An open international economy needs a dominant power willing to bear the cost of supplying its public goods, and destabilises when none will.
Kindleberger's 1973 explanation of the Depression: Britain could no longer supply stability and the United States would not yet, and the resulting gap deepened the collapse.
In practice
- An international standard for shipping containers holds because one country's fleet enforced it, and fragments when no fleet is dominant.
- A trade body's technical standard survives while its largest member funds the secretariat and collapses when that member leaves.
- Subject
- Law & Politics
- Essay
- Competing accounts of how power works