[A conversation with Jamie Martin about the imperial origins of
the world’s economic governance, imagining an alternative to these
institutions, and his new book, The Meddlers.]
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THE ROTTEN ROOTS OF THE IMF AND THE WORLD BANK  
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Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins, Jamie Martin
June 15, 2022
The Nation
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_ A conversation with Jamie Martin about the imperial origins of the
world’s economic governance, imagining an alternative to these
institutions, and his new book, The Meddlers. _

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The International Monetary Fund and the World Bank have long been
criticized for the onerous influence they exert over the domestic
policies of many states. Especially since the 1990s, they have been
excoriated for imposing policies—such as structural adjustment
reforms and austerity measures—on client states that deepen
inequality in the Global South, which, in turn, benefits the powerful
countries of the Global North. How do we understand the structural
origins of this global imbalance? One fairly standard view is to place
the blame solely on neoliberalism. This perspective argues that the
IMF and the World Bank—institutions that date back to World War
II—at one time allowed for a more equitable system of economic
governance under the Bretton Woods system of global monetary
management, which collapsed in the early 1970s. In its place, the
argument goes, free market economic policies began to dominate.
Cemented by the elections of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher,
these institutions moved in a decidedly neoliberal direction
throughout the 1980s. By the 1990s, the Democratic Party had made its
peace with this ideological revolution. Under Bill Clinton, the IMF
and the World Bank furthered their embrace of economic shock
therapies. In this way, the turn to neoliberalism is blamed for the
Third World Debt Crisis, the Asian Financial Crisis of 1997–98, and
the pillaging of Russia and the former Eastern Bloc countries after
the fall of the Soviet Union.

Yet in his new book, _The Meddlers: Sovereignty, Empire, and the
Birth of Global Governance_, Jamie Martin challenges this standard
narrative. Martin, soon to be an assistant professor of history and
social studies at Harvard University, argues that if we truly want to
understand the disastrous consequences of the IMF’s and the World
Bank’s interference in the domestic policies of sovereign states, it
is necessary to understand the first international institutions of
economic governance, such as the League of Nations and the Bank for
International Settlement, which emerged in the wake of World War I.
These institutions gave civil servants, bankers, and colonial
authorities from Europe and the United States the extraordinary power
to enforce austerity, oversee development programs, and regulate
commodity prices. Many of them had civilizational, paternalistic, and
white supremacist assumptions, which they used to justify meddling in
the economies of other states. Martin argues that these institutions
were, in fact, repackaging 19th-century practices of financial
imperialism in a new, more sanitized form, given the decline of the
European empires and the rising claims to self-determination. In
making this analysis, Martin offers an alternative perspective on the
crisis of global economic governance today, showing how the
interventionist powers of the IMF and the World Bank have all along
been rooted in empire and colonialism.

I spoke with Martin about his thinking on the relationship between
empire and contemporary global economic governance, why the Bretton
Woods system is misinterpreted, his definition of neoliberalism, and
what he sees as an attractive economic alternative to “the
meddlers.” This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

_—Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins_

DANIEL STEINMETZ-JENKINS: IT IS TYPICAL FOR CRITICS TO CONSIDER THE
ECONOMIC POLICIES OF THE INTERNATIONAL MONETARY FUND, THE WORLD BANK,
AND THE WORLD TRADE ORGANIZATION THROUGH THE PRISM OF GLOBALIZATION.
MOST INFAMOUSLY DURING THE 1990S, THESE INSTITUTIONS WREAKED HAVOC ON
STATES IN THE GLOBAL SOUTH AND THE FORMER EASTERN BLOC COUNTRIES
THROUGH ENFORCED AUSTERITY, STRUCTURAL ADJUSTMENT REFORMS, AND OTHER
ECONOMIC SHOCK THERAPIES. SUCH POLICIES WERE ROUTINELY CRITICIZED FOR
VIOLATING THE SOVEREIGNTY OF THESE STATES. YOUR BOOK REJECTS THIS
NARRATIVE, BECAUSE YOU DON’T SEE SUCH POLICIES AS THE CONSEQUENCE OF
THE SO-CALLED NEOLIBERAL REVOLUTION OF THE 1970S. WHY IS THIS THE
CASE?

