Unholy Trinity: The IMF, World Bank And WTO

Reviews:

In a word, if you like living in a sovereign nation, then write your Congressional representive, your Senators, and have the US removed from these organizations. There is a real bad element here. World domination bad.

This is what university work should be like: a professor leading a group of studnets in common action and collectieley publishing their work. Well done. Lots of good points which the unholy trinity should answer in some forum or other. All three organs are dominated by the US as Stiglitz, Bellamy and others have pointed out. Whether US hegemony is a good or bad thing is a different question.I felt the book could have done without Foucault, who has little to contribute on the parameters of discourse or much else. The fact is the budgets of these institutions dwarf all others and it makes a welcome change to see an articulate counter point of view, especially as it was a grassroots student project. Definitely worth a read.

Any one looking for a good, critical overview of the history of the International Monetary Fund, World Bank, and World Trade Organization--the major institutions of international economic governance, the institutional guardians and promoters of neoliberal globalization--should check this book out. It reviews the history of these three organizations in depth. Most analyses of these organizations that I've seen just look at their current policies and critique them. Peet (and the junior student authors who assisted him) add a great deal of historical depth to this, looking at the conditions under which the unhol trinity were founded at the end of World War II, how their missions have changed over time, and the power structures in which these organizations are embedded and part of. He looks at how the changing ways the US government has used these organizations to advance the interests of the US political-economic elite (what Peet et al. call the Washington-Wall Street Alliance) on the world stage. This book also provides a progressive critique of their impact, although other sources probably go into deeper depth on that score. Since Peet is a social scientist, he doesn't just put the problem down to bad intentions, but down to bad social structures--a refreshing change from some of the simple-minded demonization of the elite you can find in some quarters. Peet particularly analyzes how the role of people's beliefs in shaping their actions within these institutions. In some ways, this is the weakest part of the book. He tries to use an analysis of discourse a la Foucault to explain the working of these organizations, explaining how the hegemony of neoclassical economics shuts out any debates of alternatives. While this is valuable, discourse analysis along can not bear the full weight of analyzing the problems with the unholy trinity--you need some sort of political-economic analysis in the lines of world-systems theory or something to make full sense of these organizations. Indeed, Peet lays out his Foucauldian analysis in the first chapter--and then those ideas barely show up again. Honestly, I would suggest anyone who's not an academic just skip the first chapter and read the rest of the book. You won't miss much. After the first chapter though, the book provides a solid overview of the history of the IMF, World Bank and WTO--and through them much of the process of globalization.

The Writers of books like Unholy Trnity make very little money for their hard work (usually a few hundred dollars a year for 3-4 years). They write books like this out of political commitment. And then people like "Not Right" (though he or she probably is, Right Wing) criticize the author for responding to an obviously political critique! This book, as the Publishers Weekly review says, provides a scholarly grounding for the anti-WTO, IMF and World Bank protests. The group of students and faculty who worked on it did a splendid job. Read it and you will see.

I think that it is pathetic for one of the authors to actually review and rate his own book. It seems as if this person is obsessed with selling as many copies of his book as possible. This type of greed is exactly what he pretends to be writing against. It is also wrong for someone (perhaps also one of the authors), to attack another reviewer, just because he/she did not like the book. These things say a lot about the author/s of this volume.

The Florida reviewer criticizes the book's discussion of Foucault, but doesnt know how to spell his (Foucault's) name! Specify the criticisms so they can be replied to. Dont leave them as empty words. So the concept of hegemony used in the book, or which data are not backed up with sources? I dont find any. What we have here is a political attack disguised as a factual review.

Please do not buy this book; the author (...) lacks any knowledge of the topic he discusses. The whole discussion about Focault and the so-called "hegemony" is irrational and wrong. The authour is (...) prone to endorsing irrational ideas. The whole discussion of certain countries' roles (Argentina-Brazil) is simply wrong; the account given of those countries' recent history is false. The economic figures provided in the book are also false; no source of them is provided. Please do not buy this book(...).

I am a contributing author to this book. This book was written over a period of two years, during which the authors carried an extensive and detailed research on how the global institutions came to be central actors in the contemporary global political economy, and why do they operate the way they do. We looked into the internal structure of these institutions, the broad political and economic context in which they emerged, and their historical transformations in the face of a changing world, in order to deconstruct their seeming inevitability and neutrality, and to situate them in real historical-geographical circumstances. We sought to explain and criticize the instrumental role these institutions play in producing economic and geographical inequality, and massive human misery all over the world in the name of development. The authors were not "obliged to give a negative view" because of the title of the book, as our `critic' suggests, rather, because of what we found in researching the history and geography of these institutions. (And, for the authors, an unholy trinity sounds as "negative" as a holy one!)We do not pretend to approach the subject with a neutral, apolitical attitude-our ultimate aim in writing this book is to explore different possibilities, and different worlds. Like our critic, we wonder what kind of world it would be without the IMF, the World Bank and the WTO; but we wonder for the future, not to justify and apologize for the past and present (mis)deeds of these institutions. We deliberately did not present "the other side"-by which is meant the global institutions' view of themselves; the reader can find such views in the many publications of the institutions and their apologists. They're literally all over the place, and this is one reason that motivated us to work on an alternative view, a different history. For not presenting arguments in favor of these institutions (although we always present them at length where we criticize them!), and although he finds the text "sometimes hard to understand" (quoting sentences out of context to demonstrate), our critic describes our analyses as superficial, and the discussion shallow. Maybe our critic was expecting to read another kind of book; better, maybe our critic would like to read the book again, and give another thought to what is truly "the other side".

I bought this book because I wanted to understand the issues behind the criticism of these three institutions. The book did help me understand their history. But after reading the book I do not feel that I really understand the issues. With a title like "Unholy Trinity", the author is obliged to give a negative view, and he (and the students who helped him) obviously have a negative view. But I found the discussion shallow. There is very little effort to present the other side--the arguments in favor of financial discipline on the part of underdeveloped nations for instance. Actually, I learned from the book that the World Bank has had poverty reduction as one of its goals for decades, and that when Robert McNamara was its head, he made a real effort to address the problem of poverty. And in spite of the legitimate criticism of the IMF, I wonder what would have happened if the IMF had not been there to bail out so many countries over the years.The book seems to lay all the blame for the problems of the poor on the "Unholy Trinity", and none on the often corrupt governments of the underdeveloped nations or on any other factors. The main author, Richard Peet, is a professor of geography, and at some points tries to give a geographical interpretation to the question of how the world is run, maintaining that there is an axis from Washington to Wall Street, with an offshoot to Harvard University in Massachusetts, which issues policies for the rest of the world.Peet takes the world-view of Italian communist journalist Antonio Gramsci and French post-structuralist philosopher Michel Foucault. This states that the world is controlled by a "hegemony", by which is meant a dominant system of thought, and, according to Foucault, this system of thought is maintained through a "discourse", meaning a constrained set of ideas that are allowed to be discussed. This results in sentences like, "Discourses with hegemonic depth originate in a few discursive command centres where only a limited set of ideas are allowed responsible presentation and elaboration. In analysing these spaces, the clusters of economic and political institutions that carry out the production and legitimation of theories, and the dissemination of policy prescriptions, are the crucial agents." I find this kind of analysis superficial, by refusing to look into the ideas themselves.The text is sometimes hard to understand. For instance, "These diverse articulations, between the global and the local, can be described using a set of geopolitical terms that combine the political-discursive-rational dimension with the geographical-organizational-power dimension."