The Normative Construction of Modern Development at the Bretton Woods Institutions

Introduction

In recent decades, the influence of the regulatory scope of the Bretton Woods Institutions extensively shaped domestic and international identities and norms. In essence, for the last 70 years, settings of the global economy were transposed along the cultural, social, industrial and overall political architecture of each one of the nation-states part of the World Bank or the IMF. On the other hand, since these customary political transitions have affected dissimilarly the conditions within which nation-states have endured over time the transnational economic arena, little can be said about the role of global organizations in affecting such domestic institutional biographies. Aiming to disentangle this historical constellation, the goal of the present chapter is twofold. On the one hand, it explains how the Bretton Woods Institutions managed to create a norm of “modern development” that evolved globally, discursively and normatively along diverse spheres of social systems. This process was carried out through two operational stages. The first one was in between the end of the Second World War and the 70´s decade, when following harsh volatilities, the Bretton Woods convertibility system developed amidst international actors eager to increase their influence in a highly unstable international realm. The second one, is framed between the end of the 70´s decade and today. This period is characterized by the institutional attempts of the Bretton Woods Institutions to broaden the influence of its normative construction to spheres of social systems beyond the economy, such as the family structure, the forms, dimensions and shapes of urban settlements, the structure of income and knowledge based societies, the institutions of governance at the national level, the architecture and role on social spheres of highly sophisticate financial systems, the ideological boundaries of deontological practices of the organizations, and the principles of global trade, among others.

For conducting the depiction of such historical transitions, the present chapter adheres to the contributions of historical institutionalism and critical constructivism. On the one hand, historical institutionalism conceives institutions not only as systemic and deterministic arrangements of social systems, but also as political construction that arouse within singular historical events. Moreover, they operate not only as appendices of nation state entities, but create and reproduce their own cultural, political, ideological and overall normative practices. This process takes place through interaction of representatives of the institutions (bureaucrats), but also through power structures, institutional arrangements and tradeoffs of information, practices and interests within the organization. On the other hand, institutional analysis frequently adheres to the practice of not questioning how normative constructions of highly influential international organizations evolve through processes of asymmetric interaction. In this matter, the role of critical constructivism aims to offer a defined theoretical framework able to contextualize the role of the ideology and the economy in the formation of late modern social systems. As such, in an attempt to cover the limitations of alternative theoretical standpoint, the present chapter aims to validate the use of historical institutionalism and critical constructivism as an empirical research framework to contextualize international discursive interventions and normative constructions, such as the norm of “modern development”.