JAMIE MARTIN: The kind of far-reaching interventionist powers of
international economic institutions that we associate with the
Washington Consensus—powers to enforce austerity in borrowing states
and demand they enact extensive liberalizing reforms—did not emerge
out of the blue in the late 20th century. Instead, they originated
many decades before, at the end of the First World War, when powerful
states and private actors forged new partnerships to protect their
interests at a moment of enormous global economic and political
turmoil.

Now, it’s true that during the 1980s and ’90s, the IMF
dramatically expanded its reach by making assistance conditional on
borrowers committing to extensive market reforms. This took place
during three successive periods of global upheaval following the end
of the Bretton Woods system: the Third World Debt Crisis, the collapse
of the Soviet Union, and the Asian Financial Crisis of 1997–98.
During each of these periods, the IMF exercised enormous pressure on
states in receipt of loans—from Argentina to Kazakhstan to
Thailand—demanding they commit to austerity and major
transformations of their domestic economies. Failing to agree to these
terms not only jeopardized the IMF’s assistance; it also jeopardized
access to other sources of foreign capital, since the existence of a
prior arrangement with the IMF was used by other lenders to determine
a country’s creditworthiness. It is this IMF that became notorious
for intrusively meddling in the domestic affairs of sovereign states
for the sake of globalizing a hyper-liberalized form of capitalism
under US dominance.

There are good reasons to associate the emergence of this muscular IMF
with the contemporaneous neoliberal revolution. After all, the IMF was
insisting on the same kind of market reforms in the Global South and
postcommunist states that were then being implemented in the US and
Europe. And given the dominance of the IMF by the US Treasury, it was
often the very same people overseeing these transformations of the US
economy that were calling for them in places like Russia or Indonesia.

But this was not the first time that this had happened. The first time
that an international institution made bailout loans conditional on
austerity and central bank independence was by the League of Nations
in the former Habsburg and Ottoman lands in the 1920s. This involved
adapting the techniques used by semicolonial debt commissions set up
in the 19th century by European and US investors and governments to
discipline borrowers and extract revenue from them across North
Africa, the Balkans, Latin America, the Caribbean, and in China and
the Ottoman Empire. There were deep continuities between these tools
of informal financial imperialism from before the First World War and
the emergence of global economic governance in its aftermath.

When the IMF was being designed in the early 1940s, some of its
architects insisted that the new institution would have to abandon
these obviously imperial practices. They didn’t want an IMF that
could bully states into slashing their budgets and abandoning plans
for postwar welfarism—and they agreed that governments should be
allowed to protect their citizens from capitalism’s boom-and-bust
cycles. This is one of the reasons why there’s so much nostalgia for
the Bretton Woods system today, and why it’s so often described as
an antidote to neoliberalism: because, in retrospect, its founders
seemed to believe in the need for a humane reconciliation of a
moderate form of globalization with national welfarism and Keynesian
economic management.

But, in fact, there was little real commitment to this vision among
the most powerful US actors in the IMF once the Second World War was
over and the institution began to make its first loans to member
states in the Third World. Already during the early Cold War, the IMF
began to act like the earlier imperial creditor arrangements by making
loans conditional on austerity and anti-inflationary policies,
beginning in Latin American states like Mexico, Paraguay, and Chile,
and then more broadly throughout the Caribbean and the postcolonial
states of Africa. So it didn’t take the rise of neoliberalism for
these practices to reemerge.

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DSJ: WHAT IS THE MAJOR TAKEAWAY FROM YOUR ALTERNATIVE ACCOUNT OF THE
IMF’S HISTORY?

