Gordon Brown vs Madonna and Justin Timberlake

by | Mar 27, 2009 | Economics and development, Global system, London Summit

As we all know, Madonna and Justin Timberlake only had four minutes to save the world.  The big question today: can Gordon Brown achieve the same in four hours 35 minutes?  Sam Coates at Red Box has been looking at the London Summit timetable, and he’s come away sobered:

Leaders’ breakfast 8.30am – 9.45am

Morning session including finance ministers and central bankers 9.50am- 1.25pm

Lunch 1.25pm – 2.30pm

Afternoon session including finance ministers and central bankers 2.30pm to 3.30pm

Closing press conferences, 3.30 onwards

That adds up to 4 hours and 35 minutes of formal talks plus time spent chatting over three meals.  Not much to work with: as Sam notes, Bretton Woods took all of three weeks. As Madona and Justin could no doubt tell Gordon if he were to ask them, when time is short to save the world, everything depends on the quality of the choreography.

 Still, there’s no doubt that more time would be preferable.  Let’s not forget Bill Lind‘s observation on the difference between the Congress of Vienna and the Versailles peace talks a century later:

In 1814, the Congress of Vienna, which faced the task of putting Europe back together after the catastrophic French Revolution and almost a quarter-century of subsequent wars, did what aristocrats usually do. It danced, it dined, it stayed up late playing cards for high stakes, it carried on affairs, usually not affairs of state. Through all its aristocratic amusements, it conversed. In the process, it put together a peace that gave Europe almost a century of security, with few wars and those limited.

In contrast, the conference of Versailles in 1919 was all business. Its dreary, interminable meetings (read Harold Nicolson for a devastating description) reflected the bottomless, plodding earnestness of the bourgeois and the Roundhead. Its product, the Treaty of Versailles, was so flawed that it spawned another great European war in just twenty years. As Kaiser Wilhelm II said from exile in Holland, the war to end war yielded a peace to end peace.

The fact that today, it’s inconceivable that leaders could spend a whole summer negotiating with each other, as at Vienna – or even three weeks, as at Bretton Woods – is a major worry.  Time to brush up on your Joseph Tainter: it’s all about diminishing returns from greater complexity…

Come on, NGOs, raise your game!

by | Mar 26, 2009 | Global system, Influence and networks, London Summit

In comments on Jules’s post on the Put People First march, the Bretton Woods Project’s Peter Chowla takes me to task for what he argued was a sloppy and unfair critique of PPF’s policy platform that I made in my own comment on Jules’s post. 

Actually, Peter’s right.  I said PPF had a “shockingly weak policy position: just warmed up leftovers from Make Poverty History”, and that there was almost nothing to it other than the traditional calls for more aid and less conditionality.  In fact, as Peter accurately points out, there IS more to PPF’s platform than that: he cites its positions on tax havens, reform of the IMF and World Bank, Green New Deals and investing in public services, for instance.

On the other hand, I don’t think I was exaggerating that much.  On some of these areas, as Peter admits, work is still underway within the PPF coalition to clarify its policy position.  And I stand by my argument that PPF’s position on a post-Kyoto climate deal really is shocking: the 2 degree C temperature limit it advocates has been EU policy since 1998, and says nothing about the much more fundamental issues of (a) what this means in terms of a climate stabilisation target expressed in parts per million of carbon dioxide equivalent and (b) how the resulting global emissions budget ought to be shared out.

Still, fair’s fair: it was a snippy comment, and I should have reflected PPF more accurately.  But my deeper frustration with NGO coalitions like PPF remains. NGOs are supposed to set agendas; to open up new political space; to dream up big ideas about possible futures. Sure, you can’t pursue big ideas without big coalitions.  But equally, what’s the point of big coalitions without big ideas?

 What we have today is a situation in which civil society always seems to be one step behind the curve.  Back at the time of the Make Poverty History, for instance, it was clear to anyone that wanted to see it that climate change was the coming issue in international development.  Yet it was absent from MPH’s policy position; ironically, DFID’s 2006 White Paper was way ahead of where development NGOs had got to on climate.  (I remember thinking at the time: isn’t this supposed to work the other way round?)

Now, the context has changed again: and again, civil society is lagging.  Look around the international development landscape.  Scarcity issues like energy security, water scarcity and food prices are joining climate change as defining features on the map.  There’s serious cause for concern that the post-Cold War decline in conflict in developing countries may be bottoming out. The real discussion about power-shift in the international economy is finally starting. Security of supply is set to become the biggest issue in international trade (and has already led to the collapse of a developing country government.) Emissions trading holds out the potential to become the most important source of finance for development. And so on.

So where are all of these issues in the PPF policy platform? Nowhere!  Instead of opening up new agendas – at a time when vast tracts of virgin political space are opening up – NGOs are staying right in their comfort zone, articulating the same policy positions as they were five years ago. (more…)

Bretton Woods 2: now we’re talking

by | Mar 25, 2009 | Economics and development, Global system, London Summit

Just before the Washington G20 summit in November last year, David and I co-wrote a paper entitled A Bretton Woods 2 Worth of the Name.  As the title implied, we were politely sceptical of some of the political rhetoric then flying around, comparing the G20’s discussions about bank capitalisation with the rather more far-reaching discussions held at the Mount Washington Hotel in 1944.

Now, though, things are getting more interesting.  Two days ago, Zhou Xiaochuan – the governor of China’s central bank – quietly published a paper on the People’s Bank of China website, entitled Reform the International Monetary System.  It opened like this:

The outbreak of the current crisis and its spillover in the world have confronted us with a long-existing but still unanswered question, i.e., what kind of international reserve currency do we need to secure global financial stability and facilitate world economic growth, which was one of the purposes for establishing the IMF?

Later, Zhou continues that:

The desirable goal of reforming the international monetary system, therefore, is to create an international reserve currency that is disconnected from individual nations and is able to remain stable in the long run, thus removing the inherent deficiencies caused by using credit-based national currencies.

Now this line of thinking really does take us straight back to Bretton Woods – and in particular to Keynes’s proposal for a new global currency called the bancor, and a new global institution called the International Clearing Union (ICU). (more…)

Thanks!

by | Mar 19, 2009 | Global system, London Summit

A couple of weeks ago I posted news of a competition for 20 places for bloggers at the G20 London Summit on 2nd April, which would be allocated on the basis of nominations from readers, and unabashedly asked everyone to put us forward. 

Well, apparently you did, as yesterday we got a call from the summit team saying that Global Dashboard was now accredited press for the G20 – so I’ll be live blogging the summit as things progress (and who knows, perhaps asking Gordon why such a modest proportion of our fiscal recovery is green). 

Many thanks to all our readers who wrote in!