Friday 3 April 2009


U.S. TAKES BACK SEAT AS POWER BALANCE SHIFTS

Doug Saunders

Globe and Mail, April 3, 2009

LONDON -- In a conference hall built atop the Blitz-scarred ruins of the east London Docklands, the leaders of the world's largest rich and poor nations huddled for a few hours yesterday and put an end to the postwar era.

"The old Washington consensus is over; today we have reached a new consensus," British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, who convened the summit and proposed many of its ideas, declared at its conclusion yesterday. "I think a new world order is emerging."

It was no mere rhetoric. No longer, after yesterday's G20 declaration, is the world governed by the logic and structures that have defined it since the final days of the Second World War, when the similarly momentous 1944 Bretton Woods summit set up global institutions, including the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, to rebuild Europe and Asia under U.S. guidance.

"Since Bretton Woods, the world has been living on a financial model, the Anglo-Saxon model. ... Clearly, today, a page has been turned," French President Nicolas Sarkozy declared in a statement broadcast at the same time as Mr. Brown's.

(…) [artículo aquí]

No comments: