It's not the IMF: it's the policies, stupid Protesters' calls to abolish global economic institutions risk leaving the world even more at the mercy of untrammelled capitalism, says economics reporter Charlotte Denny Charlotte Denny Monday April 17 2000 The Guardian
It was dubbed the battle of Seattle East by the demonstrators. And sure enough, the television pictures of the protests surrounding the weekend's meeting of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund were a re-run of the demonstrations which rocked the World Trade Organisation's gathering in the west coast city last November. A rag-tag coalition of environmentalists, Third World activists, anarchists and trade unionists facing ranks of baton-wielding police had succeeded in if not actually shutting down the IMF, then at least preventing some of the participants - including the French finance minister, Laurent Fabius - from getting to its main spring meeting.
For multilateral organisations who are more used to appearing on the City pages than heading the Nine O'Clock news, this has all come as a bit of a shock. The mandate of the Fund and the Bank is to keep the world economy on course and promote third world development. Normally their pronouncements attract minimal interest from outsiders aside from financial journalists and market analysts. The accusation that they are widening the global gap between rich and poor - let alone the more extreme charge that they are killing poor people - is met with baffled incomprehension. But even their critics are somewhat dismayed by the calls from the protestors for the abolition of the two organisations.
Aid agencies like Oxfam, who have spent years lobbying the Bank and the Fund to relax their rigid policies for economic reform in the developing world, say the protestors are in danger of throwing out the baby with the bathwater. In an increasingly integrated world economy, the institutions which are supposed to keep the system on track are more important than ever. The Bank and the Fund can be rightly criticised for their economic prescriptions they have foisted on the third world, but the solution is not to scrap them but to reform them. In other words, it's not the institutions, it's the policies, stupid.
The opposition to the Bank and the Fund has created some strange bedfellows even by the standards of US politics. Anarchists on the left have been joined by the neo-liberals on the right in their call for the abolition of the institutions designed to manage the world economy. The right wants to let market forces rip untrammelled by any kind of global regulation. If this weekend's protests cast a spotlight on the Bank and Fund's activities and brings a little humility to their approach, then the protestors will have achieved something. But there is a real danger that if they destroy the multilateral organisations, they may end up making the world a safer place for global capitalism.
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