who wrote : " theorists explain what historians know : war is normal ". richard sets out four broad motives for war : resources, belief, power and security. i mention this because as well as powerful and more detailed surveillance, for multilateralism to have impact it has to speak to the big issues. a criticism of the early history of the fund and bank is that they were often invisible. to be fair, bretton woods was not designed with the cold war in mind, so the world moved on very quickly. but, since resources, belief, power and security cannot be separated from economics, with the rising threat of destructive nationalism we have to go back and determine what role the multilateral institutions should play to re - establish – and explain the value of – economic co - operation. another dimension to the issue of balancing national interests and international cooperation is the question of how many poles are there in the system? bretton woods is often portrayed as the transfer of authority from one single pole ( britain ) to another ( the us ), the creation of a new era. it also gets portrayed likewise as the wrestle between keynes and harry white. at the time, the importance of enabling this transfer of poles was cast in terms of avoiding going forwards the dangerous nationalism of the 1930s. very quickly, the issue became the different one of whether collective international co - operation could embrace capitalist and communist systems, it couldn't. over time, the issue moved on to the tension between advanced countries and those in the developing and emerging ones, and it is this tension that has been a persistent feature of the fund and the bank in their more mature and influential era since the 1970s. even if issues around voting shares remain to be resolved, the fund has been able to evolve its toolkit in order to lend more money to vulnerable countries. today, the issue of whether / how much the world is multipolar is complicated by the question of whether it is possible to frame effective international co - operation in a world where the two largest economies, the us and china, have such different philosophical underpinnings. this strikes me as more fundamental than the traditional bretton woods issue of how to design a system which creates appropriate discipline for creditor and debtor nations, though i don't want to deny the importance of that issue. the conclusion i draw here in terms of making multilateralism work is that we have to do all we can to make it work, and that this should be an acknowledged objective

andrew bailey : a central banker's view of global challenges and expectations for the bretton woods institutions'response remarks by mr andrew bailey, governor of the bank of england, at king's college, cambridge, 17 january 2025. * * * i am going to interpret my theme quite broadly this evening. that said, let me start – appropriately as we are at king's – with a quote from keynes at bretton woods – on the importance of monetary stability as a prerequisite for reconstructing the world economy ( with thanks to martin daunton for using it in his recent book on world economic government ) : " without currency agreements you have no firm ground on which to discuss tariffs. in the same way plans for diminishing the fluctuation of international prices have no domestic meaning to the countries concerned until we have some firm ground in the value of money... it is very difficult while you have monetary chaos to have order of any kind in other directions. " the focus on monetary frameworks and currency arrangements reflected the tension at the time between on the one hand national sovereignty and discretion and on the other hand multilateral frameworks. however, while monetary stability remains the bedrock today, the agenda has of necessity broadened out substantially in terms of economic policy. these days, global co - operation focuses more on ensuring a well - regulated financial system. that reflects the perennial tension between the national scope of governments and the more global scope of markets. solving that tension requires multilateral frameworks and institutions. another theme concerns the bretton woods institutions themselves. we can't be misty eyed about bretton woods. on monetary stability, it was a halfway house solution to dealing with the implications of free international convertibility to gold for domestic economic management. it couldn't be implemented in full for some time, and didn't survive for long when it was. to borrow dani rodrik's phrase, bretton woods was shallow multilateralism with a small role for the fund and the world bank, and it didn't pass the test. subsequently, global financial integration and its scale has become much more extensive and created its own instability. in doing so, this has required a reassessment of multilateralism and the bretton woods legacy, and brought the fund and bank to centre stage. they have been evolving, in response – but perhaps, so far, not fast or far enough. understanding the drivers of global financial stability, and acting