Conjuring the spirit of multilateralism: Histories of crisis management during the ‘great credit crash’

Abstract

In recent years, critical scholars have emphasised how the recollection of past events as traumas can both constrain and widen the political possibilities of a present. This article builds on such research by suggesting that the management of contemporary financial crises is reliant on a ritual work of repetition, wherein prior ‘crisis’ episodes are called upon to identify and authorise specific sites and modes of crisis management. In order to develop this argument, I focus on how past crises figure within the public pronouncements of four key policymaking organisations during the financial instability of 2007–9. I find that while the Great Depression does enable these organisations to reaffirm old ways of managing crises, both it and the more recent Asian crisis are also made to disclose new truths about the evolution of multilateralism as a form of governance. In so doing, I argue, these historical narratives reveal how the management of global financial crisis depends upon a kind of ‘magic trick’. Rather than a strictly rational, historical process of problem solving, contemporary crises are instead negotiated through a contingent and self-referential conjuring of crisis-histories.

The Resilience of the Multirelational Structure of Geopolitical Treaties is Critically Linked to Past Colonial World Order and Offshore Fiscal Havens

“…Te second is the change of direction in US foreign policy which has gradually reduced the country's pivotal role in the political and fnancial maintenance of the global system to increasingly prioritize the internal afairs agenda [11]. Te third is major threats such as the climate change emergency and the global pandemic crisis [12,13], and previously the great credit crash of 2007-9 which severely tested the resilience of the multilateral architecture of the global order [14]. In a multipolar order, there is not necessarily an interest in guaranteeing the multilateral functioning of an institutionalized global governance system [15], and some powers could rather beneft from disrupting it at least in part to gain more infuence in strategic regions, including the US themselves in the light of the new political agenda.Moreover, the global governance principles that worked in a 20 th -century setting need not be as efective in a 21 st -century one [16], as proven by its basic inability to provide timely and efective responses to the new challenges [17], whose scale and complexity are unprecedented and call for radically new solutions and extreme levels of global institutional coordination and cooperation [18].…”

The resilience of the multirelational structure of geopolitical treaties is critically linked to past colonial world order and offshore fiscal havens

“…The second is the change of direction in US foreign policy which has gradually reduced the country's pivotal role in the political and financial maintenance of the global system to increasingly prioritize the internal affairs agenda [11]. The third are major threats such as the climate change emergency and the global pandemic crises [12], [13], and previously the great credit crash of 2007-9 which severely tested the resilience of the multilateral architecture of the global order [14]. In a multipolar order, there is not necessarily an interest in guaranteeing the multilateral functioning of an institutionalized global governance system [15], and some powers could have an interest in disrupting it at least in part to gain more influences in strategic regions, including the US themselves in the light of the new political agenda.…”

IMF‐World Bank Cooperation Before and After the Global Financial Crisis

“…Despite favourable institutional conditions, cooperation between the Fund and the Bank has similarly been fraught with tensions (Fabricius, ; Momani and Hibben, ). Yet analyses in this literature tend to look at present states of cooperation between IOs through the lens of the past, which reflects the retrospective angle common to IR scholarship more generally (for example, Samman, ). Instead of studying a single domain of cooperation in depth, the article provides a historically informed perspective on the temporal dynamics of institutional change in Fund‐Bank cooperation across key issue areas.…”