JM: A key upshot of this history is to throw cold water on the idea
that today’s IMF is likely to drop its insistence on conditionality.
There’s good reason to take recent changes in economic ideas at the
IMF seriously—from its new emphasis on tackling inequality, to a
cautious support for the use of capital controls. But even if the IMF
has formally loosened its tight embrace of some neoliberal ideas, the
institution continues to link its assistance for vulnerable member
states to the same old demands for austerity, including most recently
in the series of emergency loans it made during the Covid-19 pandemic.
Seeing these practices as innovations of the late 20th century
suggests they may be easily abandoned with a shift away from
neoliberal ideas. But if you see them as an extension of financial
statecraft with over a century of history, it becomes clear why the
IMF continues to prove immune to shifting paradigms in academic
economics and in policymaking.

DSJ: CAN YOU EXPLAIN YOUR CONCEPT OF “MEDDLING,” AND SPECIFICALLY
HOW IT RELATES TO WHAT APPEARS TO BE A MAJOR TENSION IN YOUR BOOK: THE
CONFLICT BETWEEN THE RISE OF NATIONAL SELF-DETERMINATION AFTER WORLD
WAR I, AS EMBODIED BY THE LEAGUE OF NATIONS, AND THE GLOBAL CAPITALIST
ECONOMIC SYSTEM THAT THREATENED NATIONAL SOVEREIGNTY? MIGHT YOU
ELABORATE ON THIS TENSION? IN WHAT SENSE DID THE NEW INTERNATIONALIST
SOLUTIONS TO THIS CONFLICT INVOLVE A REINVENTION OF EMPIRE?

JM: The idea of meddling explored in the book refers to a kind of
power exercised by external actors over the domestic policies,
institutions, and laws of sovereign states. One example would be the
power exerted when an institution like the IMF insists that a member
state slash its budgets or remove a central bank from parliamentary
control in exchange for a loan. My book tells the history of how this
power evolved from the 19th century through the 20th and how it
transformed the meaning of statehood in the process.

Now it’s important to keep in mind that the loss of sovereignty this
kind of interference involved was different from that which came from
a country signing a treaty, adopting the fetters of the gold standard,
or inviting foreign experts to help with domestic reforms. The
meddling I’m interested in involved a country being compelled with
real force to let powerful foreign actors shape domestic institutions
and policies—whether with threats of military intervention in the
19th century or of being cut off from international capital markets in
the 20th.

Taking this long view is helpful for understanding the radical nature
of the power exercised by institutions like the IMF—and why it
generates such resistance. Protection from the interference of
external actors in domestic policies and institutions is coterminous
with the modern conception of sovereignty itself—even if, in
practice, it has historically been only the most powerful states that
have enjoyed this protection. Up until the 19th century, it was
questions of religion, dynastic succession, and constitutional matters
that were seen as the most important to insulate. But by the early
20th century—a period of rapid economic globalization—economic
policies were also seen as needing this protection as well.

Take the example of trade: While many trade agreements were signed in
the 19th century, tariffs were understood as strictly domestic
policies, even though they affected the economic well-being of other
countries. It’s seldom remembered that Congress refused to allow the
United States to join the League of Nations not just out of some
general isolationist sentiment but from a very specific fear: that the
league would intervene in two of the most controversial areas of US
domestic policy, tariffs and immigration. The same was true with
public finance: How a state chose to tax citizens and spend its
revenue was one of the most fundamental expressions of its
sovereignty. In the early 20th century, any state that allowed others
to determine its fiscal system was no longer considered a full state,
but instead a quasi-sovereign or semicolonized polity, like China or
Egypt at the time.

When institutions of global economic governance began to emerge after
World War I, the political problem they faced was whether they could
intervene in these domestic policies and institutions. It was clear
that governing global capitalism could not only involve managing
relations between states, such as preventing one from going to war
with another; it could also involve weighing in on sensitive domestic
economic questions. But these institutions had to try to exercise
these interventionist powers in ways that would not look like just
more of the same kind of bullying that empires had long visited on
states on the peripheries of the global economy.

