Global Policy Forum

It is intriguing to watch the behavior of the world's bankers as the Prague meetings of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank slouch closer. In contrast to the normally blustery behavior of politicians before a major party congress, these delegates seem to be taking regular turns practicing something midway between apology and contrition. Whether this is a tactic or heralds a major rethinking of global economic policy is entirely unclear, although it is hardly thinkable that the makers of the marketplace will suddenly pretend they really aren't worthy of ensuring that the planet remains a safe place in which to cash checks.

And yet consider some of the words. A few weeks ago, World Bank managing director Horst Koehler told the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., "that about half the world's population has to get by on $2 a day is unacceptable ... There will not be a good future for the rich if there is no prospect of a better future for the poor." More recently, the IMF's No. 2 man, Stanley Fischer, recommended that globalization critics not be viewed as protectionist or isolationist. "They may be asking for better globalization," rather than none at all, he told bankers assembled in Wyoming.

IMF chief economist Michael Mussa also chimed in: "The financial crises of recent years suggest that all is not well with how the global financial system works." Finally, there was Michael Moore, the director general of the World Trade Organization, whose December conference in Seattle produced some of the ugliest U.S. protests since the civil-rights movements and the Vietnam War. "Those who oppose us," said Moore -- the "us" referring to major industrial nations -- "are not all fools and frauds. We need to assert our leadership."

That these comments reflect a sense of shared guilt for the plight of the planet's abundant have-nots is obvious. Less clear is why this plaintive, almost bleating, tone comes so front and so center in the months preceding the Prague conference. Nor is it clear why the dispossessed are any more compelling now than they were a year or even a decade ago. Part of the answer, obviously, concerns resistance. The bank bodies, who rely on safe exchanges of capital and the implicit approvals conferred by the populations of rich states, are deeply unhappy to find they are increasingly disliked. Consequently, and not entirely without good faith, they are growing a conscience.

The problem is how to apply such a conscience. Koehler sees well-groomed capitalism as the only "sensible alternative." What he's saying, along with others in his community, runs along these lines: Have we been occasionally near-sighted when it comes to "over-loaning"? Yes. Have we made mistakes in Africa? Yes. Will we assist in fixing the damage? Yes, of course, but ... debt relief will work only if nations adopt better government, and better in this case means paying lip service to the market economy and macroeconomics. "In the end," says Koehler, "trade is better than aid."

Maybe. But it depends a great deal on who's doing the trading and who makes the rules. Rather dumbly, and brutishly, history shows that rich countries rule. True, it's refreshing to hear the beneficiaries of affluence worry about the fate of the Earth and concern themselves actively with their role in bankrolling the future. Yet the bankers also know that what irks the protesters, and what they seek to forestall as guardians of the system, is a deeper, as-yet poorly articulated political rage. They sense intuitively that anti-globalization demonstrators are similar to the putative Marxists of the 1950s and '60s, only without the kind of creed or ideological haven that Marxist refuge provided.

So capital's growing conscience, if it represents collective guilt, also reflects a more essential hope that more socially responsible and adroit policies will in due course make believers of those who now happily associate with the disenfranchised. Admittedly, these may not be conscious mechanisms, but they do exist. As the bankers prepare their aggressive defense, as well as their dissembling mea culpas, it behooves smarter critics to show their colors more eloquently than they have so far. Otherwise, these semi-apologies by semi-apologists will go unheard, and the world will footnote another brief wave of street protests -- and then get on with watching the Olympics.

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