratic institutions that are consistent with, although not necessarily identical with, our own democratic institutions. ₉₁

This formula rested on two interwoven propositions. The first is that institutions and relations based on a popular political will are stronger and better anchored than those dictated solely from above. The second is that international forces that promote political developments along the lines of the first proposition are more likely to be supported or accepted in a given national political arena than those that do not. Under the logic of the first principle, the U.S. was willing to support democratic leftist forces in western Europe knowing that their popular mandate made the states in question better able to resist the pull of the Soviet Union. Thorpe's revealing memo went on to say that "we should give support to political parties that offer Europeans a positive program suited to Europe's political needs and development . . . [and] this may mean support of the moderate Socialist parties of Europe." ₉₂ The operation of the second principle would make the U.S. a more popular superpower than the Soviet Union. ₉₃ Again Thorpe, capturing the essence of both propositions, called on his fellow policymakers to build "an aggressive ideological campaign whose goal should be the raising of a flag of human freedom that all European parties except the authoritative minded could rally around." ₉₄

Taken at face value, these two propositions can be understood as a basis for undergirding liberal relations in Atlantic states with layers of political strength at the national and local levels. But the operation of self-determination and liberal democracy as generators of political strength meant that they would be serving strategically as instruments of liberal order-construction. As such they would help make more viable other facets of international liberalism, especially the sovereign state, the system of international exchange, and the predominance of market economies. However, it is here that the tension regarding the setting of limits to liberal practices emerges. Because the operation of these domains in this respect would be strategic, it would be necessary to set definite bounds to the terms and conditions of the exercise of self-determination and democratic will. Thus, while the U.S. may have accepted democratic left governments within the liberal uniaxis, this was done only because, and if, their policies were consistent with significant liberal political dynamics. These dynamics included: (a) resistance to Soviet efforts at shaping the emerging order; and (b) participation in the emerging institutions and relations associated with the domain of international economic exchange. French communists, for instance, argued strongly in public that French self-determination and sovereignty was threatened by U.S. plans "to take over the country" through the Marshall Plan. ₉₅ Boundaries to democratic wills were clearly illustrated in Italy in 1947-48 when the U.S. intervened covertly to avoid a communist election victory. ₉₆ Even early on the U.S.'s rather mixed record in eastern Europe regarding support for the results of democratic elections in 1945-46 was a function of whether or not the given country was viewed as being under Soviet control or simply electing too many communists. ₉₇

Despite the tension in, if not contradiction of, liberal principles inherent in the setting of limits to the operation of self-determination and liberal democracy, they did not pose an obstacle to liberal order-construction exactly because such limits appeared within the context of the strategic needs of the liberal order. That is, it was not capricious hegemonic will but the viability and participation of Western European states and societies in liberal order that imposed limiting conditions on their national and democratic wills. Moreover, by being subsumed under a strategy of building strength to withstand the push and pull of the Soviet Union, the self-determination and democratic will of a people faced limits established in other domains as to how far it could challenge liberal relations and order-building. Understood in this light, the notion that the ERP would be based on the initiative of a Europe that included democratic left governments was not a threat to liberal order exactly because the administration and aims of the program were designed to strengthen international exchanges, the sovereign, self-determining state, and market economies. This was of course one of the key elements to the strategy of containment that emerged by 1947. ₉₈ In general, international liberal principles and institutions emerged in a tension-filled web of strategic needs, interests, and contingencies. Thus, while there might be plurality and diversity in the liberal order, it is plurality and diversity along a single axis or uniaxis. By making self-determination and liberal democracy strategic elements that can undergird the strength of Atlantic states, the U.S. was able to help set and maintain that uniaxis in place. As we shall see in the next chapter, the cost of that effort was an overemphasis on strength that became detached from its democratic origins.

The Strategic Reduction

The tensions outlined above posed formidable challenges to the making of liberal order. U.S. hegemonic agency was caught in the uncomfortable position of building an order based on plurality and difference, the unfolding of which threatened the very effort of construction. Hence, there was a need for boundaries and limits; in order, in effect, to move beyond the free operation of a liberal order of fully autonomous agents as delineated, in principle, in the UN Charter. This basic tension in the making of order was articulated in the 1947 report that set out the rationale for the Marshall Plan:

National security can be maintained most effectively through the rebuilding of a stable peaceful world, in which each nation respects the sovereignty, integrity and way of life of the others in a friendly manner. This situation can best be attained through effective implementation of the charter of the United Nations, coupled with early satisfactory settlement of certain major world problems, which may be settled partially or wholly outside the structure of the UN, such as the peace treaties with Germany and Japan. However, the UN charter has yet to be implemented with full effectiveness. A realistic appraisal of the world situation shows that there exist many problems which adversely affect the security interests of the U.S. and which may, particularly at their inception, be outside the purview of the UN. ₉₉

Moving "outside the purview of the UN" meant combating the political challenge posed by the Soviet Union by strengthening states in Europe and making sure they were "oriented" toward the U.S. Policymakers in the U.S. and Britain came to treat the Soviet Union as an opponent that not only could challenge the process of defining liberal order, but also could destroy-above all, in political and social terms-the states and societies within that order. We already have seen this in the above discussion of the Soviet threat. In order to understand more fully how the Soviet Union was transformed from its status as a threatening state into a full-fledged strategic opponent, wholly externalized from the liberal order, it is necessary to consider more closely the dynamics of U.S. agency and uniaxial politics vis-à-vis the Soviet Union.

