Establishing Hegemony or Transmitting Preferences?: A Liberal Interpretation the Bretton Woods Accords.

This paper challenges the conventional understanding of the formation of the Bretton Woods institutions, which emphasizes the preponderance of U.S. and English power in the form, design, and inclusive nature of the institutions. Andrew Moravscik’s Liberal theory offers an inside-out framework that cuts to the foundation of foreign policy decision making and provides the greatest purchase on explaining the style and substance of the Accords, besting both hegemonic stability theory and neo-liberal institutionalism. Applied to this instance of cooperation, Liberal theory both examines the alleged onset of American hegemony and demonstrates why the post-World War II superpowers’ preferences should be understood as superior and inextricably bound to a palpable domestic-level preference structure. This paper brings to bear extensive archival, biographic, and secondary-source research combined with quanitative methodology to analyze this instance of cooperation. I conclude that liberal theory has unappreciated purchase in the budding literature on informal institution building and calls for a synthesized approach to understanding institution construction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]