Question

Explain the post-World War II emergence and significance of the Pax Americana. What are the characteristics of economic institutions and political doctrines that led to Pax Americana’s global hegemony?

Answer 1

Before the aftermath of the Great War, the American Republic was basically an colonial power that refused to meet wider foreign commitments; it would eventually grow to the status of a superpower whose leaders tried to recast the global structure along American lines. In a wider historical sense, it was between 1914 and 1991 that not only the unparalleled dominance of America but also the distinctive concepts and policies of the United States came to have a dominant effect on the transformation of the international order, albeit in many ways ambivalent. More specifically, they gradually formed a cycle of transformation drawn-out and fraught with conflict.

Long-term and eventually transformative shifts in fundamental concepts and perceptions, individual and collective outlooks, and learning processes of this kind were crucial to transforming America's position in post-1945 building and sustaining sustainable international security, political, and economic structures. They were instrumental in the creation of American peace designs for "one world" under Roosevelt, typically based on the 1941 Atlantic Charter and subsequent visions of a United Nations grounded global order

Although the successors of Roosevelt have adopted global perspectives and long-term visions, they would focus on laying the groundwork for what can be described as a network of partially intertwined, but separate and distinct "regional peace structures" under American auspices in many respects: above all, the novel transatlantic order, but also the structure of bilateral alliances and modernization

These structures, developed under the influence of the raging Cold War – to which the Truman administration's policies made a major contribution embodied various manifestations of a "Pax Americana." Within them, the United States still played the leading position, though it did so in qualitative gradations from a comparatively benevolent hegemon to a new kind of empire.

It relied on fundamental improvements in the laws, norms and institutional structures of foreign and domestic orders. This was in line with the profoundly egalitarian presumption that the exemplary American power could not only deliver these peace-enforcing rules and norms, but was also called upon to play a leading role in international attempts to change world "and" domestic politics – two realms that were increasingly entangled in what also became a century of transnational interconnections.

The original American agenda, as is well-known, included far-reaching demilitarization steps, as well as efforts to encourage decartelisation, and economic and agricultural reforms without implementing laissez-faire capitalism in the US. Notably, these led to the fracturing of large industrial conglomerates in Japan and ended the domination of a limited number of property-holding families. However, an aspirational program of democratisation was central to the early American approach – in essence, an extension of the "Wilsonian project," an effort to implement far-reaching democratic reforms and a long-term phase of "democracy-building" in Japan, especially the development of a pluralist party system