Bretton Woods from UNCTAD
by
Danny Quah
Oct 2024
I did this UNCTAD podcast in Geneva in mid-September, on the Bretton Woods system (80 this year).
When I think back to my conversation with Sarah Toms, and I continue to hear calls for fundamental reform of rules-based institutions because "those who wrote the rules wrote those rules to benefit themselves", I wonder why a mere rewrite of rules would magically guarantee that possibility has been wrung out of the system. Today, with the original rule-drafters turning their backs on the system, there's hardly resounding evidence that the system has overly benefited those then Great Powers.
And I wonder if the rules were to be sensibly rewritten, how they would end up looking very different from three guiding principles: (a) seek a level playing field; (b) commit to peaceful dispute resolution; (c) have each nation treat others as that nation would wish itself to be treated. Because these features are exactly what the multilateral system already carries.
For those nations who would otherwise feel small and disadvantaged there should be lots to like in a one-world vision of an international community of nations engaging with one another under rules informed by the consent of the governed and shaped by the organised opinion of humanity.
These rules of multilateralism also contain something we see hardly practiced in the international system but badly needed: let lead the capable, whether small state or Great Power.
We should be working to make a good system work, not mobilizing to tear it down.