For many of a sceptical persuasion, geopolitics too is important. For the existing international order is constituted primarily by and through the actions of the major economic and militarily powerful states (and their agents). Accordingly, the internationalization of economic or political relations is argued to be contingent on the policies and preferences of the great powers of the day, since only they have sufficient military and economic muscle to create and maintain the conditions necessary for an open (liberal) international order (Waltz 1979). Without the exercise of American hegemony, so the argument suggests, the existing liberal world order, which underpins the recent intensification of international interdependence, cannot be sustained (Gilpin 1987). In this respect, globalization is understood as litter more than Americanization.