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New Deal program in the USA in the late 1930s. Keynesian economists and administrators flooded into the governmental bureaucracies that ran the war effort in the early 1940s, while Keynesian influences were felt (through the influence particularly of economist Alvin Hansen) in several recommendations for social programs in the post-war period, including the US Employment Act of 1946 (Collins 1981). The question was how to expand Keynesianism to the world scale. The belief grew that governments had to assume collective respon sibility for managing the international economic system, and that one country, the USA as it turned out, had to assume the responsibility of global leadership. In reaction to the traumas of the Great Depression, Western democracies had to ‘resolve the clash between domestic auto nomy and international stability’ (Gilpin 1987: 131; see also Cooper 1975: 85). With the post-war objectives of hegemony through economic growth and full employment on a national scale, governments had to commit to intervening in national economies and establishing welfare states. Yet also, in contrast to the inter-war period, governments were responsible for creating a stable international economic order and preventing a return to the destructive economic nationalism of the 1930s. As a result, the new international economic regime would differ from the laissez-faire regime of the nineteenth century and the protectionist regime of the 1930s. In contrast to the prevailing situ ation under the liberalism of the nineteenth century, the governments of nation-states would have a greater role in the economy, subject to international rules, in a compromise between domestic autonomy and international norms. Contrary to what happened in the 1930s, the new regime would appeal to the consent and cooperation of member nations, but would also commit them legally. And it would also recognize the mutual obligations of countries with balance of payment deficits and surpluses. In summary, there would be balance between national and international stability without subordinating one to the other, with institutions devised to manage and resolve international economic conflicts, and hence assume regulatory force in the international market. These institutions would assume the role of the state in a global market economy. The USA: from isolation to global hegemony
Between the two world wars, the battered US economy was still in a better shape than the European economies. Moreover, the USA had a huge base of natural resources on which it could depend, and