First off, my understanding of this transformation contests the argument of some diplomatic historians that the emergence of East-West tensions was facilitated by the increasingly confrontational character of the beliefs and assumptions of Western policymakers themselves. It has been held that, despite the initial efforts at accommodation with the Soviet Union, an increasingly strong confrontational emphasis began to emerge as early as 1944 among such Western policymakers as Averell Harriman and Winston Churchill. ₁₀₀ Underlying the contrast by historians of this emergent competitive strain with the initially dominant cooperative one is an assumption that conflict did not simply stem from an inherently conflictual distribution of power. Rather, it has been argued that policymakers' belief systems and willingness to adopt hardnosed, Realpolitik, approaches to foreign relations need to be factored in as determinants. For Daniel Yergin, the Cold War took its strategically charged form ultimately as a result of the triumph of a paradigm in the making of U.S. foreign policy he called the Riga axioms. At its "heart" is "an image of the Soviet Union as a world revolutionary state, denying the possibilities of coexistence, committed to unrelenting ideological warfare, powered by a messianic drive for world mastery." This paradigm competed with the Yalta axioms, which "downplayed the role of ideology and the foreign policy consequences of authoritarian domestic practices, and instead saw the Soviet Union behaving like a traditional Great Power within the international system, rather than trying to overthrow it." ₁₀₁

Other historians point to the sometimes hollow commitment to liberal principles based on such evidence as FDR's willingness to tacitly tolerate Soviet violations of such principles in eastern Europe as long as liberal appearances were maintained. ₁₀₂ The notion that there resides a realist nut within the shell of FDR's and Truman's wartime and early postwar commitment to international liberal principles is meant in part to show that policymakers were willing to deal with the Soviet Union in straight power terms. Thus, the adoption later on of a hard line was consistent with the realistic approach underlying U.S. and British foreign policy and negotiation. Both appeals to underlying hard-line policy approaches, however, fail to explain why the West was in a position within which some policymakers found it compelling to view the Soviet Union as a competitor.

Gaddis offers an alternative approach that goes further in explaining the rising superpower confrontation. He argues that it was not foreign policymakers themselves but domestic political reaction to international trends that drove the Truman administration to take hard-line positions. Most notably, the public despair over Soviet violations of liberal principles led the administration to abandon the Yalta accords as the basis of relations with the Soviet Union. ₁₀₃

In effect, what is in play here is the domestic politics of a liberal state. U.S. policymakers as well as public opinion had become frustrated with what appeared to be Soviet violations of liberal principles in eastern Europe and Asia. ₁₀₄ That is, the political forces inherent in a liberal democratic regime, including a democratic public and an effective legislature, helped compel Truman ultimately to abandon the policy of accommodation he had inherited from FDR. A hard line could help mobilize support for the survival of his own political career and justify the burgeoning U.S. commitment to Europe against lingering isolationist forces. ₁₀₅ The construction of U.S. liberal hegemony clearly required support at home.

It is true that the increasing abandonment of Yalta as a frame of reference for the structure of the postwar settlement was an important aspect of the growing confrontation between the West and the Soviet Union. The Yalta accords had shown the ability of the U.S. and Britain to reach broad-based agreements about multiple regions across the globe through negotiations with the Soviet Union. In the least, the agreements broadcasted the commitment of the Big Three to liberal principles such as national self-determination, however much the specifics of the accords allowed the Soviet Union to compromise such principles in practice in places such as Poland.

But domestic political pressure for a reconsideration of Yalta represents a force that made its abandonment and a hard line tenable and desirable for U.S. policymakers only in the domestic arena. By considering its implications for the politics of liberal order-making, we can show why such abandonment matter internationally. At its most basic level, abandonment freed up the U.S. from the constraints that the accords placed on foreign policy, and allowed the U.S. to pursue new policies it had formed after the Yalta agreement had been made. ₁₀₆ Abandonment, however, was not simply a means for facilitating U.S. hegemonic agency: it also undermined the Soviet Union's capacity to influence the liberal definitional process through negotiation. If so basic an agreement as Yalta could be abandoned, then the Soviet Union's connection to the liberal order through negotiation would be unhinged because its agreements would not be viewed as lasting and binding. Indeed, the emergence of what came to be known as America's "get tough" policy in 1946, especially in regard to policy in Iran and Turkey, represented an unwillingness to negotiate and implied the use of force in the face of Soviet intransigence; it was a first step in the externalization of the Soviet Union from the liberal order. Wiping away the trace of a Soviet negotiated presence in that order in the form of the Yalta and ultimately the Potsdam accords limited the Soviet capacity to participate in that order on such grounds.

By constricting the negotiation conduits of Soviet pressure on the liberal definitional process, U.S. policymakers had raised the salience of Soviet strategic pressures, and thereby created a strong basis for viewing the Soviet Union as a threat. Of course, the possibility of accommodation was left open through 1946, and the logic of building a liberal order strong enough to tolerate diplomatic Soviet challenges would surface often in policy papers. ₁₀₇ But the U.S. was increasingly willing to rely on strategic power as a mode of resisting Soviet definitional pressures. It was in that year, for instance, that Byrnes made his famous Stuttgart speech announcing the decision to leave U.S. troops in Germany for an indefinite period. In effect, the U.S. "determination to compromise no more" by default left the Soviet Union only the strategic realm in which to affect the liberal definition process. ₁₀₈ Increasingly, it was the very existence of the subjects of definition themselves, states and societies in Western Europe, rather than relations per se that would constitute the object of the Soviet challenge. States in Western Europe were increasingly viewed by U.S. policymakers as being vulnerable to intimidation by Soviet diplomatic-strategic challenges from without and destabilizing political threats from within the borders of the liberal order by social forces such as communist parties which appeared to owe political allegiance to the Soviet Union.

As the channels of negotiation dwindled, the U.S. external state began to be transformed from being a means to effect a postwar settlement into being an organizational force in the confrontation with the increasingly salient Soviet strategic challenge. The Truman Doctrine signaled the emergence of a U.S. commitment to confront a strategic challenge in the Mediterranean by building and employing the U.S. external state in the form of the American Mission to Aid Greece (AMAG). This type of shift was also sharply reflected in the German occupation: not only would troops remain indefinitely, but a commitment was made by 1947 to build with the external state organs of the occupation a separate West German political unit that could serve as an aid in Western Europe's effort to resist Soviet challenges on the politico-strategic plane.

