Kansainvälinen valuuttarahasto ja globaalin harvainvallan pyhittäminen

Authors

• Teivo Teivainen

Abstract

Producing knowledge about other cultures has always been an adjunct of colonial domination. One of the most powerful ways of legitimizing the domination has been declaring one’s knowledge neutral and universally true. The liberal orthodox discourse of the IMF makes use of the metaphysical strategies of neutralization and universalization. The political workings of metaphysics produce a deification of the undemocratic decision-making structure of the IMF. By comparing the role of the IMF in the recent Latin American debt crisis to the role of the private economic advisors of the debt crisis in the 1920s some changes as well as continuities in the emergence of the global system of economic governance can be found. Even if we can in a strict sense never have a world state, the globalization of power structures implies that we can no longer regard the nation-state as the only possible form of political community. Correspondingly, democratic claims and other normative claims linked to political communities need to be rethought in a transnational context.