Institutions
In After Victory: Institutions, Strategic Restraint, and the Rebuilding of Order after Major Wars, Ikenberry explores how the United States utilized its hegemony after both World Wars to shape future world order. In both cases, the U.S. attempted to institutionalize its power through the creation of a constitutional order, by which political order was organized around agreed-upon legal and political institutions that operate to allocate rights and limit the exercise of power. In the process, the United States agreed to "tame" its power by placing it within institutions and the set of rules and rights with which this came. One of the advantages for the United States in doing so was locking itself into a guaranteed position for years to come. In the event that its power waned in the future, the institutional framework it created would nonetheless remain intact.
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Famous quotes containing the word institutions:
“In my short experience of human life, the outward obstacles, if there were any such, have not been living men, but the institutions of the dead.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“You see how this House of Commons has begun to verify all the ill prophecies that were made of it—low, vulgar, meddling with everything, assuming universal competency, and flattering every base passion—and sneering at everything noble refined and truly national. The direct tyranny will come on by and by, after it shall have gratified the multitude with the spoil and ruin of the old institutions of the land.”
—Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834)
“Our institutions have a potent digestion, and may in time convert and assimilate to good all elements thrown in, however originally alien.”
—Herman Melville (1819–1891)