** This is the introduction to a forum comprising three reviews of Jamie Martin’s The Meddlers: Sovereignty, Empire, and the Birth of Global Economic Governance. Each day this week one review will be published, and Professor Martin will then respond on Friday. **
Since the Covid-19 pandemic, the IMF has been faced with a paradoxical situation. On the one hand, the return of inflation on a global scale reaffirms its pre-eminence at the heart of the international monetary system. On the other hand, the rise of China as the main creditor of many defaulting states (Zambia, Pakistan, Sri Lanka) questions the central place it has held for over seventy years in any debt restructuring. Global economic governance, of which the Fund has been a keystone since 1945, is therefore going through a turbulent period. In this age of global economic upheaval, Jamie Martin’s The Meddlers, considerably enriches the analysis of this phenomenon by giving it genuine historical depth.
Building upon work of the political scientist Louis Pauly and, above all, the historian Patricia Clavin, Jamie Martin, assistant professor at Harvard, traces the genesis of international economic governance back to the interwar period. He shows how, at the end of the First World War, the Allies began to entrench the logic underlying the mechanisms whereby they won the war: by acquiring decisive economic and logistical advantages through international cooperation. To do this, Martin deploys an impressive number of varied sources. In addition to British, French, American and Indian national archives, he draws on a large corpus of bank records (from the Bank for International Settlements, the Banque de France, the Bank of England, and HSBC), intergovernmental organizations (the League of Nations and Inter-Allied Food Council) and private papers (including those of Charles Addis, Thomas Lamont, Arthur Salter, Jean Monnet). But it is first and foremost because of its innovative perspective, focusing on “how the first international economic institutions developed the power to open the internal economic spaces of sovereign states to the involvement of “outsiders””, that the book stands out. With this resolutely political framework, Martin focuses on the rise of the “meddling power”; he explores the conflicts surrounding its legitimacy and its objectives over more than twenty years. In doing so, he shows that those who supported meddling power and its development were convinced liberals for whom it was necessary to limit state sovereignty in order to preserve the planetary domination of Europe and the stability of global capitalism. Thus, like Nicholas Mulder’s book on the rise of economic sanctions in the same period, Jamie Martin brilliantly articulates a history of the ideas of global economic governance and a social history of those who defend them, the titular “meddlers”, whom he also calls the “architects” of the first global economic institutions.
Particularly stimulating in its approach, Jamie Martin’s book is also remarkable for the diversity of the areas of the international economy that it examines and over which the meddlers attempted to gain control throughout the interwar period. The first chapter analyses the First World War as a crucible in which intergovernmental economic cooperation became an essential aspect of the war effort, particularly on the production of essential raw materials such as nitrate of soda, tungsten, or tin. Chapters 2 and 3 then deal with financial issues. The second chapter examines the conditional loan mechanisms set up in the early 1920s. In the summer of 1922, at the initiative of France and with the support of the United Kingdom, the League of Nations organized a financial control over one of the most illustrious defeated countries: Austria. Inspired by the imperialist institutions created to interfere in the internal affairs of Egypt and the Ottoman Empire in the late nineteenth century, this control was nevertheless presented by its promoters as being quite different from these embarrassing precedents. French diplomats and British financiers justified it by describing it as a disinterested and legitimate intervention due to Austria’s membership in the League of Nations. However, as Martin shows, behind this façade, the financial subjection of Austria was for Montagu Norman, Governor of the Bank of England, a leverage for increasing the independence of central banks on the Old Continent. Under this system, any new loans would be conditional on an increase in the autonomy of the Austrian National Bank. Following this analysis, the third chapter then looks back at the coordination efforts of the various central banks in the 1920s and traces the steps leading to the creation in 1930 of the Bank for International Settlements.
After these financial issues, the following sections explores areas less obviously associated with global economic governance. Chapter 4 studies the birth of development aid programs, and looks back at the plans designed to help Greece welcome the many refugees arriving on its soil after the dismantling of the Ottoman Empire, and those to support the Nationalist Chinese government’s proactive policy of infrastructural and economic modernization in the 1930s. Chapter 5 then extends the insights of Chapter 1 into the control of the production and trade of certain raw materials that were particularly important for the war effort between 1914 and 1918. It shows that, despite the difficulties of financial and commercial inter-state coordination, the Great Depression fostered inter-governmental cooperation over a strategic commodity like tin. In doing so, the book highlights the extremely concrete and local consequences of the rise of meddling institutions like the Refugee Settlement Commission (RSC) of the League of Nations in the case of loans to the Greek government or the International Tin Committee (ITC) in the case of tin management. Refugees arriving in Greece were sent to work in fields in Macedonia or in carpet factories by the RSC. In Malaysia, the implementation of a worldwide restriction on tin production by the ITC led several small companies to go bankrupt and thousands of miners to lose their jobs.
The rise of the new international institutions did not only have far-reaching consequences; it was also quickly contested by a wide range of actors, the delicate web of whose hetereogenous aims is carefully unraveled by Martin. The Austrian government, for example, complained that its sovereignty was blatantly encroached when its public finances fell under the control of the Economic and Financial Committee of the League of Nations. When similar treatment was contemplated in Portugal in 1927, the minister of Finances who had proposed calling for help from the League was quickly dismissed following fierce opposition to the prospect of international interference. The conglomerates dominating the tin industry as well as some members of the Malaysian colonial government concerned about the loss of their imperial sovereignty also questioned the relevance of an international management of global commodities. The interwar period was therefore simultaneously the time when the “meddling power”, which today justifies the ability of organizations such as the IMF to act, took off and gained legitimacy, and the period when the tensions that still permeate global economic governance first arose. It was at this time that contemporary debates were structured, even though their terms have been subject to frequent renegotiation since the 1930s. Should domestic economic policies be opened to external scrutiny – if so, which? Are there states that have a greater right to autonomy from external interference, and which de facto enjoy such a right?
To discuss these issues at the heart of international politics, this book forum invites three leading academics to share their thoughts on Jamie Martin’s book. Madeline Woker is an early-career fellow at the Collegium Helveticum and Permanent Lecturer at the University of Sheffield, and a specialist in the economic, financial, and fiscal history of the French empire. Mira Sigelberg is a University Associate Professor in the History of International Political Thought at Cambridge University; her expertise lies at the intersection of international history and law. Finally, Charles Sabel is the Maurice T. Moore Professor of Law at Columbia Law School, where he is currently working experimentalist and incremental approaches to solving global problems like world trade and climate change. In the next week, responses to The Meddlers by all three will appear here, at Tocqueville 21, followed by a response from the author.