** This is the first of 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. **
Jamie Martin’s The Meddlers: Sovereignty, Empire, and the Birth of Global Economic Governance builds on and sits at the intersection of rich and lively historiographies concerned with the history of interwar internationalism, the political economy of empire, the history of international development, the relationship between capitalism and democratic governance, and perhaps most importantly the history of global economic regulation and governance, which has benefited from a remarkable recent upsurge of interest.[ii]This is a timely book. At a time when the Bretton Woods institutions (IMF, World Bank) are faced with the slow death of the neoliberal Washington Consensus that they helped spawn, a historical inquiry into their deep, imperial origins is particularly welcome.
One major contribution of the book lies in its thorough analysis of “the first phase” of global economic governance which did not emerge only in the post-1944 world, Martin tells us, but in throes of the First World War as the Allied Powers sought ways to organize economic warfare against the Central Powers and win the war thanks to unprecedented coordinated economic planning. What comes out clearly in the first chapter and then re-appears episodically is a very stimulating argument about the novelty of international management of raw materials supply and procurement in the interwar era and the role it played in forcing the march of global economic institution-building.
The book also shows that conditional lending, a practice that we have come to associate with the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the post-Bretton Woods world of the 1970s in fact emerged much earlier, notably through the loans extended under the aegis of the League of Nations. One crucial difference however lies in the fact that the League – and its Economic and Financial Organization more specifically – was not lending its own money. In contrast, the IMF sits on a capital amounting close to $1tr and made up of the initial contributions of its member-shareholders as well as additional borrowed money. But not unlike today, these loans and the associated “meddling” in their recipients’ economies triggered intense controversies over sovereignty and interference.
The cases of Austria, Greece, and China are particularly illuminating, and the array of examples used – spanning Central Europe, Latin America, East and Southeast Asia – speak to the truly global nature of Martin’s analysis. This is international and global history at its best because it follows governance methods and institution-builders across national contexts and draws connections but never loses sight of where power lies. The book shows, notably, that “imagined standings in a hierarchical world order” often determined the degree and acceptability of meddling. Wasn’t it indeed precisely because they wanted to mitigate the “humiliation” of a recourse to the IMF that eurozone member states set up the European Stability Mechanism in 2012? Regional financial arrangements are also emerging elsewhere and have already begun to decenter the IMF and the West.[iii] So have the so-called non-Paris Club creditors, most importantly China.
What follows are several remarks, mostly formulated as questions, which have to do with Jamie Martin’s engagement with empire, the politics of interwar meddling in Austria, Greece, and China described in chapters 2 and 4 respectively, the author’s choice of “meddling projects”, and finally the implications that the book’s findings may have for discussions about the future of global economic governance. These should by no means be interpreted as criticisms: if anything, they testify to the richness of this highly thought-provoking book.
While the charge of meddling became highly resonant in an age of empire undergirded by racialized hierarchies, the kind of interference that Martin looks at differs, he argues, from the meddling of imperial powers into the internal affairs of their colonies or that of the international debt commissions of the nineteenth century because “in the aftermath of the First World War, international efforts to govern the world economy involved a new challenge: compelling governments of sovereign states to relinquish full autonomy over policies, resources, and institutions without insulting their claims to self-governance and national pride in the process.” This means, in other words, that there may very well be an imperial genealogy at play here but that it was not a straightforward one; it was not merely new wine in old bottles. Point taken. It did come as a surprise however that the author decided not to engage with territories placed under the League of Nations’ mandatory rule. They are referred to a few times but mainly to argue that the Permanent Mandate Commission (PMC) “did not exercise powers to set economic policies.” This might merit further exploration.