Finally, the tensions associated with the making of liberal order suggest that the process was a fragile one. Consolidating the fragile political relations between states along the liberal uniaxis could aid the process of order-making. In mid-1946, Kennan had called for "the cultivation of solidarity with other like-minded nations on every given issue of our foreign policy." To achieve this at that time he was "very much impressed with the usefulness of the UN." ₁₀₉ By the time of the 1947 report quoted above, policymakers questioned that usefulness. They were thinking by then clearly in terms of tactics, strategies, and forces, "all of which are difficult and sometimes impossible to combat under the United Nations Charter," and of "orienting other foreign nations toward the U.S. and the UN." ₁₁₀ In this context, the U.S. was often fearful of independent lines of negotiation emerging between Western Europe and the Soviet Union. By constricting Soviet pressures to the strategic realm, the U.S. reduced the possibility of multilateral political relations between these states and the Soviet Union. Indeed, the authors of NSC-68 understood that there were great advantages to showing that the Soviets were not honoring state sovereignty in negotiations:

In the process of building up strength, it may be desirable for the free nations, without the Soviet Union, to conclude separate arrangements with Japan, Western Germany, and Austria which would enlist the energies and resources of these countries in support of the free world. This will be difficult unless it has been demonstrated by attempted negotiation with the Soviet Union that the Soviet Union is not prepared to accept treaties of peace which would leave these countries free, under adequate safeguards, to participate in the United Nations and in regional or broader associations of states. . . . [italics mine] ₁₁₁

In addition, the substance of negotiations and relations among liberal uniaxial states themselves became increasingly concentrated and unified by the terms of a Soviet strategic threat. In the negotiations over the future of political and economic development in Germany, for instance, the location of a solution to the conflicting definitions offered by Western European states and the U.S. was facilitated by the identification of the Soviet Union as a disrupting force that sought to exploit German development for its own politico-strategic goals. ₁₁₂ As Kennan had put it, an enemy was better than a friend. ₁₁₃

What we are witnessing in these dynamics of constriction is a reduction of various political dimensions of interaction to strategic concerns. I am using the term strategy in this context to denote plans of action against a clearly defined adversary, whose identity as such is based on its will to harm the interests or existence of its adversary in order to advance its own interests and well-being. This is the significance of the label "enemy." My understanding of the term straddles: a) the more benign understanding of strategy elucidated by Thomas Schelling that emphasizes the way that "players" can be interdependent on each other's "course of action"; and b) the strictly militaristic sense of interest to a Liddell Hart, who focuses on the modes or art of deploying and applying military force to achieve goals. ₁₁₄ This straddling makes sense because U.S. policymakers such as Kennan sought to clearly define in the containment doctrine a realm of strategy that could rely on economic and political tactics without automatic recourse to military ones. The operative phrase was "means short of war." ₁₁₅ These issues will be discussed in greater detail in the next chapter, where it will become clear that strategic reductions were not simply moves away from the political-for instance, from the substantial politics of negotiation over a wide range of social and political (rather than simply military-strategic) differences-but a move toward a different type of political agency. Indeed, the recourse to strategic reduction was eminently politico-strategic.

Spheres of Influence

As the liberal core consolidated and the confrontation between it and the externalized Soviet Union became increasingly focused on the military-strategic realm, two separate spheres of influence came into view. Spheres of influence in this context may be understood to denote relatively separate realms of relations centered around the U.S. and the Soviet Union. They are taken here to be the defining feature marking the transformation of East-West confrontation into the Cold War. Their emergence was a function of the continued progression of Soviet externalization and liberal consolidation.

The historiography of the early Cold War to a large extent portrays the East and the West on an unintended trajectory leading toward separate spheres of influence. ₁₁₆ At the global level, however, the record is clearly very mixed regarding the trend toward separate spheres. While it is clear that in Latin America, sub-Saharan Africa, and the occupations of ex-enemies Japan and Italy the West endeavored to minimize Soviet influence and relations, in the Near East there was an effort to avoid the formation of separate spheres. In Europe, the fear that an exclusive Soviet sphere would pull eastern Germany permanently out of Western reach was incentive enough to endeavor to avoid European spheres. ₁₁₇ At negotiations such as the Council of Foreign Ministers in Paris in 1946, ambivalence and unevenness were manifested in bouts of both contestation and resignation over the prospect of forming strategic areas of influence. Even much earlier, the Yalta conference exhibited the same ambiguity as FDR secretly accepted Soviet strategic interests in eastern Europe at the same time as the Yalta accords appeared to define eastern Europe inside the bounds of the liberal order. ₁₁₈

Within the Truman administration itself there were arguments both for and against an increasing exclusivity of relations between the West and the Soviet Union. ₁₁₉ The seemingly contradictory pattern at work in the immediate postwar years reflected more generally the endeavor explored above to integrate the Soviet Union and its sovereign security claims into a liberal order that had security claims of its own. At the Potsdam Conference, for instance, Stalin and Truman attempted to place a limit on each other's extension of power beyond their positions in eastern and western Europe respectively. And at the Moscow Conference at the end of 1945 the U.S. was willing to trade off recognition of the Bulgarian and Romanian governments, despite their nonliberal nature, in return for Soviet acquiescence on a limited Soviet role in Japan. ₁₂₀ As the U.S. efforts to influence relations in eastern Europe and the Soviet effort to determine outcomes in Japan show, this type of trade-off hardly constituted separate spheres.

However, as tensions grew, these trade-offs became increasingly less likely. As one British official put it, early on, in 1946: "If we cannot have a world community with the Russians as a constructive member . . . it seems clear that the next best hope for peace and stability is that the rest of the world, including the vital North American arsenal, should be united in defense of whatever degree of stability we can attain." ₁₂₁ Indeed, by the end of 1947 a central arena through which trade-offs were worked out, the Council of Foreign Ministers, had collapsed altogether. On one level, the externalization of the Soviet Union, which the British official was presciently pointing to, reduced tensions in the liberal world (in his words, "stabilized" it) by minimizing Soviet capacity to influence and directly define liberal relations from within the liberal world. This opened up the way for Western states to consolidate their uniaxis centered on the U.S. state. (This, of course, is part of the strategic reduction.) Such consolidation perhaps found its first strong manifestation in the Marshall Plan which would either bring the Soviets within the liberal uniaxial structure or permit its consolidation without them, and those states which paid allegiance to them, if they rejected participation. ₁₂₂ The use of the Soviet Union as a means to consolidate the liberal core emerged even before Soviet externalization became clear. This means, Western policymakers could exploit the emerging Soviet threat itself as a means of consolidation. The State Department more than once blamed the Soviets for the lack of progress in negotiations regarding Germany instead of the sometimes more guilty French and British. ₁₂₃

But consolidation, as many U.S. policymakers then realized, would not be a one-sided affair in that externalization from the liberal world permitted the Soviets to consolidate their own sphere along economic, political, and strategic lines. ₁₂₄ The Soviets offered their own version of a Marshall Plan for the East soon after their rejection of the West's, and in late 1947 mutual security treaties were signed by Eastern European countries. It is at this point that one may identify the formation of separate spheres of influence marked by the realization among Western policymakers that there was no longer any prospect of incorporating the Soviets inside the liberal world.

