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There are several ways in which America’s open hegemony served to reinforce the credibility of the United States’ commitment to operating within an institutionalized political order. The first is simply the transparency of the system, which reduced surprises and allayed worries by partners that the United States might make abrupt changes in policy. This transparency comes from the fact that policy making in a large, decentralized democracy involves many players and an extended and relatively visible political process. The open and competitive process may produce mixed and ambiguous policies at times, but the transparency of the process at least allows other states to make more accurate calculations about the likely direction of American foreign policy. This lowers levels of uncertainty and provides a measure of reassurance which, everything else being equal, provides greater opportunities to cooperate.
Another way in which the penetrated hegemonic order provided reassurances to partners was in the way that it allowed participation of outsiders and an Atlantic policy-making process that facilitated compromise and agreement. This extension of the American democratic system outward to Europe is noted by John Lewis Gaddis: having attained their authority through democratic processes, its [America’s] leaders were experienced as their counterparts in Moscow were not in the arts of persuasion, negotiation and compromise. . . . [T]he habits of democracy had served the nation well during World War II: its strategists had assumed that their ideas would have to reflect the interests and capabilities of allies; it was also possible for allies to advance proposals of their own and have them taken seriously. That same pattern of mutual accommodation persisted after the war.”
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On an wide range of postwar issues occupation zone management, the Greece and Turkey crisis, and responses to the 1947 economic crisis in Europe the Europeans, particularly the British, were critical in shaping American policy. Despite the sharp inequalities in power, political influence flowed in both directions across the Atlantic.
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The fragmented and penetrated American system allowed and invitedthe growth of a wide network of transnational and transgovernmental relationswith Europe, Japan, and other parts of the world. The United Statesbecame the primary site for the pulling and hauling of trans-Atlantic andtrans-Pacific politics.
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Although this access to the American political processwas not fully reciprocated abroad, the openness and democratic processesof the American political system assured other states that they would have routine access to the decision-making processes of the United States.
Transnational processes extensions of domestic democratic politics werereadily constructed that facilitated bargaining and compromise.
The negotiations between the United States and Britain over postwar economic arrangements during and just after the war are illustrative of the larger pattern. The United States had a diversity of bureaucratic groups that advanced positions on trade and monetary policy. British officials were able to maneuver around their conflicts with the State Department over postwar trade policy by finding more congenial partners at the Treasury Department. In the years that followed, an intensive set of transgovernmentalnegotiations took place that culminated in the Bretton Woods agreements. As indicated earlier, the British successfully moved the Ameri-
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can position on postwar economic order toward the embrace of a more managed open system that provided governments with tools for economic stabilization and expansionary options for macroeconomic imbalances.
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The multiple governmental access points and decentralized character of American governmental decision making allowed the British to play a more influential role than might otherwise be possible in a more unitary and closed system.
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Taken together, the acceptability of American hegemony was facilitated by the ability of the Europeans and Japanese to maneuver within it. The British found this to be so, as Charles Maier notes: Within the American‘hegemony’ Britain preserved as much of her Commonwealth position, her shielding of her balance of payments, as possible. She also played what might be terms the ‘Polybian’ strategy, attempting to become the Greeks to America’s Roman empire, wagering on the ‘special relationship’ to prolong their influence and status.”