Book Review

Comparative/World

The title of this book needs translation. Torbjørn L. Knutsen's "world" begins in 1494 and ends in 1945, and what he calls "order" refers to a recurrent pattern of international relations among a handful of European states (p. 1). Yet the second, and for a historian far more interesting, half of the book analyzes the rise and fall of American hegemony between 1917 and 1998, and Knutsen ends his book with a rather half-hearted suggestion that in the 1990s the United States may have resumed the world leadership it enjoyed in the decades after World War II, thus perhaps initiating a second American hegemony analogous to what he recognizes as a second British hegemony that began in 1815.	1
Part one describes the patterns of power that concern Knutsen in five chapters. Their titles explain the cycle he discerns: "The wave of great wars"; "The phase of hegemony"; "The phase of challenge"; "The phase of disruptive competition"; and a summary, "The rise and fall of world orders." According to Knutsen, European states ran through this cycle four (or perhaps five) times, producing an Iberian world order, 1494–1648; a Dutch world order, 1648–1714; a first British world order, 1714–1815; and a second British world order, 1815–1914. This was succeeded by an American world order after 1945, but Knutsen refrains from giving it a definite terminus in his introductory schema (p. 7).	2
Political science became a distinct branch of learning by embarking on resolute search for laws or at least for recognizable patterns in public affairs, and Knutsen is true to this tradition. He seeks regularities in the past and, knowing full well what he is looking for, he finds them. Historians also habitually find what they look for in the tangled record of the past, but Knutsen's systematic cast of mind occasionally overrides inconvenient details more recklessly than I, for one, am comfortable with.	3
He writes, for example, that "Spain, the United Provinces, and England (twice) emerged from their respective waves of great wars with substantial land forces. These countries did not build up the biggest land forces of their time, as is indicated by Table 4" (p. 42). But Table 4 shows Spanish soldiers far outnumbering all rivals in 1555, 1595, and 1635! This seems inexcusably careless—or perhaps just hasty, for I surmise that Knutsen embarked on his exploration of the military-political history of modern Europe as a way of testing (i.e. confirming) his ideas about the rise and fall of American hegemony after World War II.	4
At any rate, his analysis of American foreign policy since 1945 in part two struck me as masterly. And he leaves his heavy-handed system building behind by recognizing the open-endedness of contemporary affairs and emphasizing how the emergence of a second American hegemony (if such there be) departs from previous patterns. By abandoning political science for contemporary history, in short, he becomes an admirably precise, insightful, and tentative interpreter of the course of international affairs since 1945. Seeing ourselves as others see us is always interesting and sometimes illuminating. I find Knutsen's chapters on the ups and downs of American foreign policy since 1945 to be often novel and frequently convincing.	. . .