As the Soviet Union became increasingly separated, there was a deepening of the strategic dimensions of the East-West confrontation. Despite the emerging contours of separation, the Soviet Union was able to exert push and pull pressures on a West that by then possessed few and rather ineffective institutional means (i.e, the UN) with which to confront them. That is, as the Soviets became increasingly separated, they were less susceptible to the discipline of conferences and negotiations. As a result, the separation of East and West opened the way toward an increasingly militarized confrontation with the Soviets because of the lack of any other effective channels and arenas for managing rivalry. Such a lack conditioned the very character of Europe's response to the Soviet threat. While we will never know whether developing institutional channels of negotiation would have forestalled the deepening of the Cold War, it can be argued counterfactually that, in the least, their continued operation would have left open a more viable alternative to an increased militarization of relations. It is perhaps ironic that the very endeavor to incorporate the Soviet Union into the liberal order through negotiation was an important factor leading to the increased separation that undermined institutional channels of negotiation.

Cold War Alternatives

The Third Force

Although the adoption of a hard line and the move to spheres of influence became the dominant means to contend with the Soviet challenge, alternatives were articulated. ₁₂₅ The most powerful alternative in U.S. foreign policy was the possibility of following through on the development of Western Europe as a "Third Force" between the U.S. and the Soviet Union. ₁₂₆ One of the attractions to the Third Force idea was that when strong challenges emerged inside of European states the U.S. would have to worry less about intervention if sufficient "local forces of resistance" existed. ₁₂₇ However insufficient such forces would have been relative to the Red Army in central and eastern Europe, their development could only have constituted a welcome addition to U.S. power. The prospect of a European Third Force would have supplemented the U.S. as a second-albeit far less formidable-center of power along the liberal uniaxis capable of helping offset Soviet pressures. According to Kennan, it was a matter of "strengthening local forces of independence" and "getting them to assume part of our burden." ₁₂₈

A more decentered liberal uniaxis along these lines was not possible because of two conditions-ironically, both of them had made this alternative possible in the first place. First, the plurality of a liberal uniaxis meant any construction of an independent Western European alliance would take place in a complex web of state agencies. Even with the prodding of the U.S., these states were not able to resolve their differences to an extent that would allow for the formation of the independent political bonds necessary for the development of a Third Force. ₁₂₉

A second condition that paradoxically opened as well as closed off the Third Force alternative was the presence of the U.S. external state in Europe. Its continued presence in Germany and expansion via the formation of the Economic Cooperation Administration (ECA) could just as easily undermine independence as foster it. The development of an independent Europe seemed to rest on aid from an organizational force whose very presence implied dependence. And while the U.S. external state, especially in Germany, provided Western Europe with security, it heightened the strategic tensions in Europe by standing face to face with the Soviet external state. It made available a real alternative to the necessity of building a Third Force-i.e., the commitment of U.S. power, however as yet limited and provisional-and highlighted the potential inadequacy of a European Third Force. ₁₃₀ (The implications of both conditions for the salience of U.S. hegemony in Europe vis-à-vis the making of the Western European community will be considered in chapter 4.)

Program A

By mid-1948, despite his original distrust of negotiation with the Soviets early on-a view for which he was criticized by Walter Lippmann in The Cold War-Kennan would offer another alternative that relied on this diplomatic tool and which came to be known as "Program A." ₁₃₁ It called for a negotiated disengagement of U.S. and Soviet forces from much of Europe that would leave in its wake a unified, "independent"-albeit pro-Western-Germany that could thereupon be absorbed by an integrated and independent Western Europe. Program A in essence constituted a plea for the rollback of both the U.S. and Soviet external states. This alternative, on the one hand, was rejected by U.S. center and external state actors such as the State Department and General Lucius D. Clay-who headed the German occupation-on the grounds that occupation troops were necessary to keep West Germany in the liberal order and counter Soviet strategic pressures so close to Western Europe. On the other hand, it was rejected by France, which understood that international liberal order offered too few controls for a unified Germany that could itself, or under Soviet influence, challenge Western Europe. ₁₃₂

Ultimately, the sort of rollback that Kennan suggested was doomed because it called for an undermining of the strategic dimension of the U.S. external state in Europe. The reliance in Progam A on negotiation as a prerequisite overlooked the ways that it had been increasingly displaced in the context of a compelling strategic reduction.

Conclusion: The Trope of Failure

It is tempting to turn to the historical trope of failure in liberal order-building to explain both emerging spheres of influence and increasing U.S. involvement in Europe. After all, the failure of liberal states to accommodate the Soviet Union had serious implications for international politics. The Truman administration was willing to blame the Soviets for economic failures in Europe, for increased tensions there, and for stalemate in German negotiations. Historians and political scientists since then have turned to the "failure thesis" to explain the necessity of the Marshall Plan, NATO, and ultimately the militarization of the Cold War. ₁₃₃₀ Failure is a term we have become deeply familiar with in the post-Cold War period, especially through the numerous commentaries on the unfortunate record of the UN in Bosnia. ₁₃₄ But it should be used with caution. The notion that a policy has failed implies that if one or another condition had been different that policy would have succeeded: that is, that success was a real possibility. But things typically are more complex than that. ₁₃₅

This complexity relates to a second point. The recourse to failure to explain historical outcomes tends to submerge the wider contextual point that what makes failure relevant in the first place is the fact that liberal order-construction is subject to all sorts of historical conditions and outcomes. It is the U.S.'s-and in general the West's-deep, and with time increasing, implication in the process of order-building that should be viewed as the basic explanatory force, of which failure is a function, rather than the reverse. That is, the character of that involvement and the nature of liberal order-construction is what opened the way to historical outcomes, including failure. The fear and occurrence of failure was continuously present even as the U.S. increased its involvement in liberal order-construction: it marked 1950 as well as 1947. ₁₃₆

