International organizations and the shadow of colonialism

As this story notes (reg. required), the World Bank is signaling a new interest in basic elements of governance, including policing:

The World Bank is calling for development organizations to place a new emphasis on improving police protection to halt the violence gripping dozens of poor nations.

In a major report ahead of its spring meeting this week, the bank breaks from its traditional reluctance to address security and policing concerns. The bank had long viewed these problems as too political to take on, but now identifies them as significant obstacles to job creation and economic development.

This is just one step in a broad retreat from the Bank’s Cold War reluctance to meddle in delicate internal governance questions. When the Cold War ended, the strategic need to prop up all sorts of kleptocratic governments became less pressing, gradually clearing the way for the Bank to focus on previously inconvenient subjects like corruption. James Wolfensohn, Bank president from 1995 to 2005, recalls being shocked that corruption wasn’t on the Bank’s agenda when he took over. "There was a wall of silence surrounding this critical issue," he wrote in a recent memoir. 

The Bank’s transformation into an institution that focuses on policing and corruption is just one part of a broader shift in the workload of international organizations. Organizations like the Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and the United Nations–conceived largely as mechanisms for managing economic and political relations between states–now spend vast resources and time implementing and strengthening basic governance within states. Through its loan conditionality, the IMF now gets its hands much deeper into the internal workings of states than the negotiatiors at Bretton Woods likely anticipated. The UN Security Council now spends the bulk of its time managing peacekeeping operations in weak and failing states. New organizations, like the International Criminal Court, have sprung up to address other gaps in the international community’s ability to provide governance functions normally thought of as belonging to the state.  

Particularly on the left, critics often deride these institutions and activities as "neo-colonial." And in some ways, the charges are absurd. Sovereign governments have consented to join and support these organizations, which are staffed by people from all over the world. But the description also contains an essential truth that’s easily forgotten (though perhaps harder to forget on a day when French forces, working with the UN, seized a wayward Ivorian leader): just as the more enlightened colonialists were trying to transfer basic governance skills and conceptions of decent government, so too are today’s international bureaucrats.