Ikenberry - After Victory: Institutions, Strategic Restraint, and the Rebuilding of Order after Major Wars, New Edition - New Edition

After Victory

PRINCETON STUDIES IN
INTERNATIONAL HISTORY AND POLITICS

Series Editors
Jack L. Snyder
Marc Trachtenberg
Fareed Zakaria

Recent Titles:

After Victory: Institutions, Strategic Restraint, and the Rebuilding of
Order after Major Wars by G. John Ikenberry

Stay the Hand of Vengeance: The Politics of War Crimes Tribunals
by Gary Jonathan Bass

War and Punishment: The Causes of War Termination
and the First World War by H. E. Goemans

In the Shadow of the Garrison State: Americas Anti-Statism
and Its Cold War Grand Strategy by Aaron L. Friedberg

States and Power in Africa: Comparative Lessons in
Authority and Control by Jeffrey Herbst

The Moral Purpose of the State: Culture, Social Identity, and Institutional
Rationality in International Relations by Christian Reus-Smit

Entangling Relations: American Foreign Policy in Its Century
by David A. Lake

A Constructed Peace: The Making of the European Settlement, 19451963
by Marc Trachtenberg

Regional Orders at Centurys Dawn: Global and Domestic
Influences on Grand Strategy by Etel Solingen

From Wealth to Power: The Unusual Origins of
Americas World Role by Fareed Zakaria

Changing Course: Ideas, Politics, and the Soviet
Withdrawal from Afghanistan by Sarah E. Mendelson

Disarming Strangers: Nuclear Diplomacy with North Korea
by Leon V. Sigal

Imagining War: French and British Military Doctrine Between the Wars
by Elizabeth Kier

Roosevelt and the Munich Crisis: A Study of Political Decision-Making
by Barbara Rearden Farnham

INSTITUTIONS, STRATEGIC RESTRAINT,
AND THE REBUILDING OF ORDER
AFTER MAJOR WARS

G. John Ikenberry

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
PRINCETON AND OXFORD

Copyright 2001 by Princeton University Press
Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street,
Princeton, New Jersey 08540
In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press,
3 Market Place, Woodstock, Oxfordshire OX20 1SY

All Rights Reserved

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Ikenberry, G. John
After victory: institutions, strategic restraint, and the rebuilding of
order after major wars / G. John Ikenberry
p.cm. (Princeton studies in international history and politics)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-691-05090-2 (alk. paper ISBN 0-691-05091-0 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. World politics. 2. Military history, Modern19th century. 3. Military history,
Modern20th century. 4. Peace. 5. Security, International.
I. Title. II. Series

D363. I46 2000

327.1dc21 00-034681

This book has been composed in Janson

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements
of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (R1997) (Permanence of Paper)

www.pup.princeton.edu

Printed in the United States of America

1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

To Lidia, Jackson,
and the memory of Tessa

In crossing a heath, suppose I pitched my foot against a
stone, and were asked how the stone came to be there. I
might possibly answer, that, for anything I knew to the
contrary, it had lain there forever; nor would it perhaps
be very easy to show the absurdity of this answer. But
suppose I had found a watch upon the ground....
Reverend William Paley, Natural Theology, 1802

CHAPTER ONE
The Problem of Order

CHAPTER TWO
Varieties of Order: Balance of Power, Hegemonic, and Constitutional

CHAPTER THREE
An Institutional Theory of Order Formation

CHAPTER FOUR
The Settlement of 1815

CHAPTER FIVE
The Settlement of 1919

CHAPTER SIX
The Settlement of 1945

CHAPTER SEVEN
After the Cold War

CHAPTER EIGHT
Conclusion

The central question of this book is: What do states that have just won major wars do with their newly acquired power? My answer is that states in this situation have sought to hold onto that power and make it last, and that this has led these states, paradoxically, to find ways to set limits on their power and make it acceptable to other states. Across the great postwar settlements, leading states have increasingly used institutions after wars to lock in a favorable postwar position and to establish sufficient strategic restraint on their own power as to gain the acquiescence of weaker and secondary states. Leading postwar states might ideally want to tie other states down to fixed and predictable policy orientations and leave themselves institutionally unencumbered. But in seeking the institutional commitment of less powerful stateslocking them into the postwar orderthe leading state has to offer them something in return: some measure of credible and institutionalized restraint on its own exercise of power. The type of order that emerges after great wars hinges on the ability of states to restrain power institutionally and bind themselves to long-term commitments.

Viscount Castlereagh in 1815, Woodrow Wilson in 1919, Harry Truman in 1945each sought to use newly preponderant state power to mold a postwar settlement that bound other states to each other and to them. American officials again found themselves in this position after 1989. But to lock other states into a desired order, these leading states did not simply exercise powerthey sought the acquiescence of other states by agreeing to set limits on the use of that power. The order-building power of these leading states was partly rooted in their ability to limit that power institutionally. The changing capacity of states to do so has had a profound impact on the type of international order that has emerged after great wars.

My interest in postwar junctures and peace settlements began in the late 1980s, when the debate about the character and significance of American hegemony was in full swing. My interest was not in the decline of hegemony but in how hegemonic order is created in the first place, and in how political order more generally is created.

The end of the Cold War made my question even more compelling. It also raised the stakes of my initial question about order formation in two ways: first, with the end of the Cold War, scholars and pundits began to argue that the United States was again at a major postwar juncture, a historical watershed not unlike 1919 and 1945. The question immediately became: What can we learn from early postwar settlements about how to create a stable and desirable postwar order? The other way the stakes were raised was that the end of the Cold War sharpened certain theoretical debates. It was now possible to determine whether external threats were the essential element in cohesion and cooperation among the industrial democracies. During the Cold War, the explanation for stable and cooperative relations among these countries was overdetermined. Both neorealists and liberals had plausible explanations, but it was impossible to determine precisely which variables mattered most. When the Cold War ended, these two theoretical traditions generally expected divergent outcomes and the possibility existed for more careful adjudication of their respective theoretical claims.