I have argued that the forces at play in failure were the very tensions characterized the liberal construction process. Understood as such, failure is best viewed as a starting point for explanation rather than an explanatory factor itself. In the case of the initially planned multilateral economy based on Bretton Woods and the British loan, the combination of devastated European economies together with an inadequate U.S. effort to undergird the international economy are held to be responsible for a failure that required new programs and modes of intervention. ₁₃₇ The question is, why was the U.S. effort inadequate? On its face the effort appeared to be shaped by the mistaken hopes of U.S. planners that the economic needs of states and societies would be addressed simply by freeing up international exchange. While such optimism flowed from liberal tenets, more than intellectual fashion was involved. Policymakers were, one should recall, also contending with the difficulties of locating the political will to make the extensive external commitments that would become essential to a developing U.S. liberal hegemony. As we shall see, after wising up to the costs of simple market solutions, policymakers continued to pursue a minimizing course, even as U.S. commitments in Western Europe and elsewhere increased. This course not only shaped the character of U.S. involvement, but also played an important role in the militarization of liberal relations. It will become clearer that minimalization stemmed from far more than policymakers' efforts to overcome resistance to commitments among U.S. state-center legislators. It grew out of the tensions faced and strategies applied by policymakers internationally in the building of liberal order.

Notes

Note 1: Notter, Postwar Foreign Policy Preparation, p. 464. Back.

Note 2: See Shoup and Minter, Imperial Brain Trust; and Council on Foreign Relations, War and Peace Studies. Back.

Note 3: Cited in Divine, Second Chance, p. 247. Back.

Note 4: United Nations, Charter, ch. 6 (article 33), p. 19. Back.

Note 5: For an analysis of some of those doctrines see Latham, "Getting Out From Under." Back.

Note 6: Morgenthau, Scientific Man, p. 119. Back.

Note 7: Cited in Divine, Second Chance, p. 315. Back.

Note 8: Clifford, "American Relations," p. 476. Back.

Note 9: For an in-depth consideration of the analogy between domestic and international order see Suganami, The Domestic Analogy. Back.

Note 10: Bull, Anarchical Society, p. 13. Back.

Note 11: See, for example, Meyer, "World Policy." Meyer has made this reproduction of state practices central to his life's work. Back.

Note 12: Messer, End of an Alliance, p. 189. Back.

Note 13: An exploration of this question in the immediate post-World War II period is in Ruggie, "Embedded Liberalism." Back.

Note 14: See McMahon, Colonialism and Cold War, p. 305; and Rotter, The Path to Vietnam, pp. 176-77. Back.

Note 15: Mastny, "Stalin and the Militarization," p. 109. Ironically, in a not so dissimilar fashion Kolko and Kolko, Limits of Power, p. 17, claim that many American policymakers saw no place for the Soviet Union in a free market world. Back.

Note 16: Cited in Gaddis, "The Insecurities of Victory," p. 244. Back.

Note 17: Although he is mainly concerned with what he calls a capitalist world economy, rather than an international liberal order as it is more broadly defined here, Bruce Cumings discusses the demarcation of geopolitical regions in Roaring of the Cataract, p. 763; and idem, "The Origins and Development," pp. 1-40. Back.

Note 18: Paterson, Meeting the Communist Threat, p. 129, points out "[i]n most cases agreements were not broken, but rather interpreted differently by both sides." Back.

Note 19: Messer, End of an Alliance, pp. 108-09. Back.

Note 20: Etzold and Gaddis, eds., Containment, p. 60. See also Paterson, Meeting the Communist Threat, p. 115. Back.

Note 21: Kuniholm, Cold War in the Near East, p. 300, contrasts the apparent fait accompli in eastern Europe with the contestation in the Northern Tier region composed of Iran, Turkey, and Greece, where the "parameters had yet to be defined." Back.

Note 22: In his early work, John Lewis Gaddis argued for a strong distinction between Communist ideology and the Soviet Union as a threatening power to the West, the latter of which he believed was more important. See Gaddis, "Was the Truman Doctrine a Real Turning Point?" p. 392. Brands, The Specter of Neutralism, p. 310, adopts this view and bases it on the fact that the U.S. ignored ideological differences and established relations with Tito and pursued a Sino-Soviet split. But I would argue that it was exactly because the Soviets challenged the West with a decidedly nonliberal ideology and set of practices that made the opportunity potentially to split the adversary so attractive in the first place. Gaddis has since departed from his earlier view on the role of ideology in challenging the West and now places a great deal of emphasis on it. See Gaddis, "The Cold War," pp. 234-46. Back.

Note 23: See Schwartz, America's Germany, pp. 28-29. Back.

Note 24: Some of the ways Britain affected especially monetary practices is covered in Gardner, Sterling-Dollar Diplomacy; on the influence of Britain in the security area see Folly, "Breaking the Vicious Circle," pp. 59-77; on France's impact on security see Harrison, The Reluctant Ally. For an excellent overall analysis of this issue that takes liberalism quite seriously see Risse-Kappen, Cooperation Among Democracies. Back.

Note 25: Department of State, Foreign Relations of the United States (FRUS), 1941, vol. 1. p. 367. Back.

Note 26: United Nations. Charter, ch. 7 (article 51), p. 27. Back.

Note 27: See for example, FRUS, 1945, vol. 5, pp. 263-64. Back.

Note 28: Gaddis, Origins of the Cold War, pp. 17, 225. Back.

Note 29: As Barry, "Superfox," p. 143, makes clear, "objectionable counterfactuals can be characterized in general terms as ones where the antecedent cannot be imagined without also requiring other changes, prior or concomitant, that are of such nature as to make nonsense of it." In this case it is the extent of necessary changes that renders the counterfactual nonsensical. See also Tetlock and Belkin, eds. Counterfactual Thought Experiments, pp. 19-21. Back.

Note 30: A good survey of what was thought in both Germany and Britain on the Concert order is Holbraad, Concert of Europe. For an understanding of the growing range of phenomena being ordered across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries see Murphy, International Organization and Industrial Change, p. 199. Back.

Note 31: Murphy, International Organization and Industrial Change. Back.

Note 32: The word community is formed ultimately by the amalgam of the Latin prefix com meaning "together" and munis meaning "under obligation." Williams lays out the history of the word and its cognates in Keywords, pp. 70-76. Back.

Note 33: For an exploration of those possibilities see Linklater, "Problem of Community;" and Latham, "Liberalism's Order / Liberalism's Other." Back.

Note 34: Deutsch, et al., Political Community, pp. 5, 129. Back.

