5 The age of universality (1945–1980)

At the end of the Second World War, the United States was in a unique
position. As the unchallenged global power, it controlled about half of
the world’s production, dominated in most technologies and resources,
and disposed of a victorious and powerful army. “Today,” wrote
British scholar Harold Laski in December 1947, “literally hundreds of
millions of Europeans and Asiatics know that both the quality and the
rhythm of their lives depend upon decisions made in Washington.”^1
The Americans would indeed play a central role in the shaping of a
postwar order governed by new international norms and institutions.
Many uncertainties and tensions remained, however, some inherited
from the unresolved conflicts of the inter-war years, others from the
new alignment of forces that emerged from the war.
Chief among these uncertainties was the challenge posed to the new
hegemonic power by the rise and assertion of its former ally and now
rival, the Soviet Union. “At the present moment in world history,”
President Harry Truman told a joint session of Congress in March
1947, “nearly every nation must choose between alternative ways of
life...I believe that it must be the policy of the United States to
support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by
armed minorities or by outside pressures.”^2 The Cold War conflict
Truman announced was profound and universal. It defined what
Kemal Dervis, former Turkish Minister of the Economy and then head
of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), aptly
described as an enduring “global ideological battle.” “On the right,”
explained Dervis, “there was, for want of a better word, ‘capitalism,’

(^1) Harold J. Laski, quoted in G. John Ikenberry,After Victory: Institutions,
Strategic Restraint, and the Rebuilding of Order after Major Wars, Princeton
University Press, 2001, p. 168.
(^2) Harry S. Truman, “Address to Joint Session of Congress on Aid to Greece and
Turkey,” March 12, 1947, The Avalon Project at Yale Law School: Truman
Doctrine (www.yale.edu/lawweb/avalon/trudoc.htm).
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