Excerpted from chapter 8 of Global Discord: Values and Power in a Fractured World Order with a new preface by Paul Tucker. Copyright © 2022, 2024 by Paul Tucker. Published by Princeton University Press and reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Hereafter . . . those countries may grow stronger, or those of Europe may grow weaker, and the inhabitants of all the different quarters of the world may arrive at the equality of courage and force which, by inspiring mutual fear, can alone overawe the injustice of independent nations into some sort of respect for the rights of one another. But nothing seems more likely to establish this equality of force than that mutual communication of knowledge and of all sorts of improvements which an extensive commerce . . . carries along with it.
As its relative power increases, a rising state attempts to change the rules governing the international system, the division of the spheres of influence, and, most important of all, the international distribution of territory. In response, the dominant power counters this challenge through changes in its policies that attempt to restore equilibrium in the system. The historical record reveals that if it fails in this attempt, the disequilibrium will be resolved by war.
The United States and Europe: System Predicated on What?
As the quote at the chapter head from Robert Gilpin illustrates, some hold that international System invariably relies on the dominance of a leading state capable of policing the prevailing Order, that the rules of any System accordingly reflect the hegemon’s interests, and that “shifts in the distribution of power among states give rise to new challenger states that eventually engage the leading-state in hegemonic war.”16
That line of thinking—like much International Relations theory, proclaimed as a universal law of motion, as though it were physics—invites the questionof why, after it had recovered from World War II, Europe did not challenge US leadership, and whether the explanation offers a window into relations with today’s rising states. Those answers must turn on whether secondary and rising states, including Europe after its decline, experience institutionalized hierarchy as useful and acceptable or as dominance; and on whether the leader gets enough out of leadership—keeping the sea-lanes open, providing the reserve currency—to accept the costs of qualified followership.
Europe’s Edgy Volunteerism within Post–World War II US Hegemony
The US-European relationship has neither involved unqualified dominance, nor been entirely smooth. Even immediately after World War II, when Europe’s states were bankrupt or broken, the United States had to acquiesce in their capitals’ unpalatable domestic-policy preferences to get the postwar Order going at all. Among the war’s victors, Britain nationalized industries and France pursued state-led investment planning, both significantly at odds with America’s more free-market creed. But US leaders prioritized security policy (balancing the Soviets by keeping Western Europe within its own sphere of influence) over spreading their own economic model (chapter 3)—an example of taking the long view.17
Differences did not end there. In the security field, while NATO countries participated in the Korean War during the early 1950s, a decade or so later Paris and London declined to join the United States (and its Australasian and Southeast Asian allies) in Vietnam.18 At other times, by contrast, leadership was unceremoniously asserted, notably over Suez in 1956, when France and especially Britain were still economically bereft.19 But Washington did not try to maintain their weakness. If anything, by allowing Britain and France to acquire nuclear capability, and by pushing for some kind of European union (small u), the United States created conditions where partners could become rivals.
Today, of course, Europe is rich again, and has been for decades. Not only rich per capita but rich in aggregate since it is populous (around 450 million people in the European Union [EU], plus about one hundred million across the EU’s immediate advanced-economy neighbors). Europe is, therefore, latently capable of projecting more hard power than it does. Nevertheless, a solid if occasionally fractious alliance has been sustained. Europe as a whole supported the United States in the first Iraq war, and instinctively stood by Washington in its “war against terror” after the 9/11 atrocities. But there have also continued to be significant examples of Europe challenging, or simply ignoring, the United States. France and Germany rejected the case for the second Iraq war, openly (and correctly) disputing the reliability of US (and British) statements on weapons of mass destruction.
Europe’s Influence within the System
Away from security, Europe has been even less reticent. While it has not mounted a concerted challenge against the dollar’s role as the world’s premier reserve currency (and is in no position to do so until it completes its economic and monetary union), it has become something of a regulatory superpower, harnessing its vast internal market to techniques of international and transnational law and regulation to increase its leverage.20
This is not abstract. The EU continues to tax imports of some American foodstuffs (I think at root because of concerns about an endogenous decline in tastes and standards liable to be triggered by importing the United States’ lower-cost produce). To date, it has been somewhat tougher with the US- domiciled technology-cum-media platforms, partly because of different values around privacy, decency, and private political power. And, at a higher level, it seems to have inspired the widespread judicialization of international regimes described in chapter 3.21
Despite those and other tensions, the institutionalized hierarchy of power has sustained itself for three-quarters of a century. So why does the United States put up with Europe? And why didn’t European capitals aim for greater power once its Cold War security blanket briefly seemed less necessary?
Part of the answer is probably a prudent inertia: do not lightly jettison what has worked tolerably well when you do not know what lies ahead. That might explain why, despite the predictions-cum-urgings of not a few American International Relations realists, Washington did not fold NATO after the Cold War.22 But I think a more fundamental part of the answer is that, in a dangerous world, neither the United States nor Europe has represented a threat to the other, with that in turn rooted in something deeper: a loosely shared way of life.
Threats versus Inconveniences
As a general matter, it seems likely that the response of established powers to rising states turns on what might change. Hobbesian International Relations realists tell us states want, above all else, to survive.23 That seems right—at least of a state’s leading officials—but it leaves much unsaid. Survive as what: as a state, the leading superpower, a prestigious leader, a materially prosperous political community, or a community with particular institutions and ways of life?
