Silences of Bretton Woods: gender inequality, racial discrimination and environmental degradation

Abstract

In the formal deliberations of the Bretton Woods conference, little was said about gender inequality, racial discrimination, or environmental degradation. At the time, however, the significance of these issues to international economic governance was prominently discussed elsewhere, including in other conferences planning the postwar international order. The fact that the Bretton Woods architects chose to ignore these issues, thus, was an anomaly that needs to be recognized as an important part of the content of the conference and its ‘embedded liberal’ normative framework. Explaining these silences also reveals important dimensions of the politics of Bretton Woods that have been understudied. More generally, this history highlights how efforts to encourage the Bretton Woods institutions to engage more with these three issues—and political resistance to those efforts—are not unique to the current era but were present at the founding of these bodies. It also contributes to recent calls for IPE scholars to devote more attention to the study of gender inequality, racial discrimination, and environmental degradation. These issues may be ‘blind spots’ in contemporary IPE, but discussions of their relevance to international economic governance have deep historical roots, including at the creation of the postwar international economic order.