• by Walden Bello
• Tuesday, June 30, 2009
• Inter Press Service

If ever an international conference was bound to fail, it is the coming G20 meeting in London, billed as a 'new Bretton Woods' that would forge a coordinated global response to the developing depression and create a new order of global economic governance, writes Walden Bello, professor of sociology at the University of the Philippines at Diliman, president of the Freedom from Debt Coalition, senior analyst at the Bangkok-based research and advocacy institute Focus on the Global South.

In this analysis, Bello writes that the appropriate site for such an ambitious endeavour is the UN, not an informal grouping of the world's richest countries with token representation from the global South that has little legitimacy.

For the G20, the institutions that were part of the problem are now being asked to become a central part of the solution, especially the IMF, in which the rich countries are still vastly over-represented, and whose credibility was torpedoed by the fact that it helped cause the 1997 Asian Financial Crisis and failed to anticipate the brewing financial crisis.

The current crisis should be seen as a grand opportunity to craft a new system that ends not just the failed system of neoliberal global governance but also the Euro-American domination of the world economy, and a chance to put in its place a more decentralized, deglobalized, and democratic order.

(*) Walden Bello is professor of sociology at the University of the Philippines at Diliman, president of the Freedom from Debt Coalition, senior analyst at the Bangkok-based research and advocacy institute Focus on the Global South.

//NOT FOR PUBLICATION IN CANADA, NEW ZEALAND, CZECH REPUBLIC, IRELAND, POLAND, THE UNITED STATES, AND THE UNITED KINGDOM//

© Inter Press Service (2009) — All Rights Reserved. Original source: Inter Press Service

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