Following the demise of the post-war monetary order in the early 1970s (the Bretton Woods system, named after its birthplace), the so called “Bretton Woods twins”, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund had to rethink their roles. The 1970s gave them the possibility to rebrand themselves. By the end of the decade, these institutions had started dealing with the debt crises plaguing countries in the Global South as well as the socialist (later post-socialist) states of Central and Eastern Europe. Typically, they agreed to lend large amounts of money to countries facing severe macro-economic instabilities in exchange for structural economic reforms and macroeconomic stabilization. The standard reform package, which followed neoliberal conventions dubbed the “Washington Consensus” by 1990, included the balancing of budgets, devaluation of the local currency, the opening of domestic markets to international trade and finance, deregulation, and the privatization of parastatals. These measures aimed at integrating debtor countries into the capitalist world economy. Consequently, social scientists and historians have described the World Bank and IMF as “globalizers” (Ngaire Woods) and “powerful sponsor[s] of global financial deregulation” (Mark Mazower) and have referred to the period as one of “IMF-driven globalization” (Vijay Prashad).
While such labels accurately depict the results of many of the efforts undertaken by these institutions, they do not tell the full story. Structural adjustment programs also contributed to processes of deglobalization. In several cases international trade actually declined during the period of adjustment. From 1983 to 1993 Latin America’s share of the world trade in merchandise dropped from 5.8% to 4.4%, while Africa’s roughly halved to 2.5%. It actually took African countries until 1995/96 until they imported and exported as much merchandise as they had in 1980/81. Increasingly impoverished societies became less attractive markets for multinational enterprises and airlines stopped offering transcontinental flights to destinations like Lusaka, the Zambian capital, in the 1980s and 1990s. In a very practical sense, parts of the developing world were cut off from the rest of the globe. The role of the Bretton Woods institutions is thus arguably more complex than that of “globalizers” and relentless promoters of free market fundamentalism.
Focusing on the period of “neoliberal globalization” from the 1970s to the financial crisis of 2007/08, the conference aims to discuss the role that the IMF and the World Bank played in the process. The conference will address issues such as:
a) The agency of structural adjustment programs: Recently historians and social scientists have started to debate whether the political, economic, and intellectual underpinnings of structural adjustment programs were solely grounded in thinking that took place in Western Europe and in the United States. In fact, there is a growing body of literature that is rethinking the agency and origins of (neoliberal) structural adjustment (e.g. Connell/Dados). According to this view, countries of the Global South were not simply passive recipients of policies designed in Washington or London, but actually played a significant role in shaping them. This opens venues for new research. For example, when referring to the Global South, the history of late 20th century structural adjustment intersected and can only be fully comprehended within the colonial and postcolonial context in which these countries existed, organized their economic systems, and “requested” foreign assistance. Without denying the obvious centrality of the Bretton Woods Twins in the formulation of structural adjustment and neoliberal policies, the conference is open to debate on whether these reforms were ultimately requested, or instead were stimulated by a Global South that had already, at least partially, adopted parts of these policies. We thus want to ask: who shaped structural adjustment programs? Were IMF and World Bank missions or Western debtor governments the key actors (giving credence to contemporary accusations of neo-colonialism)? Or were debtor governments in charge, and if so, which branches within them? Which role did civil society and the media play? How did academic “experts” influence the outcome?
b) How did structural adjustment programs re-shape debtor economies and particularly public sectors within them? Besides attacks on large parastatal sectors, did they also entail the slashing of education and health budgets? Were they thus tantamount to adjustment “without a human face,” as the well-known 1987 UNICEF report suggested? Or were they a means for fighting poverty, which became a central World Bank target again in the 1990s? What was their connection to the restructuring of agricultural systems in Africa? Also, how were structural adjustment programs used in the Global South by postcolonial elites to re-organize the structure of the public and private sectors to their own advantage? What kind of debate existed with the World Bank and the IMF in this regard? Were there cases in which the World Bank acted as an agent of democratization against the will of post-colonial elites?
c) How were programs of structural adjustment received by the populations of recipient countries? Which groups were supporting the policies of stabilization and liberalization? And who was fighting them – sometimes up to the point of rioting, as in Egypt or Venezuela? Who was losing and who were the beneficiaries of reform, for instance because they could buy up former parastatals on the cheap when these were privatized in large numbers.
d) How did recipient countries change the Bretton Woods institutions in return? Did their public appeals towards and criticism of the World Bank and IMF or their internal lobbying modify the institutions’ outlooks on adjustment programs? Can we understand, for instance, the increasing focus on poverty reduction and “social action programs” to accompany structural adjustment in the 1990s as a reaction by the Bretton Woods twins to accusations from debtor countries hit the hardest by its policies?
e) Finally, how did these processes play out in different regions and times? Namely in Africa, Asia and Latin America since the late 1970s, in socialist and post-socialist Eastern Europe beginning in the 1980s, and in the region that benefited above all from financial globalization: East Asia. Regarding socialism, the conference aims to highlight the agency that existed in socialist market thinking well before the fall of the Soviet Union and that had already introduced concepts like fiscal discipline and austerity as key features of many eastern European countries’ economic outlooks. While the role of the World Bank and the IMF was instrumental in bringing down socialism during the 1980s and the 1990s, endogenous neoliberal ideas already existed in late socialist Eastern Europe, as well as in the Soviet Union. How does this change the predominant narrative of the story that tends to “victimize” these actors instead of giving them the agency they deserve?
We invite proposals for papers dealing with these and related questions. As in-depth historical studies dealing with the role of the Bretton Woods twins and structural adjustment programs in the era of “neoliberal globalization” barely exist, we particularly encourage proposals based on archival work to shed light on a wide range of topics that have been left unexplored by historians. As the intended conference seeks to foreground discussion and argument, we will dispense with long presentations and instead place two pre-circulated papers in conversation in each 90-minute-panel and offer commentary by a third participant. If you are interested in presenting at the conference, please submit a paper proposal of 300 words and a short CV by 19th January 2024 to jonas.kreienbaum@fu-berlin.de or federico.pachetti@uni-corvinus.hu. The conference will take place from 26th to 28th September 2024 at Corvinus University of Budapest.