Note 35: . Ibid., pp. 123-28. Back.

Note 36: The notion of nascent community is considered in Adler and Barnet, "Governing Anarchy," pp. 86-89. Back.

Note 37: Cited in LaFeber, The Origins of the Cold War, p. 41. Back.

Note 38: Ibid., pp. 44-45. Back.

Note 39: Cited in Gardner, Sterling-Dollar Diplomacy, p. 1. The obvious analogy is the book that enters the public domain as an object of reading, interpretation, and debate by others, which no longer can be rightfully said to be possessed by the author, but rather by her public. Back.

Note 40: Lundestad, "Empire by Invitation." Back.

Note 41: See Waltz, Theory of International Politics, pp. 168-76. Back.

Note 42: Besides Lundestad, "Empire by Invitation?" and Folly, "Breaking the Vicious Circle," the plural nature of liberal system-construction is noted by Gaddis, "Turning Point," p. 392; Hogan, The Marshall Plan, pp. 123-24; and Ikenberry, "Origins of American Hegemony," pp. 391-94. Back.

Note 43: . See NSC-68 reprinted in Etzold and Gaddis, eds., Containment, p. 441. Back.

Note 44: Rawls, Political Liberalism, p. xviii. Back.

Note 45: Ibid., p. 50. Back.

Note 46: The status of Europe as a "Third Force" and potential challenger will be explored below. Back.

Note 47: The vulnerability of democracies, as opposed to liberal orders, especially in the area of foreign policy and war-making, has been noted since Alexis de Tocqueville in Democracy in America, pp. 236-50. As we shall discuss below, this theme was central to NSC-68. A more recent version of the argument is made by Jean-Fran¨ois Revel in How Democracies Perish. For Revel-and the authors of NSC-68-the point is that the criticism and plurality of voices in a democracy make them fragile and impotent in the face of threats. My argument regarding liberal order is obviously different. Back.

Note 48: This incident is described by Messer, End of an Alliance, p. 76. Leffler, Preponderance, p. 40, points out that Secretary of State Byrnes's willingness to accommodate Soviet interests in eastern Europe depended on Soviet acceptance of "liberal economic and political principles." Back.

Note 49: See Hixson, George F. Kennan, p. 53, for such a depiction. Back.

Note 0: This is conveyed in Policy Planning Staff (PPS) Paper 23 in Etzold and Gaddis, eds., Containment, pp. 114-25, especially pp. 120-21, where it is recommended that the U.S. "do everything possible from now on to coordinate . . . policy toward Germany with the views of Germany's immediate western neighbors." Who must "make their full contribution and bear their full measure of responsibility." Back.

Note 51: Some of the pluralistic elements of the ERP is captured in Arkes, Bureaucracy, ch. 7. Back.

Note 52: The third element was ultimately recognized by others in the State Department, among them Charles Bohlen, as risking the demarcation of a separate sphere of influence, which will be discussed below. See Gaddis, Long Peace, pp. 51-52. Back.

Note 53: The "boundary setting" implications and increasing irreversibility of Germany's division is considered in Maier, " 'Pax Americana,' " p. 5. Back.

Note 54: Although the process of separation represented a devolution of available channels of negotiation between the Soviets and the West, the status of "separation" is not meant to imply that the Soviets were thoroughly cut off from the liberal world. After all, they and the emerging Eastern bloc remained in the United Nations and international economic exchanges continued between East and West. More importantly, while its position was increasingly distanced from the liberal world, the Soviet Union was still capable of exerting a negative pressure on the delineation of liberal relations from that position in ways which will be explored below. Back.

Note 55: For the play between security and modernity across the centuries and its impact on thought see Toulmin, Cosmopolis, especially p. 42, where he argues that Descartes search for certainty led him to the individual cognito. Back.

Note 56: Mill, Utilitarianism, p. 67. Back.

Note 57: Zygmunt Bauman, has argued that "[t]he other of order is not another order: chaos is its only alternative." Modernity and Ambivalence, p. 7. But he fails to note that the extent to which an order can be challenged and negated by the establishment of an other order. I am trying to show that this latter challenge became palpable only as the Soviets were increasing separated from liberal order. Until then their challenge was far more tied to the possibility of thrusting liberal order into chaos. Back.

Note 58: Cited in Gaddis, "Insecurities of Victory," p. 271. Back.

Note 59: Paterson, Communist Threat, ch. 3, attempts to critically evaluate the emerging perception of a Soviet threat as though it were on a single trajectory of development. Back.

Note 60: See Sherry, Preparing for the Next War, pp. 159-78. Back.

Note 61: This point is made by Gimbel, "Cold War Historians," pp. 86-102; see also Pollard, Economic Security, p. 105. Back.

Note 62: . Melvyn Leffler, "The United States," p. 288, argues that even the 1948 Czech coup did not generate a sense of a threat of war in the U.S. administration. Also see Kennan's November 1947 draft of Policy Planning Staff (PPS) 13, entitled, "Resumˇ of World Situation," in Etzold and Gaddis, eds., Containment, pp. 90-97. position in ways which will be expl Back.

Note 63: On Truman's "hard-line" see Messer, End of an Alliance, p. 184. Back.

Note 64: FDR's qualified recognition of Soviet dominance in eastern Europe is discussed by Gaddis, "Turning Point," pp. 387-88. Harbutt, The Iron Curtain, p. 283, also conceives of the main lines of tension in the Cold War as stemming from the way the Soviets stepped out of the Eastern European region. Back.

Note 65: The importance of the perception of an internal threat is explored by Leffler, "The American Conception," pp. 363-65; Kolko and Kolko, Limits of Power, p. 499; and Smith, "From Disarmament to Rearmament," p. 359. Back.

Note 66: See Schwartz, America's Germany, p. 92, on the U.S. fear of East-West trade regarding especially western Germany. Back.

Note 67: See Kuniholm, Cold War in the Near East, on the pressures the Soviet applied in the eastern Mediterranean. The Soviet questioning of the British role in Greece in 1946 is discussed by Kofas, Intervention and Underdevelopment, p. 61. Back.

Note 68: See the "Report of the Special 'Ad Hoc' Committee of the State-War-Navy Coordinating Committee," April 21, 1947 in FRUS, 1947, vol. 3, pp. 208-9, 216-19; and "Policy with Respect to American Aid to Western Europe," in Etzold and Gaddis, eds., Containment, pp. 102-13. Back.

