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12. What Lessons for the Future?
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276 The UN and Global Political Economy 276 12 What Lessons for the Future? • The Contest for Global Economic Control • An Economic Security Council? • What Should Be Done to Reform the IMF? • What Should Be Done to Reform the World Bank? • WTO Rules: OK? • WTO Rules, Industrial Subsidies, and Development • Greater Developing-Country Participation in WTO Rule-Making • Can International Organizations Be Creative Intellectual Actors? The Contest for Global Economic Control Member governments support the UN for a variety of very different motives . It is a point that one writer emphasized in the following way: It is recorded that a traveller in France once came upon a wayside hotel named “The Immaculate Conception and Commercial.” This is a very apt name for the house in which the world lives and might appropriately be hung up as an inn-sign outside the Headquarters of the United Nations. Human motives, whether expressed individually or collectively, are just such a mixture of the lofty and the base, the sacred and the profane, the sublime and the ridiculous. It is to this complexity that we have to address ourselves, and within the walls of this house we have to live and work.1 In seeking to draw lessons for the future, as we do in this final chapter, we shall bear this advice firmly in mind. Lessons that assume that human nature harbors, or can be easily made to harbor, only lofty aspirations and noble motivation will not be very useful ones. Our zeal to escape from the mistakes and muddles of the past should not lead us to call for a general march toward utopia. What Lessons for the Future? 277 Even in the earliest years of the UN, heady idealism was diluted by a strong dose of economic and financial calculation. Radically divergent views already existed about the constitutional relationship of the Bretton Woods institutions to the rest of the UN system. As we have seen in Chapter , both Harry Dexter White and Treasury secretary Henry Morgenthau were “determined that the United Nations was never going to tell the World Bank or the International Monetary Fund what to do.”2 The British firmly supported theAmericans on this point, and in the Anglo-American position was entrenched in letters of agreement exchanged between ECOSOC and the IMF and the World Bank. Nevertheless, other countries had taken a different stance and were willing to see the IMF and the bank subordinated to some form of UN control.3 The claim made by many developing countries that the Bretton Woods institutions should be part of a UN-based system of world government ,although overridden in ,continued to compete with the established fact that they operated as independent executive agencies whose actions could be influenced only through their own contribution-weighted systems of governance . This conflict smoldered on, and it animated much of the history with which our volume has been concerned. As UN membership began to change rapidly in size and composition with the grants of colonial independence of the s,different groups of UN members increasingly vied for control of the organization. Developed countries tussled with developing countries about nothing less momentous than the appropriate forms of global economic governance, and the phases of the struggle were played out in the diplomacy of the North-South dialogue.The developing countries had lost this conflict by , and indeed it is difficult to imagine how they could ever have won it. While it continued, it undermined the possibility that the UNCTAD secretariat could act successfully as a global think tank on trade and development,since they were also advisors to one of the parties to the contest. It would thus be misleadingly narrow to claim that the gradual eclipse suffered by the UNCTAD secretariat’s view of the links between trade, finance, and development was simply the product of differential rates of investment in development-policy research between the North and the South.That is because the decisions about how much to invest in such research, and who should do it, were determined as part of the larger contest. The campaign for SUNFED in the s, discussed in Chapter , was a crucial moment of the struggle.Its protagonists aimed not only at setting up a softloan agency for developing countries; they also wanted to create a new financial executive agency under UN control. In the first aim it succeeded, but in the latter aim it failed.This failure came about not because the campaign could not...