When one Order gives way to another, the precise circumstances of transition determine whether the new leading powers trash most of what has gone before or are constrained to work with the grain of at least some of the old Order’s internalized values. The history of Christendom, the European balance of power, and US hegemony is, in this crucial sense, continuous. The post–World War II Order-System jettisoned some of the previous Order’s baggage, notably colonialism, but there has been a great deal of continuity in its underlying aspirations. While there have been tensions and not a little hypocrisy, the United States–led Order-System has (most of the time) involved more than the thinnest possible international Society among its leadership group.
This helps make sense of Washington’s relationship with Europe. If the test is whether a rising state poses a threat to the survival of the leading states’ autonomy or prosperity, then just as the ascendency of the United States had not been much more than an (aggravating) inconvenience for Britain, so Europe’s postwar recovery and confederation were hardly serious threats to the United States.24 That is partly because continental European capitals embarked on a strategy of breaking the link between being a hard-power top dog and a welfare top dog. The post–World War II Order-System has, in short, been good for Europe, freeing it to pursue greater regional interdependence and prosperity.25 We see that in the European Dream, which acts as a magnet for many people in the former Soviet republics, such as Ukraine. A longing for freedom no longer requires a boat journey to America.
The Grand Bargain: “Guns and Butter” or Prestige and Ways of Life?
That makes it sound, at least for Europeans, like the “guns versus butter” choice: whether to expend resources on consumption (and investing for greater future consumption) or, instead, on the military in order to ensure that the state and its people survive to consume in the future.26 Europe has persistently chosen standard of living (leisure, a social-security safety net, consumption, and the cultivation of taste) over the pursuit of international leadership.27
But surely more was going on than different welfare preferences. At least for the eastern Atlantic, close relations—including volatile acquiescence in empowered followership—were buttressed by perceptions that Americans were and are, when it comes to it, either “like us” (deep Society) or, at least, governed via institutions instantiating shared political values: a modern, qualified kind of thick Society.28 It really does matter that the US founding fathers were steeped in, among many others, Locke, Montesquieu, and Hume.
What about the United States: why does it go along with Europe’s preferences? Partly, it might be the shared liberalism embedded in the System’s sinews.29 But there are also concrete returns to Americans: top-dog prestige (for top officials), pride or even honor (for some citizen-subjects), wide-ranging soft power, and the harder power of tilting transnational initiatives toward its own interests. Whether that suffices for citizens is another matter, parked for now.
This, then, is chapter 1’s grand bargain: European followership and acquiescence in US prestige in exchange for an American security blanket and a sizable presence at an institutionalized hierarchy’s top table. That is not only a matter of System—the design and workings of international regimes—but of the underlying Order. While, as US officials fairly point out, Europe plainly could bear a much bigger part of the burden of defending itself (and now, at last, looks set to do so), the possible effects of parity in effort would include the emergence of another great power (with hard power), changing the implicit bargain.
References
15. G. Smith, “G7 to G8 to G20.” Initially, the international organizations attending the sum- mit were limited to the financial bodies (IMF, World Bank, Financial Stability Forum) plus the UN but have for some years now included the WTO, the OECD, and others.
16. Ikenberry, Liberal Leviathan, p. 57, discussing Gilpin’s views, which drew on Charles Kindleberger’s earlier suggestion that the twentieth century’s interwar economic unraveling was down to the unwillingness of the arriving hegemon (the United States) and the incapacity of the outgoing one (Britain).
17. Steil, Marshall Plan, pp. 348–50, and chap. 13 generally.
18. Technically, and so significantly for the gap between System and Order, Vietnam was an undeclared war and simply bypassed the UN (where the different sides all had veto rights).
19. During this episode, Washington sold sterling (Kirshner, Currency and Coercion, pp. 63– 82) and threatened to table a UN motion sanctioning the Europeans ( J. Barr, Lords of the Desert, pp. 245–46).
20. Bradford, Brussels Effect.
21. On judicialization, see Alter, “Multiplication of International Courts.”
22. E.g., Waltz, “Structural Realism after the Cold War.” Many such essays hovered ambigu- ously (and instructively) between prediction (so far, wrong) and prescription (probably ill-judged).
23. Among International Relations realists, this is often rooted in Hobbes’s belief, in his stripped-down natural-law account of politics, that survival is the elemental goal and right of each and every one of us.
24. Britain abjured the temptation to secure Southern secession in the 1860s partly because of public opinion (against slavery), and gained a long-run protector of its liberties. For an International Relations realist stressing the balance of threats (probably closer to Hobbes himself), see Walt, Origins of Alliances.
25. Waltz, Theory of International Politics, p. 71, would cast this ambition as freedom to take more risks.
26. The phrase might be Lyndon Johnson’s. Powell, “Guns versus Butter.”
27. European living standards have been closer to those of the United States (in per capita gross domestic product terms) once adjustments are made for patterns of output (less on military, more on consumption goods) and leisure. Gordon, “Two Centuries.”
28. Khong, “American Tributary System,” argues the US-led system of international relations is structurally similar to China’s old tribute system (next chapter). But the European and (in colonial origin) Anglo-Saxon states and peoples identified as the hegemon’s “closest tributaries” do not regard the United States as the origin or authoritative exemplar of “European” civilization, culture, political institutions, and values, as opposed to being one rather grand and, inevitably, sometimes perverse manifestation of them, as well as being the source of a cultural efflorescence that cannot be traced to the free settlers (e.g., jazz, the blues, and their offspring).
29. Ikenberry, Liberal Leviathan.
