Does anyone believe in the independence of international officials?

The debate about who should be take over the International Monetary Fund has within it a number of  interesting, but pretty much unexamined assumptions (and I’ve made them myself at times). First, and most fundamentally, it’s being assumed that who the next managing director is matters a great deal. Does it? Ultimately, the IMF is a shareholder organization controlled by its executive board. Yes, the fund’s staff and management can be quite influential, particularly when the shareholders aren’t paying much attention. But on the issues that everyone is talking about–notably the European bailouts–the key shareholders are paying plenty of attention, and every IMF decision is a product of shareholder consensus, not the managing director’s whim.

A second dubious assumption is that the next IMF head will simply reflect the biases and policy priorities of his or her home country or region. And so the question of whether the next chief comes from Europe or one of the emerging economies becomes a question of what worldview will dominate at the fund. Using this reasoning, Paul Blustein argues that Europeans should be all but precluded from running the fund again:

The crisis in the eurozone doesn’t fortify the argument for keeping the top IMF post in European hands; on the contrary, it makes the opposing case more compelling than ever.

As the region most desperately in need of IMF loans — and IMF-guided discipline — Europe shouldn’t get to choose the person with the greatest influence over the terms. The blatancy of that conflict of interest ought to prick the conscience of even the most hard-boiled believer in realpolitik. And the handling of the eurozone crisis to date has already aroused widespread misgivings that Europe’s most powerful governments are using their sway over IMF policy to obtain deals that suit their political interests.

Neither Blustein nor anyone else in the debate seems to give much credence to the notion that an individual can have one set of obligations and priorities when serving as a national minister but another set as an interventional civil servant. Indeed, the possibility of independence and impartiality appears to be absent from the debate. I understand that skepticism. If she’s selected, for example, French minister Christine Lagarde would not drop all her ideological and intellectual baggage at the door of IMF headquarters. Her worldview would still be Western, and European in particular. (Perhaps more important, she might still have her eye on higher office back in France.)

But it’s unfair and overly cynical to exclude the possibility that she might perform her job impartially. What’s more, her worldview may evolve considerably as she gets to know the fund and its work. As in any organization, I expect that the permanent IMF staff will "educate" its new leader; the institution itself has a worldview that will no doubt insinuate itself into the thinking of the new chief. Moreover, a new managing director is going to be under considerable pressure–particularly in these circumstances–to demonstrate that he or she is more than just a representative of  a certain region. Europeans might even find that Lagarde works so hard to appear even-handed that she’s tougher on them than a non-European.