ShareThisThe annual meetings of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank in Washington D.C. over the weekend have reconfirmed the increasingly central roles of these global institutions, established during World War II. World Bank President Robert Zoellick occupied a particularly prominent role, reiterating points made at the London G20 summit and elsewhere concerning the enormous threat of the global recession to the already poor populations of the world.
The World Bank has announced a number of large scale but also specific policy initiatives, including committing $45 billion over the next three years to support infrastructure projects in poor nations. This is $15 billion more than the Bank spent in this sector in the three years before the current international crisis.
Bank President Zoellick also has been in the forefront of institutional reform within international organizations. In Washington, he reiterated that the rich nations should "reconsider old prerogatives" and allow China, India and other developing countries a greater voice in management of international institutions.
Zoellick himself personifies the durable dimensions of America's internationalism, which abruptly succeeded traditional isolationism in 1941 in the bloody wake of the attack on Pearl Harbor. President Bush described Zoellick as "a committed internationalist" when nominating him in 2007 to lead the Bank.
By so doing, Bush confirmed the end of the cowboy neo-conservatism, and policy unilateralism, of his first term. Beleaguered Bush also reconfirmed the enduring importance of the United Nations family of institutions, envisioned by President Franklin D. Roosevelt and Prime Minister Winston Churchill even before Pearl Harbor, and planned in some detail during the course of World War II.
The Bretton Woods Conference of 1944, held the year before the surrenders of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan, hammered out the structure of UN economic organizations. In additional to the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, they include the World Trade Organization (previously the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade).
Zoellick, previously a Vice Chairman at investment bank Goldman Sachs, has extensive senior government experience, especially in economic policy, reaching back to the Reagan and first Bush administrations. Noboru Hatakeyama, head of the Japan Economic Foundation and former very senior vice minister of his nation's ministry of trade and industry, got to know Zoellick well during complex, tough trade negotiations in these years. In commenting on the nomination, he described his former negotiating adversary as highly intelligent negotiator and also "very sincere," reflected in disarming candor.
Not surprisingly, World Bank presidents generally have had senior executive experience in banking or industry. This in turn has helped in trying to run the enormous global bureaucracy. During a long tenure, Robert McNamara greatly increased the scale and visibility of Bank lending. In less dramatic but crucial fashion, his successor Tom Clausen increased member government contributions to pay for all the new activity. Clausen also was able to institute merit pay differentials, generally considered impossible to achieve.
UN institutions provide not only forums for at times endless discussion but also a comprehensive web of international laws, regulations and understandings that have provided the foundation for unprecedented global economic growth and prosperity. Churchill, Roosevelt and their deputies were hardly perfect, but the remarkable vision and determination they personified underwrite the overall security we too often take for granted.
In a changing global order, Americans continue to play very prominent roles in these vital agencies.
Arthur I. Cyr is Clausen Distinguished Professor at Carthage College and author of 'After the Cold War'(NYU Press and Macmillan/Palgrave). E-mail him at acyr(at)carthage.edu
COLUMN