Now there was little question that the new international institutions
like the League of Nations were inheriting old imperial practices. The
most powerful members of the league, after all, were Britain and
France—two sprawling colonial empires. But during an era of rising
claims to self-determination, self-governing polities—particularly
states that had recently won their independence, like, say, Poland or
Albania—didn’t want to be bossed around like the poor,
semi-sovereign debtors of the 19th century, constantly under the watch
of their creditors and not fully in control of their domestic
policies.

The point of international institutions was to make this less
humiliating, by offering formal representation to the state where
these powers were being applied. In this way, these institutions were
to serve as legitimation machines—making older imperial practices
easier for sovereign states to tolerate in an era of demands for
self-determination. But even in this new sanitized form, these powers
generated enormous resistance wherever they were brought to bear.

DSJ: HOW DO WE SEE SIMILAR DYNAMICS STILL PLAYING OUT TODAY?

JM: From the late 1990s, more and more countries have turned away
from the IMF after it became clear what accepting an IMF bail-out
involved. This is particularly true for those “emerging market”
economies—Russia, China, South Korea, and Turkey—that have
developed ways of dealing with financial instability that obviated the
need for IMF assistance. This isn’t because all of these states have
been waging a war on neoliberalism; far from it. Take Putin’s
Russia, long committed to a deeply conservative form of fiscal
restraint and boasting a central bank staffed by the most modern
technocratic economists. This Russia would never have allowed the IMF
to tell it to commit to these policies, particularly given Russia’s
experiences with the institution after the collapse of the Soviet
Union. Allowing this kind of interference in its domestic affairs by
an institution dominated by the US Treasury would be akin to admitting
to the kind of loss of sovereignty that comes from losing a war. In
some ways, we might see the rise of Putin as a self-described
protector of Russian autonomy and civilizational prestige as a direct
reaction to the perceived humiliations of allowing institutions like
the IMF to become so deeply involved in Russia’s domestic economy
and politics during the 1990s.

One of the aims of my book is to show just how old this dynamic is.
Even states that have accepted the need for liberal reforms or fiscal
restraint have always been reluctant, except when in severe distress,
to commit to them when demanded to do so by powerful outside actors.
Accepting the discipline of a body like the League of Nations or,
later, the IMF could of course be strategically useful for certain
political actors—delegating away a decision to impose austerity, for
example, was often done by governments to block domestic opposition to
it. But doing so was always politically risky, since it was likely to
be seen as moving a given state to a lower rung in global hierarchies
and as a relinquishment of autonomy that threatened a loss of
statehood itself. This was an extremely shaky ground on which to build
a viable vision of international cooperation.

DSJ: CAN YOU PINPOINT THE CIVILIZATIONAL, RACIAL, AND CULTURAL
HIERARCHIES OF THESE FIRST INTERNATIONAL INSTITUTIONS OF ECONOMIC
GOVERNANCE AND, IN TURN, HOW THEY MADE THEIR WAY INTO THE BRETTON
WOODS CONFERENCE OF JULY 1944, WHICH LED TO THE FOUNDING OF THE IMF
AND THE WORLD BANK?

JM: In the early 20th century, many countries with formal sovereignty
saw extensive unwanted interference in their domestic affairs. This
took many forms. Foreign-run commissions controlled assets and
dictated policies in borrowing countries like Egypt and Nicaragua;
other states, like China and Siam, lost their power to set their own
tariffs. In many countries, natural resources and land were owned by
foreign actors and central banks were controlled by foreign directors.
States like Haiti, Liberia, Iran, Mexico, Greece, and many others did
not see their legal sovereignty translate into real autonomy from
external compulsion.

Well aware of this contradiction, many attempted to justify it in
various ways. There were glaringly racist defenses of this sovereign
inequality—with some arguing that true autonomy and economic
self-determination really only belonged to white- and
Christian-majority countries in the West. There were also
justifications of it in terms of development: the idea that newly
independent states needed foreign tutelage to set them on a path
toward “responsible” government and economic progress. This was
also a time when states were judged according to the side they had
chosen during the First World War. It was no coincidence that it was
in the losers of the war—Austria, Germany, and Hungary—where some
of the earliest and most interventionist tools of international
economic governance were developed. But opponents of these tools also
appealed to the same imagined civilizational hierarchies. From the
vantage point of a state like Germany or Austria in the 1920s,
opposition to external interference was described by political actors
of all ideological commitments as key to preventing the country from
falling to the status of a China or a Greece—formally sovereign, but
constantly subjected to humiliating interventions in their domestic
affairs.

