Good Governance and Bad Policy : The Perils of International Organization Overextension

A significant adaptation has recently occurred in the mandate of the International Monetary Fund. With no alteration to its legal charter, the Fund has effectively become the promoter of a putative consensus among its leading member states on intrusive norms of industrial regulation. At a time when much attention was focused on the need for new tools of global economic governance, such a shift in the role of an organization viewed as emblematic of the post-World War II order potentially had wide implications. Skeptics began to ask whether intergovernmental organizations originally designed to encourage mutually beneficial collaboration among sovereign member states were simply turning into crude instruments for advancing the interests of the strong. This article disputes the historical uniqueness of the turn underway inside post-war international economic organizations; it draws parallels to the work of the League of Nations in the interwar period and to inconclusive multilateral negotiations in the 1940s. Those parallels suggest the weakness of claims that a true consensus now exists among dominant states on basic issues of industrial governance, and cast doubt on the wisdom of rapidly extending established organizational mandates