In a recent piece outlining potential new research avenues on the League and empire, the historian of German colonial revisionism Sean Andrew Wempe suggests that the mandates system could indeed have served as a “bridge between the long nineteenth century’s variant of imperialism as civilizing mission and the new developmentalist aid networks, the new spheres of influence, and the ongoing exploitation of the Global South by the Global North without formal colonization that arose after the Second World War and decolonization”, in which he explicitly includes the IMF and the World Bank.[iv] The domestic jurisdiction clause, contained in Article 15 of the Covenant, did not apply, by definition, to the mandates system. The question of where sovereignty lay nevertheless remained a hotly debated issue within the mandates commission.[v] A cursory look at the minutes of the PMC shows that its members spent quite some time discussing, monitoring, and indeed meddling, in the economic life of territories placed under their guardianship. Could this aspect of global economic governance in the interwar period, the “adaptative international imperialism” of the mandates system, have made its way into the book, if only to further prove the author’s point?[vi] What differentiates the interwar imperial and international politics of economic meddling in, say, Iraq or Syria, from the case studies analyzed in this book?[vii]
A second question relates to resistance to meddling, specifically to chapters 2 and 4 which contain some very convincing descriptions of the politics of meddling in Albania, Austria, Greece, and China respectively. Was everyone involved to the same degree in “the politics of resisting” interference? To whom did sovereignty matter the most? Were there instances of elite capture that could further complicate our understanding of the politics of meddling?
A third question has to do with the relative success of certain meddling projects. The author decided not to engage with trade as this was “one area of policy that remained much harder to influence.” Finance is presented, by contrast, as much more vulnerable to meddling. Another interesting terrain was tax cooperation. Just by virtue of its existence, the League managed to put pressure on the Swiss tax haven for instance, and especially the Swiss tax administration, which did not see eye to eye with Swiss bankers, at least in the 1920s.[viii] This was, admittedly, a less intrusive type of meddling – Farquet talks about the “symbolic power” of the League and the “pressure” it exerted on governments – but it was meddling, nonetheless. Why do some meddling projects work better than others?
Finally, this book is very much a story about origins and transitions. Some individuals straddle temporal boundaries, the economist and tutelary figure Jacques J. Polak for instance who started his career at the League and then went on to become Chief of the Statistics Division, Assistant Director, Deputy Director, and Director of Research at the IMF. But this is a difficult continuity and one that has remained hidden from view, as the book shows. Does this mean that the prequel must die for the sequel to emerge? Might this have implications for current discussions about the future of global economic governance? In the “post-neoliberal” era, will it be enough for the International Monetary Fund or the World Bank to follow an Evolution Roadmap in an effort to remake themselves or will something entirely different have to emerge? The author gestures towards this hypothetical future at the end of the book, as well as in a recent long read in The Guardian. What needs to change? Will sovereignty come to matter as much as it did in the age of planetary climate risk? Will carbon mitigation plans devised by rich countries emerge as a new form of meddling? In what ways could or should this book help us think about a way forward? And finally, how should we characterize the new meddling of non-Paris Club creditors?
[i] This review builds on oral remarks prepared for a book launch event which took place at the Political Thought and Intellectual History seminar, University of Cambridge, 28 November 2022
[ii] See for instance Eric Helleiner, Forgotten Foundations of Bretton Woods: International Development and the Making of the Postwar Order (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2016); Patricia Clavin, Securing the World Economy: The Reinvention of the League of Nations (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016) and Martin Daunton’s The Economic Government of the World, 1933-present (London: Penguin, 2023)
[iii] William N. Kring and William W. Grimes, “Leaving the Nest: The Rise of Regional Financial Arrangements and the Future of Global Governance”, Development and Change, 50 (1)(2019): 72-95
[iv] Sean Andrew Wempe, “A League to Preserve Empires: Understanding the Mandates System and Avenues for Further Scholarly Inquiry”, American Historical Review (2019): 1731
[v] Susan Pedersen, The Guardians: The League of Nations and the Crisis of Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015): 204-232
[vi] Sean Andrew Wempe, “A League to Preserve Empires”, 1727
[vii] See, most recently, Parvathi Menon, “Negotiating Subjection: The Political Economy of Protection in the Iraqi Mandate (1914-1932)”, Third World Approaches to International Law Review, 2 (2021): 180-199
[viii] Christophe Farquet, « Expertise et négociations fiscales à la Société des nations (1923-1939) », Relations Internationales, 2, 142 (2010) : 5-21