DSJ: IN WHAT SENSE WAS THIS HIERARCHY MODIFIED GIVEN THE UNITED
STATES’ RISE TO AN ECONOMIC AND MILITARY SUPERPOWER? WHAT DID THE US
LEARN FROM BRITISH AND FRENCH MEDDLING DURING THE PERIOD BETWEEN THE
WORLD WARS? AND IN WHAT WAYS DID THE BRITISH AND FRENCH NOW HAVE TO
DEAL WITH A TASTE OF THEIR OWN MEDICINE WITH THE US MEDDLING IN THEIR
ECONOMIES AFTER WORLD WAR II?

JM: There is a well-known story about the origins of the Bretton
Woods system during the Second World War. In 1944, representatives of
44 countries met at the Mount Washington Resort in New Hampshire to
rewrite the rules of the international economy and create two new
institutions, the IMF and the World Bank, to govern the postwar world
economy. On most accounts, this process involved fraught negotiations
between a declining great power—the British Empire, represented by
John Maynard Keynes—and a rising one—the United States,
represented by the Treasury economist Harry Dexter White—that
resulted in one of the greatest international agreements of all time.

But Bretton Woods was, at best, a mixed achievement. Sure, the United
States took on more commitments to provide global public goods and
fight crises than ever before. But the IMF, the more important of the
two Bretton Woods institutions, was designed to be dominated by the
US—even more so than the British had dominated the League of Nations
before this. As the British came to grips with this fact, they began
to worry that the United Kingdom, weakened by the war, now faced the
risk that the IMF would intervene in its domestic affairs, just as the
UK had long done in the Balkans, the Middle East, and elsewhere.
British officials worried that the UK was sinking in US eyes to the
level of the kind of “irresponsible” debtor state long subject to
the intervention of US officials and bankers in its affairs. This was
a replay of older dynamics: In Germany and Austria in the 1920s,
contemporaries constantly referred to these countries being treated by
Britain and France in the ways that these empires had treated the
Ottoman Empire and China before the First World War.

Keynes worked tirelessly to prevent the IMF from developing these
interventionist powers—not out of some commitment to universal
sovereign equality (he was mostly dismissive of Latin American and
non-Western delegations at the Bretton Woods Conference), but because
he feared a weakened British Empire was now vulnerable to US meddling.
Just days before the Bretton Woods Conference, he drove this point
home to his counterparts in the Roosevelt administration by asking
them how they’d feel if an international institution had told the
United States it couldn’t afford the New Deal.

Whether or not the IMF would be able to do this was left ambiguous at
the Bretton Woods Conference. Keynes felt confident that he had won a
commitment from Washington that the institution would not tell
Parliament it couldn’t afford the Beveridge Plan. But soon after the
conference, Keynes realized he’d lost this struggle: The
US-dominated IMF was clearly going to be able to tie its assistance to
extensive demands on the domestic policies of borrowers. Sure enough,
as soon as the IMF opened its doors, shortly after Keynes’s death in
1946, its British and French members saw that this was not the
institution they had signed up for. In a stark reversal of fortunes,
the meddlers now risked becoming the meddled-with. But in the end, it
wasn’t Western Europe where the IMF developed its most
interventionist powers. It was in the Global South.

DSJ: HOW DID REPRESENTATIVES OF THE GLOBAL SOUTH DEAL WITH THE
MEDDLING OF THE IMF AND THE WORLD BANK IN THE 1960 AND ’70S? FOR
INSTANCE, THERE HAS BEEN MUCH WRITTEN OF LATE ABOUT THE NEW
INTERNATIONAL ECONOMIC ORDER THAT EMERGED AT THIS TIME. WHAT DID IT
HOPE TO ACHIEVE?