Note 69: . Gaddis, Strategies of Containment, p. 4. Back.

Note 70: The status of the Truman Doctrine as the first publicized containment policy is addressed in Pollard, Economic Security, p. 130. The early dimensions of containment prior to mid-1947 are explored in Gaddis, Strategies of Containment, chaps. 1, 2. Back.

Note 71: Etzold and Gaddis, eds., Containment, pp. 88, 173-203. Back.

Note 72: Watson, The Evolution of International Society, p. 14. Back.

Note 73: Cited in Holbraad, The Concert of Europe, p. 138. Back.

Note 74: Berlin, Four Essays on Liberty, pp. 121-22. Back.

Note 75: Ibid., p. 131. Back.

Note 76: Of course, as implied above, liberal hegemonic leadership endeavors to set the terms of the relations that open up these possibilities. Back.

Note 77: . Some of the different forces at play regarding the state in liberal and nonliberal international economies are explored by Kahler, "Survival of the State." Back.

Note 78: The importance I am attributing to state sovereignty in liberal order is not simply a matter of sneaking the realist concern with sovereignty in to drive explanations. My point is that state sovereignty took on specific force and salience through the liberal moment and the making of liberal order. In fact, if anything, liberalism is far more attached to the sovereign state than realism could ever hope to be. I explain why in "Getting Out From Under." Back.

Note 79: One fascinating articulation of this view is Perroux, "Economic Space: Theory and Applications." Back.

Note 80: Even if both the invitation for and appeal to Soviet participation were disingenuous, the point is that the potential for Soviet inclusion existed. The question of sincerity of the U.S. invitation to all European states is considered in Lundestad, American Non-Policy Towards Eastern Europe, pp. 402-5; Dallek, American Style, p. 173; and Van Der Beugel, From Marshall Aid, pp. 44-45. See also the PPS paper, "Policy with Respect to American Aid to Western Europe," in Etzold and Gaddis, eds., Containment, p. 106. On the Soviet rejection of participation see Halle, The Cold War, p. 135; Paterson, Communist Threat, p. 30; LaFeber, America, Russia, and the Cold War, p. 60; and Arkes, Bureaucracy, p. 202. Back.

Note 81: See Hogan, Marshall Plan, pp. 80, 268; Maier, "Supranational Concepts," p. 34; and Milward, Reconstruction of Western Europe, p. 400. Back.

Note 82: Rappaport, "The United States and European Integration," pp. 141-42, provides a fuller discussion of Britain's reason for rejection of the Schuman Plan. Back.

Note 83: This of course was a central concern in Polanyi, The Great Transformation. Although Britain's economy was in many respects socialist, a significant portion was organized as a market, and it clearly participated in international economic exchange. See Shonfield, Modern Capitalism, pp. 88-99. Back.

Note 84: Of course the fact that American foreign policy was so crucial to liberal order construction makes its adjustments at this level an important arena of analysis for the system in general. See Schurmann, The Logic of World Power, pp. 186ff; and Cumings, Roaring of the Cataract, ch. 1. Back.

Note 85: My understanding of the U.S. role in Indonesian independence is based above all on McMahon, Colonialism and Cold War, pp. 140-316. Back.

Note 86: Etzold and Gaddis, eds., Containment, p. 259. Back.

Note 87: Hirschman, Exit, Voice, and Loyalty. Back.

Note 88: See Colbert, "The Road Not Taken," pp. 608-28, for a more detailed discussion of many of the factors mentioned in this paragraph. On the relation between Indochina and European international politics and economy more generally see Rotter, Path to Vietnam, pp. 4-9. Back.

Note 89: Colbert, "Road not Taken," p. 624. Back.

Note 90: Mehta, "Liberal Strategies of Exclusion," p. 435. Back.

Note 91: "Memorandum by Assistant Secretary of State for Economic Affairs," FRUS, 1948, vol. 1, p. 558. That Thorpe was not alone in this thinking is made clear in the many references to related points made by Thorpe's contemporaries found in Gaddis, Long Peace, p. 259, n.53, n.54. Back.

Note 92: "Memorandum by Assistant Secretary of State for Economic Affairs," FRUS, 1948, vol. 1, p. 558. Back.

Note 93: Both principles, and their perceived importance for "the viability of political systems" are explored in Gaddis, Long Peace, p. 59. The second point is addressed by Lundestad, "Empire by Invitation," p. 263. An early formulation along these lines which stresses that there is a limit to intervention because of the necessity of obtaining popular support for international programs is in Van Der Beugel, Marshall Aid, pp. 220-21. Some of the consensual dimensions of hegemony more generally are explored by Cox, "Gramsci, Hegemony and International Relations," pp. 162-75. Not surprisingly, Lea Brillmayer, American Hegemony, p. 199, points out that popular sovereignty is especially important to her theory of liberal consent because it: 1) legitimizes what the state consents to; and 2) rebuts claims that decisions are imposed by external actors. Back.

Note 94: "Memorandum by Assistant Secretary of State for Economic Affairs," FRUS, 1948, vol. 1, p. 558. Back.

Note 95: This was recalled by Averell Harriman, European Cooperation Agency ambassador and is cited in Burr, "Marshall Planners," p. 512. Back.

Note 96: Miller, The United States and Italy, ch. 8. Back.

Note 97: See Lundestad, America's Non-Policy Towards Eastern Europe, pp. 313-17. Back.

Note 98: See, for example, the November 1947, "Resumˇ of World Situation," in Etzold and Gaddis, eds., Containment, pp. 91, which calls for "strengthening local forces of independence." Back.

Note 99: "Report of the Special 'Ad Hoc' Committee," FRUS, 1947, vol. 3, pp. 208-09. Back.

Note 100: . See for example Woods and Jones, Dawning of the Cold War, pp. 24-28; Dallek, American Style, p. 159; and Yergin, Shattered Peace, ch. 1, on the so-called Riga axioms. Back.

Note 101: Yergin, Shattered Peace, p. 11. Back.

Note 102: See Gaddis, "Turning Point," pp. 387-88; Dallek, American Style, p. 181; Leffler, "Adherence to Agreements," p. 92; and Anderson, United States, Great Britain, and the Cold War, p. ix. Back.

