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Email this citationCIAO DATE: 04/04
Imposing Ideology as "Best Practise": The Problematic Role of the International Financial Institutions in the Reconstruction and Development of South East Europe
Milford Bateman
January 2004
Abstract
The reconstruction and development of post- communist South East Europe since 1988 has taken place w ithin the framework of the neo-liberal policy model that was eff ectively imposed upon the region by the Bretton Woods ins titutions - the World Bank and IMF. As elsewhere in central and easter n Eur ope ( see S achs, 1990), the confident prediction made by both ins titutions was that their preferred policy framewor k would ensure both a rapid and a s ustainable post-communist, and then after 1995 and 1999 a pos t-conflict, reconstr uction and development tr ajectory. What has transpir ed instead is s omething quite different: unstoppable deindustrialisation, dramatically r ising poverty, unemployment levels now off icially among the highest in the world, high levels of inequality, declining lif e expectancy, r ising employee insecurity and deter iorating wor king conditions for many, an unprecedented rise in the level of cor ruption and criminality, drastically declining levels of solidarity and tolerance within already dis tress ed communities, incr easingly unsustainable trade and for eign debt levels, and collapsing public health, recreation and welfare services. In spite of such overtly negative r esults, the Wor ld Bank and IMF (hereafter , the International Financial Institutions, IFI s), as well as ass ociated regional development institutions, such as the EBRD, do not appear to have become at all discouraged with the standard neo- liber al policy model. On the contrar y, it retains the unequivocal support of the IFI s in South East Europe, as indeed it does jus t about everywhere else in the wor ld, most r ecently with respect to the reconstruction of Iraq.