JM: The evolution of IMF conditionality during the Cold War was seen
by representatives of Global South countries as being similar to the
many other kinds of foreign interference their countries had long
faced. As such, it was they, often backed by the Soviet Union, that
were the most consistent in claiming a right for all states to enjoy
protection from the meddling of others. This became a central demand
at the United Nations, including in the push for a New International
Economic Order in the early 1970s. The major exceptions to this were
apartheid in South Africa and Jim Crow in the United States, which
were seen as domestic legal and institutional arrangements that should
not be hidden behind sovereign walls. But when it came to economics,
the anti-interventionist emphasis of Global South countries was
consistent.

Within the IMF, the conflict over this issue began well before the
rise of the Washington Consensus. Already in the 1960s, there was a
growing backlash among representatives of Third World states to the
double standards and asymmetries of IMF interventionism. This reached
a fever pitch after the IMF bailed out the United Kingdom in 1967
without nearly as many demands on British policy as it routinely made
on the policies of members in, say, South America. As scholars like
Adom Getachew and Christy Thornton have shown, there was, well before
the Cold War, a long history of Global South officials and activists
attempting to make sovereign equality a reality in a deeply
hierarchical international system, but without calling for a full
retreat to nationalism. So, too, did the backlash to conditional
lending appear much earlier than during the wave of global protests
against the IMF in the 1990s.

DSJ: LET ME ASK YOU TO ELABORATE ON SOMETHING YOU ALLUDED TO
PREVIOUSLY. IN THE CONCLUSION OF _THE MEDDLERS_, YOU STATE THAT
“THE HISTORY TOLD IN THIS BOOK SUGGESTS THAT THE CHALLENGES OF
GLOBAL GOVERNANCE IN THE EARLY TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY ARE MORE
SIGNIFICANT THAN WHAT IS IMPLIED BY STYLIZED HISTORIES OF EMBEDDED
LIBERALISM AND ITS COLLAPSE INTO NEOLIBERALISM.” IS THIS AN
INDICTMENT AGAINST LIBERALISM IN GENERAL? DO LIBERALISM AND EMPIRE GO
HAND IN HAND?

JM: If we focus too much on the relatively recent history of
neoliberalism, we risk overlooking a much longer-term evolution in the
relationship of global capitalism and empire. We miss that we continue
to live in a world shaped by older practices of informal financial
imperialism, which date back at least to the mid-19th century and have
existed under the many varieties of liberalism that historians and
social scientists often see as neatly separated: classical liberalism,
“embedded liberalism,” neoliberalism, and so on. Structural
adjustment is not just a kind of distant relative of empire, but its
direct descendant.

DSJ: I RECENTLY
[[link removed]] INTERVIEWED
GARY GERSTLE, WHOSE NEW BOOK ON THE RISE AND FALL OF NEOLIBERALISM
SPECIFICALLY ARGUES THAT SOMETHING LIKE “EMBEDDED LIBERALISM” DID
COLLAPSE INTO NEOLIBERALISM, EVENTUALLY BRINGING DOWN THE NEW DEAL
ORDER WITH IT. GERSTLE ALSO ARGUES FOR A GLOBAL PERSPECTIVE, BUT SEES
THE RISE OF A NEOLIBERAL ORDER BEING INSEPARABLE FROM THE DOWNFALL OF
THE SOVIET UNION. HOW, THOUGH, DO YOU EXPLAIN THE GRADUAL UNDERMINING
OF THE NEW DEAL SINCE THE 1970S (SOMETHING THAT HAS ANALOGUES ACROSS
THE NORTH ATLANTIC) FROM THE GLOBAL PERSPECTIVE YOU PUT FORWARD IN THE
BOOK?

