Making promises in India
As noted in the morning brief, IMF chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn was in India this week and he reportedly opined there on the future governance of the Fund. Let us be candid. The (era of ) so-called agreements between the US and Europeans, whereby the IMF head used to be European and the World Bank president ...
As noted in the morning brief, IMF chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn was in India this week and he reportedly opined there on the future governance of the Fund.
As noted in the morning brief, IMF chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn was in India this week and he reportedly opined there on the future governance of the Fund.
Let us be candid. The (era of ) so-called agreements between the US and Europeans, whereby the IMF head used to be European and the World Bank president American is over…I think it will be just fair that the next leader of the two institutions will come from somewhere else in the world.
I’ve heard Strauss-Kahn say similar things in other venues, but his comments are notable for a couple of reasons. First, it’s the second time in the past few weeks that a major international figure has come to India and hinted at significant changes in the international governance architecture. President Obama, of course, was explicit about U.S. support for India’s Security Council membership. Strauss-Kahn here was more indirect, but given the fact that several Indians might be considered for the managing director post, his comments have a special significance, as he no doubt knew. Some fairly large expectations are being created about a reshuffling in global governance—expectations that may be tough to fulfill any time soon.
And that leads to the second significant point about Strauss-Kahn’s comment: he’s really not in a position to make them. The shareholders of the IMF decide on who will be the next managing director, and it’s for them to decide whether the era of U.S. and European privilege has ended. I’ve got no problem with the substance of Strauss-Kahn’s comments, but if I were a finance minister or IMF executive director, I’d be just a bit rankled at the presumptuousness. It’s almost as if he’s speaking like a president, rather than an international civil servant…
David Bosco is a professor at Indiana University’s Hamilton Lugar School of Global and International Studies. He is the author of The Poseidon Project: The Struggle to Govern the World’s Oceans. Twitter: @multilateralist
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