The Emperor’s New Suit: The New International Financial Architecture as a Reinvention of the Washington Consensus

Abstract

Many analysts have studied the New International Financial Architecture (NIFA) as a reaction to the growing financial instability in emerging market economies. The NIFA, like its predecessor the Washington Consensus, is an emerging conjuncture of institutions, practices, and discourses that aim to provide a managing infrastructure for the movement of global capital flows. Until now, the debate surrounding the NIFA has, for the most part, remained focused on the efficacy of its new institutional embellishments, especially their ability to limit systemic instability by harmonizing international policy proscriptions with national forms of governance. I attempt to complement these investigations into the nature of the NIFA by asking the question, who benefits? In order to tackle this question it is necessary to transcend the usual institutional focus of regime theory by looking at the relations of power that underscore the NIFA. To this end, I situate the NIFA within two features of the global political economy: the recent debates over capital controls; and the structural power of the United States. I suggest that while the NIFA is often presented as a shift toward a compromise between financial stability and deregulation (the Third Way), it remains oriented toward preserving the imperative of free capital mobility rather than implementing profound political changes in the functioning and regulation of global financial flows. This position is clearly reflected in Washington's tenacious resistance to universal capital controls. The big winners of maintaining the imperative of capital account liberalization are unmistakably global financial players and the United States. To elaborate, the following section sketches the links between the Washington Consensus (or, the old international financial architecture), the United States, and global finance. The Washington Consensus and U.S. Structural Power Since the demise of the Bretton Woods system in 1971, the world economy has shifted back to a period dominated by the freedom of the market, or what Karl Polanyi referred to as the first of two phases of capitalist development (the double-movement (1)). Briefly, the first movement (or Phase I) encompasses a period of growth where the forces of market and economic liberalism are in a more dominant position. One of the underlying reasons for this shift is tied to the larger crisis of fordist capitalism in the world economy and the policy option of the United States to maintain its structural power in these changing circumstances. As Eric Helleiner notes, this strategy preserved the privileged global financial position of the United States largely by securing the greenback's central international role and helping the United States to continue to fund growing budget and trade deficits with foreign funds. (2) Owing to its ability to freely decide the price of the world's trading and reserve currency, the United St ates has been able to exercise structural power (not behavioral power) over other states by influencing international monetary and financial arrangements in the global economy. (3) In the absence of an interstate consensus, the United States flexed its powerful muscles to unilaterally pursue, inter alia, a post-Bretton Woods development agenda for the Southern Hemisphere that would further its interests. (4) Nevertheless, it was not until the late 1980s that the term the Washington Consensus was formulated in Washington among members of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the U.S. Treasury Department, and the World Bank. (5) The consensus held that macrostability, liberalization (lowering tariff barriers and market deregulation), and privatization were the three keys to prosperity. (6) Largely through the means of conditionality--policy reforms in exchange for IMF and World Bank loans--this development philosophy is transmitted to debtor countries in Latin America, Asia, and Africa by strongly encouraging governments to lift barriers to imports and exports to both outside investment and to foreign currency transactions if full economic expansion is to be achieved. …