JM: Generally, accounts of IMF interventionism focus on the
transition from the supposed Keynesian consensus of the early Cold War
to the neoliberalism of the late 20th century. On this telling, the
Bretton Woods system replaced the interwar gold standard with a new
international system that allowed states more autonomy to pursue
expansive policies, build welfare regimes, and insulate their citizens
from economic crisis—all without resorting to the kind of
competitive nationalism that shattered the world economy in the 1930s.
The insight of the Estonian economist Ragnar Nurkse is often used as
shorthand for this innovation: The world economy was now to be
governed for the sake of domestic social and economic priorities, not
the other way around. The political scientist John Ruggie described
this arrangement as an “embedded liberal” compromise in 1982.

But this narrative relies on a mythical rendering of the mid-20th
century. This kind of autonomy was a luxury that few states could
afford. Now this is not to say that neoliberalism is not real or that
the undermining of postwar social democratic arrangements, where they
existed, was not a major political development with worldwide
consequences. Far from it. But I think we should be careful to avoid
nostalgia for a postwar moment when social democracy was secure,
states could control their own economic destinies, and welfarism was
vibrant and universal. We know full well just how much this is a myth
on the national level.

The racist compromises and structural contradictions at the heart of
the New Deal state are obvious to US historians; so too is it clear
that Keynesianism was much less of a consensus in postwar America than
many would like to think. What I want us to see is that we should also
be wary of using the concept of embedded liberalism to describe the
global order after 1945, unless we’re referring to a small handful
of relatively wealthy states in the North Atlantic during a brief
period of time. Obviously, much of the world still lived within the
confines of colonial empires, and few states that achieved “flag
independence” saw this translate into robust autonomy in practice.
Embedded liberalism may have been something that US and British
officials talked a lot about during the Second World War. But it was
not something that ever became an organizing logic of the global order
after 1945, as much as we’d like to wish that it had and that it
could somehow be recaptured today.

DSJ: WHAT HISTORICAL ALTERNATIVES MIGHT WE CONSIDER—PATHS NOT
TAKEN—THAT WOULD ALLOW US TO RETHINK THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN THE
NATIONAL AND THE INTERNATIONAL SO AS TO OVERCOME MEDDLERS TODAY?

JM: There are pushes for reform at the IMF that we should encourage,
and new ideas are clearly taking root in the institution. There’s a
welcome recognition among some IMF officials that the institution
overreached in the 1990s and that forms of lending without strings
attached, like special drawing rights, have a place in the
institution’s toolkit. There are efforts to reform how the IMF
treats debtors, particularly by reducing its punitive surcharges. And
the G20—if it’s not to be completely hamstrung by great power
competition—has some potential to lead collective efforts at
sovereign debt relief. Despite the current moment of global crisis (or
perhaps because of it), now is a time when there are vibrant and
productive discussions about how to reform international economic
institutions.

But I also think we need to escape thinking in terms of reaching “a
new Bretton Woods,” as is so often the tagline of these calls for
reform, or of limiting our ambitions to tweaking existing
institutions. These institutions were designed at a time when empire
was still taken for granted as an organizing principle of the global
order, and were set up to ensure the dominance of one great power. We
need to think creatively, from the bottom up, about what kinds of
institutions might actually work in our multipolar and unstable world
order: institutions that are able to achieve collective aims, whether
this is the reduction of global inequalities or mitigating climate
change, and that states look to with enthusiasm, not just under
duress.

I don’t have the answer to what exactly this would look like. But I
see this as a long-term effort that needs to be engaged across
multiple sites of scholarship, politics, and social movements. I find
it difficult to imagine life on earth continuing as we know it if we
cannot craft collective responses to the existential challenges we
face. But we can’t begin to imagine what is politically feasible
without reckoning with how we’ve arrived where we are now—and with
how the legacies of empire need to be continually overcome in the
pursuit of new and more just forms of international cooperation.

DANIEL STEINMETZ-JENKINS
[[link removed]] runs a
regular interview series with _The Nation. _ He is an assistant
professor in the College of Social Studies at Wesleyan University. He
is writing a book for Columbia University Press titled_ Impossible
Peace, Improbable War: Raymond Aron and World Order_.

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* IMF
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* colonialism
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* neocolonialism
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* imperialism
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* international affairs
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* Austerity
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* inflation
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* World Bank
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