From: Patrick Bond (pbond@MAIL.NGO.ZA)
Date: Mon Jun 11 2007 - 13:20:27 EDT
The World Bank: Poverty, Development and Global Hegemony Edited by David Moore, published by University of KwaZulu-Natal Press, South Africa (June 2007) www.ukznpress.co.za ISBN 978 1 86914 100 4 CONTENTS David Moore, Economic History and Development Studies, University of KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa Introduction: The World Bank and its Presidents: Sheepskinned Wolves or Naked Emperors? I. Ideas and Hegemony 1) David Moore, Economic History and Development Studies, University of KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa The World Bank and the Gramsci Effect: Towards a Transnational State and Global Hegemony? 2) Scott Macwilliam, Centre for Development Studies, Australian National University, Australia Plenty of Poverty or the Poverty of Plenty? The World Bank at the Turn of the Millennium 3) David Williams, Political Science, Oxford University Constructing the Economic Space: The World Bank and the Making of Homo Oeconomicus 4) Ben Fine, Economics, School of African and Oriental Studies The Developmental State is Dead – Long Live Social Capital? 5) Thomas Wanner, Flinders University, Australia The Bank’s Greenspeak, the Power of Knowledge and Sustainable Development II Constructing Hegemony: Politics and States 6) Susanne Schech and Sanjugta vas Dev, Centre for Development Studies, Flinders University, Austgralia Governing Through Participation? The World Bank’s New Approach to the Poor 7) David Williams and Tom Young, Politics, Oxford University and School of Oriental and African Studies The World Bank and the Liberal Project 8) David Moore, Economic History and Development Studies, University of KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa “Sail On, O Ship of State:” Neo-liberalism, Globalisation and the Governance of Africa III. Towards Hegemony in Asia and Africa 9) Robert Wade, London School of Economics Debating the East Asian Miracle 10) Mark T. Berger and Mark Beeson, Modern History and Politics, University of New South Wales, Australia Miracles of Modernisation and Crises of Capitalism: The World Bank, East Asian Development and Liberal Hegemony” 11) Henry Bernstein, Development Studies, School of Oriental and African Studies, Britain Structural Adjustment and African Agriculture: A Retrospect 12) Graham Harrison, Politics, University of Sheffield, Britain The World Bank and the Construction of Governance States in Africa 13) David Moore, Economic History and Development Studies, University of KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa Levelling the Playing Fields and Embedding Illusions: “Post-Conflict” Discourse and Neo-liberal “Development” in War-torn Africa IV. Critique, Challenge and Change 14) Richard Pithouse, Centre for Civil Society, University of KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa Producing the Poor: The World Bank’s New Discourse of Domination 15) Marcus Taylor and Susanne Soederberg, International Development Studies, Queen’s University, Canada The King is Dead (Long Live the King?) - From Wolfensohn to Wolfowitz at the World Bank 16) Patrick Bond, School of Development Studies and Centre for Civil Society, University of KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa Civil Society and Wolfowitz’s World Bank: Reform or Rejection Revisited *** PREFACE As the World Bank goes through its sixth decade and its opponents continue with the slogan '(how ever many) years are enough' it is time to gather the last decade and a half's radical analytical assessments of the world's most visible development institution. They must be assessed and reassessed, and new critiques must be built on their shoulders. This is the intention of this book. Some of the works that must be considered classical are here reproduced in their pristine state, others of that genre have been revisited by their authors, more are refinements of the trails blazed by the 'originals' in the field, while still more are new entrants taking the field of what could be labeled 'World Bank studies' into uncharted territory. They all confront major World Bank documents or intellectual turning points marking significant attempts for the Bank to break new ground in development discourse - to make new efforts to alter the hegemonic contours of the intelligentsia and political actors working on the terrain of the 'third world's' uneven capitalist transformations, but without challenging the essentials of its project. To the original critical accounts of the trials and tribulations of the Bank, built on historical materialist foundations, more ideational, post-structural, and even philosophical studies have been added - just as the Bank itself has moved from being an institution based in 'economics' to one grabbing on to every other social sector and its 'science'. To make it easy for readers to know whether the chapters are 'original and unchanged', re-visited by their authors in the light of this project, or specially commissioned for this book, each chapter will be identified with those categories. It is hoped the whole makes up more than the sum of its parts, and a consistent and rigorous intellectual challenge to the Bank's assumptions emerges by the last page. It will be up to readers to decide whether or not this author's attempt at a Gramscian understanding of the Bank is enough to bring together the old, the new and the revisited, but certainly anyone who took seriously past-president James Wolfensohn's efforts to bring in all the institution's critics onside to a friendly neoliberal project could not have failed to see efforts at hegemony - attempts to co-opt and persuade opponents that they could be incorporated into a moral and material project - working at their hardest (Mallaby 2005, Goldman 2005). Conversely, the second Wolf's (Paul Wolfowitz) attempts to move with a contradictory blend of neoliberalism and neo-conservativism along his peers' lines will show whether or not the Bank has a deeply engrained momentum of its own (see Taylor and Soederberg's chapter) or will move in radically different, if as yet unclear, directions (see Bond's concluding chapter) entailing drastic new configurations and hegemonic contours. These will, of course, condition the strategies of those critical of the Bank. Be they reformers who might have been half-heartedly co-operative with the Wolfensohnian tenor of reform and restructuring, or those who see the two wolves as sharing essentially the same skin - and maybe, secretly, glad to see the second more willing to expose it - their efforts of criticism and alternatives will have to change with the new regime and the new 'world order' it represents. These chapters will, hopefully, constitute at least part of a foundation for these new constructions. As William Robinson (2005: 14) has written recently, 'sound theoretical understandings are crucial if we hope to intervene effectively' as resolutions emerge in response to the structural and hegemonic crises in which our emergent global society is immersed. The World Bank is a key structural and ideological component of an unevenly developing 'transnational state' tasked to ameliorate the contradictions of a global political economy fraught with more tensions than in any other period since the end of the Cold War. If these chapters help at all to gain a 'more nuanced theoretical [and empirical] understanding of emergent global social structures' and the beliefs of those who are in charge of them, then it just might be that 'the power of collective agencies to influence history' at such 'time of crisis' (Robinson 2005: 14) will be augmented to some extent. David Moore, Durban
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