Note 103: Gaddis, Origins of the Cold War, pp. 281-90; see also Messer, End of an Alliance, pp. 82-83. Back.

Note 104: . On the domestic forces see Gaddis, Origins of the Cold War, pp. 281-90; and Messer, End of an Alliance, pp. 82-83. For a review of some of the ways that both sides violated the Yalta accord see Leffler, "Adherence to Agreements," p. 104. Back.

Note 105: The emphasis on the use of the hardline to generate domestic support for external commitments is explored in Freeland, Origins of McCarthyism. Back.

Note 106: Leffler, "Adherence to Agreements," p. 94. Back.

Note 107: See Dallek, American Style, pp. 161-65. This logic is also evident in parts of NSC-68, in Etzold and Gaddis, eds., Containment, pp. 426, 441. Back.

Note 108: Quoted in Kuniholm, Cold War in the Near East, p. 298. Back.

Note 109: Kennan, Measures Short of War, p. 11. Back.

Note 110: "Report of the Special 'Ad Hoc' Committee," FRUS, 1947, vol. 3, pp. 217. Back.

Note 111: NSC-68, reprinted in Etzold and Gaddis, eds., Containment, p. 425. Back.

Note 112: This positioning of the Soviets is explored in Gimbel, Origins of the Marshall Plan, pp. 130ff. Back.

Note 113: Gaddis, Strategies of Containment, p. 74. Back.

Note 114: Schelling, The Strategy of Conflict, pp. 3-4; and Hart, Strategy, p. 335. Back.

Note 115: See the September 1946 lecture by George Kennan entitled, "Measures Short of War," reprinted in Measures Short of War, pp. 3-17. Back.

Note 116: See, for example, Yergin, Shattered Peace, pp. 141-46, 169, 295. Gaddis, Long Peace, ch. 3, is concerned with showing that spheres resulted from historical conditions and thus were hardly inevitable or desired. Back.

Note 117: On the Near East see Kuniholm, Cold War in the Near East, p. 377; on Africa see Harbutt, Iron Curtain, p. 269; and on Germany and the early avoidance of spheres in Europe see Gaddis, Long Peace, p. 53. Back.

Note 118: On the Paris conferences see Harbutt, Iron Curtain, p. 274; and Messer, End of an Alliance, pp. 193-94. On Yalta and Eastern Europe see Leffler, "Adherence to Agreements," pp. 88-123. The play between what appeared to be FDR's secret acceptance of Soviet dominance in Eastern Europe at Yalta and his public declaration of having defeated the temptation of spheres is considered in Gardner, Spheres of Influence. Back.

Note 119: Gaddis, Long Peace, pp. 49-52, traces these arguments between Kennan and Bohlen. Also see Lundestad, America's Non-Policy Towards Eastern Europe, pp. 73-75, for a consideration of Stimson's and Wallace's pro-spheres view. An early advocate of separate spheres who believed their clear definition would lead to less room for conflict was Walter Lippmann. See Dallek, American Style, pp. 133. Back.

Note 120: See Lundestad, America's Non-Policy Towards Eastern Europe, p. 100-101. Back.

Note 121: Cited in Gaddis, "Insecurities of Victory," p. 271. Back.

Note 122: In this respect, the Marshall Plan was more a commitment to a regional economy than to global multilateralism. See Maier, "Supranational Concepts," p. 30; and Block, Origins of International Monetary Disorder, p. 240, n.38. Back.

Note 123: Gimbel, The Origins of the Marshall Plan, p. 139. On use of the Soviet threat in general to keep the West together see Milward, Reconstruction of Western Europe, p. 283; and Kaplan, The United States and NATO, p. 72. Back.

Note 124: See Lundestad, America's Non-Policy Towards Eastern Europe, p. 104. The logic of Western consolidation was captured by Kennan and the Policy Planning Staff in "Policy with Respect to American Aid to Western Europe" (PPS 1), in mid-1947, reprinted in Etzold and Gaddis, eds., Containment, pp. 102-7. An earlier portrayal >of this logic was in Clark Clifford's September 1946 report to the president, "American Relations." Back.

Note 125: See Maier, "Making of 'Pax Americana," p. 4; and Messer, "Paths not Taken," pp. 297-320. Back.

Note 126: The best discussion of this alternative is Gaddis, Long Peace, ch. 3. Back.

Note 127: Ireland, Entangling Alliance, p. 65, makes this observation. Back.

Note 128: Cited in Etzold and Gaddis, eds., Containment, pp. 91-93. See also Ikenberry, "Origins of American Hegemony," p. 386. Back.

Note 129: As we will explore further below, this dynamic underlaid much of the impetus for the "empire by invitation" extended to the U.S. Back.

Note 130: Gaddis, Long Peace, pp. 64-65, explores the tension over the U.S.-Soviet face-off in Germany and how it served to supply an additional impetus to the empire by invitation. Back.

Note 131: PPS 37, August, 1948, in Etzold and Gaddis, eds., Containment, pp. 135-44. Note also the discussion in Hixson, George F. Kennan, pp. 81-87; and Schwartz, America's Germany, pp. 35-40. Back.

Note 132: See Schwartz, America's Germany, p. 39. Back.

Note 133: On the Truman administration's use of failure see Freeland, Origins of McCarthyism, p. 9. Gaddis, Long Peace, p. 61, for instance argues that the failure of the emergence of a European "Third Force" led to the U.S. military commitment. An argument for viewing the necessity of the European Recovery Program as stemming from the failure of the multilateral economic system planned for during World War II is made by Ikenberry, "Origins of American Hegemony," pp. 371, 385. General failure of the instruments of system construction is a important aspect of the arguments in Kolko and Kolko, Limits of Power, pp. 329, 710. Back.

Note 134: A recent example is Reiff, Slaughterhouse: Bosnia and the Failure of the West. Back.

Note 135: See the discussion above about employing counterfactuals in the context of historical situations involving a wide array of complex factors. Back.

Note 136: See Leffler, "Strategic Dimensions of the Marshall Plan," p. 300, for a portrayal of the failure perceived by Acheson in the spring of 1950. Back.

Note 137: For example, see Milward, Reconstruction of Western Europe, p. 48; and Hogan, Marshall Plan, pp. 30-33. Back.

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The Liberal Moment