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American strategic restraint after the war left the Europeans more worried about abandonment than domination, and they actively sought American institutionalized commitments to Europe. The American polity’s transparency and permeability fostered an extended political order that reached outward to the other industrial democracies. Multiple layers of economic, political, and security institutions bound these countries together, reinforcing the credibility of their mutual commitments. The dramatic asymmetries of postwar power were rendered more acceptable as a result.
CONCLUSION
The order created afterWorldWar II among the advanced industrial countries was distinctive and unprecedented. More than the early postwar orders, it had and continues to have constitutional characteristics. The Western industrial order was characterized by multilayered institutions and alliances, open and penetrated domestic orders, and reciprocal and largely legitimate mechanisms for dispute resolution and joint decision making. It was marked by wide disparities in power after the war, the United States stood in an unparalleled superordinate position is relation to Europe and Japan. But despite these power differentials, a mutually agreeable order was devised after the war and is still largely in place today.
Several specific arguments emerge from the record of post-World War II order building. First, the United States did seek to use its position as the leading postwar state to lock the other industrial powers into a particular type of international order organized around economic and political openness.
These ideas, articulated first in the Atlantic Charter, remained in play even as the specific circumstances of order building changed unexpectedly in the years that followed. It would not be a world of closed blocs, national capitalism, or rival imperial orders. What changed with the rise of the Cold War were the shrinkage in the amount of the world that would be organized according to this logic and the types of institutional strategies that were pursued in order to secure such an order.
Second, America’s broad postwar goals predated the rise of the Cold War and drew upon a wide array of complementary ideas about political, economic, and security order. State Department officials who advanced notions of an open world economy were reinforced by defense planners who linked American security interests to market and resource access to Asian and European regions. State Department planners, such as George
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Kennan, who were primarily concerned with rebuilding the economic and political infrastructure ofWestern Europe made common cause with other officials who were concerned with encouraging the emergence of continental European governments committed to an open and integrated Western order. This convergence on liberal democratic order was facilitated by the reluctance of the Truman administration to pursue more far-reaching optionssuch as simple free trade or world government. An institutionalizedand managedWestern order that centered on openness and democracy was an appealing objective for some, and an indispensable means to an end for others. What the United States sought to lock in after 1945 was more ambitious and multifaceted than any goals after 1815 or even 1919. The persistence of this agenda was reinforced by the diversity of policy advocates who differed on many matters but by and large converged on the importance of open and multilateral relations among the major industrial democracies.
Third, the United States pursued these goals by agreeing to lock itself in to a highly institutionalized postwar order. In a sense, the United States purchased European agreement by conceding more favorable terms to them, agreeing to a massive aid program, and reluctantly accepting binding security guarantees. The evolution of American policy on postwar trade and monetary arrangements reflects this willingness to compromise to get European acquiescence, giving a better deal in the short run in order to get an institutional settlement that secured America’s long-term interests.
The Marshall Plan aid was even more explicit in this sort of trade-off: the United States transferred massive financial resources to Europe but with specific understandings that the European states would move toward greater political and economic unification. The American security commitments that followed in 1949 with the NATO treaty and the later intensification of security ties were also reluctantly extended in exchange for European commitments to greater regional security cooperation and a willingness to reintegrate and rearm western Germany.
Fourth, the political organization of postwar relations among the industrial democracies was driven by this process of mutual and reciprocal binding.
The United States consistently sought to remain as unencumberedas possible after the war. This goal helps explain the appeal of the State Department’s free-trade agenda and the later ideas of a European third force.” At the same time, American officials pursued a remarkably sophisticated agenda aimed at binding the Europeans together and tying western Germany into a more unified and integrated Europe. At first this agenda was driven by the demands of postwar economic renewal and the need for some solution to the German problem, imperatives that existed independently of the worsening of relations with the Soviet Union although the Cold War did raise the stakes and sped the process. But at each stage in
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this process, European officials insisted that the binding together of Europe was only acceptable if the United States itself made binding commitments to them, as well. At each stage, the United States conceded only as much commitment as was needed to keep the Europeans on their path toward integration and reconstruction. Restraint, reassurance, and commitment were the price the United States had to pay in order to achieve its order-building goals in Europe and more widely.
The Europeans engaged in a similar trade-off: they agreed to steps toward European integration and accepted western Germany back into Europe, in part because in exchange they got a more institutionally restrained and connected postwar America. As suggested in the model of constitutional order building, the weaker and secondary states locked themselves in to a postwar order, but in return they received a favorable short-term return on their power and secured at least to some extent institutional arrangements that made the leading state more predictable, restrained, and accessible. The full measure of this binding of American power to Europeoccurred relatively late after the war only after 1950 and in response to a heightening of the Soviet threat with the integration of NATO forces and the permanent stationing of American troops in Europe. This institutionalization of Atlantic security relations provided reassurances to Europe by making the exercise of American power more certain and predictable and by creating voice opportunity mechanisms.
Fifth, the institutional strategies that were employed after the war were critical in giving shape to the order among the industrial democracies and overcoming the insecurities otherwise inherent in highly asymmetricalpower relations. The rise of the Soviet Union reinforcedWestern solidarity, but that solidarity was imagined and acted upon before ColdWar hostilities broke out. Indeed, the shifts in thinking among American postwar planners from the weakly institutionalized free-trade vision to the hands-on and managedWestern economic, political, and security system was driven more by the growing perception of European weakness after 1945 than by the threat of Soviet power.