The current global financial and economic crisis has brought the issue of a new global governance of finance into the political and academic mainstream. Almost four decades after the Bretton Woods 1 (BW1) system was abandoned, there is an intensive an...
The current global financial and economic crisis has brought the issue of a new global governance of finance into the political and academic mainstream. Almost four decades after the Bretton Woods 1 (BW1) system was abandoned, there is an intensive and controversial discussion ongoing within the G20, the Financial Stability Board (FSB), the IMF and other international organisations on how to improve international cooperation in regulating finance and, thereby, preventing future financial crises. In this paper, I put the G20 process of improving the governance of international finance into a historically informed perspective. I analyse the driving forces behind and obstacles to international cooperation in governing finance in a broad sense that includes the regulation of financial firms, financial flows, currencies and the coordination of macroeconomic policies. Building on the explanations put forward by various schools of International Political Economy, I combine a modified version of the trilemma of economic policies with findings from the varieties of capitalism approach. I argue that the lack of international cooperation in governing finance can be explained by a "divergence of capitalisms". That is, economies and the corresponding governments have reacted in distinct ways to the collapse of the BW1 system, lower growth rates and saturated domestic markets since the 1970s. Most notably, there has been a divergence between the approaches of financialising countries (like the US, Britain) and export-oriented countries (like Germany, East Asian nations). This divergence has created incompatible preference on how to regulate international finance. In this paper, I depart from the majority of the studies on financial globalisation that put the financialised countries at the centre of their explanations. I suggest, rather, that financialised and export-oriented countries are equally responsible for the lost four decades of failed international cooperation since the collapse of BW1. If my analysis is correct, a comprehensive global governance of finance would be more difficult than expected. It would have require a new arrangement of the international division of labour and deep structural changes of domestic political economies not just in the financialised countries but in the export oriented countries in Europe, East Asia and the emerging world as well. Reembedding ‘disembedded neoliberalism’ (Best 2003) is not just a challenge for the US and Britain, it is a global challenge that will require prolonged efforts.
In Section two, I introduce the problem and my argument in more detail and discuss the failure to establish a BW2 since the 1970s in the light of the empirical and theoretical literature. In Sections three and four I analyse the conflicting preferences positions and policies of financialised and export-oriented countries, respectively, in the global governance of finance. Section five draws conclusions.