Trevor Manuel and the IMF job: It's a structural issue

I want to make a small contribution to the discussion around the (im)probability of Trevor Manuel being appointed as managing director of the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Parenthetically, this piece was originally written a week ago and was sent back to me last Friday for shortening. So, things might have happened in the meantime which might render this post meaningless. Anyway, the main point I want to make is one that may seem somewhat contradictory; there is little chance of Manuel getting the position, and even if he does, it would make no difference to anyone, in the short-to-medium term, other than to the pecuniary status of the office-bearer. The basis for this claim is two-fold. The “problem” with the IMF, and with organisations like the World Bank and World Trade Organisation (WTO), is structural. That the Europeans chose the head of the fund, that the United States chooses the president of the World Bank, and both veto the appointment of the WTO head, is part of the structure of post-war liberal international organisation. That is organisation as a process. It has almost nothing to do with “birthright”. If that were true, James Wolfensohn would not have become president of the World Bank. He was born in Australia, and US citizenship was granted to him before he could become president of the bank. All of this should be elementary knowledge to any first or second year international political economy student. We should have some understanding of this structure to which I refer.

The structure of the post-war liberal international economic order
The power that determines the purpose and place of the IMF in international economic relations is structural. This structure is one that was forged by European dominance and control of the world during the period of formal colonialism, the seat of which was, effectively switched from Whitehall to Washington in the years immediately after the Second World War. The countries of the global south had little to no say in shaping the rules and institutions that swaddled the infant international organisations that, today, preside over late capitalist global governance. Interested readers may learn something about this by trying to establish how many African countries were represented at the Bretton Woods conference that created the bank-fund, or that hammered out the first General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (Gatt), which served as the legal and institutional basis for global free trade since at least 1947. Space constraints prevent me from fully presenting this data.

The idea that everyone is equal before the laws of organisations like the World Bank, the IMF or the WTO is just rubbish. One would have to resort to rather profound cognitive dissonance to conjure some other reality. The fact is that the post-war order was “designed and controlled” by the Europeans — by Europeans I refer not to a cartographic entity, but to Europe and what Angus Maddison referred to as its offshoots in North America. (Go ahead, google Angus Maddison, you will probably take his word over mine.) It is foolish to envisage that any dominant group would design an order that does not benefit itself, first. This post-war order is, thus, fundamentally unequal. The US and EU dominate almost every aspect of the day-to-day work within the three organisations, which preside over what Keynes idealised as his institutions for world governance — in terms of both, actual, numerical representation, and in decision-making. Individual agency, as an effective means for altering the structure of global governance that has growing quite significantly in the post-war period, is almost meaningless.

Manuel and the double difficulty of effecting structural change
The history and structure of international inequality is predicated, precisely, on the idea that the Europeans “created” the world in the 20th century, and that they do/should remain in control of it. In one rather revelatory study (on the WTO) involving US trade representatives, they were quite forthright in the proclamation that the Gatt was a rich man’s club created by the diktat of the US and that the US let poor countries in too soon. These were the actual words they used. Anyway, this structural approach may help us understand how it came to be that the US appoints the president of the bank, and the EU chose the managing director of the IMF. Under these arrangements, there is a type of double-difficult effect at play with respect to appointing someone from the global south to the head of the IMF. The first difficulty is actually getting the EU to surrender its position of power, dominance and control, the second difficulty is that even if someone like Manuel is appointed, it would make no difference because the structure of post-war liberal international economic relations is such that the outcomes are guaranteed — regardless of which (individual) is at the head of the IMF or the bank.

For instance, during my time at the bank I worked in the office of Joe Stiglitz, a profoundly mainstream (individual) from the US, who was spat out of the organisation because he was considered to be “too radical”. There is nothing radical about Stiglitz. Consider his (personal) pedigree before he came to the bank: he was white, male, he served as an economic adviser for former US president Bill Clinton (who continued the right-wing monetarism of Ronald Reagan) he taught at Stanford University, and he is one of the founding thinkers of information economics. We should not ask Stiglitz to describe himself. A great German thinker once wrote: “Whilst in ordinary life every shopkeeper is very well able to distinguish between what somebody professes to be and what he really is, our historians have not yet won even this trivial insight. They take every epoch at its word and believe that everything it says and imagines about itself is true.” The point, nonetheless, is that if this white male, a Washington insider, who would go on to win a Nobel Prize (granted the Nobel people are terribly conservative), could not change the bank-fund, what chance has Manuel? The problem is structural. It would be remiss of me, not to add that we appear to be in an interregnum, and any next order that emerges may affect structural change.