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INTRODUCTION
The battles fought in the international trade and development regimes are often as much
ideational as material. The protestors who occupy the streets outside the Ministerial Conferences
of the World Trade Organization (WTO) and the annual joint meetings of the International
Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank have little power in the traditional sense. NGOs, civil
society groups, and busloads of college students lack monetary or military might. Yet the words
and images they employ often shape the public’s perception of the Bretton Woods institutions. In
a sense, the old adage “sticks and stones may break your bones, but words will never hurt you”
does not apply here. Rather, the opposite is true. Over the past decade, the increased scrutiny of
the fundamental identities, ideologies and practices of these international financial institutions
(IFIs) has inflicted tremendous damage on their external legitimacy and, in turn, their political
and financial support. As a result, the Bretton Woods institutions, at the ripe age of sixty, seek to
recast their public image to re-establish their authority and influence in the global economy.
In this paper, we are interested in how the senior officials of the WTO and the World
Bank engage their critics in the process of trying to renew faith in their institutions’ purposes.
Specifically, we seek to understand the nature of the discursive debate between the IFIs and their
critics, investigating how and to what extent the “hegemonic discourses” of the WTO and the
World Bank have changed as a result of this dialogue. In the case of the WTO, we study the
evolving case for free trade.
We examine the speeches and press releases of institutional
officials as we attempt to assess whether these actors have begun to address the concerns of
WTO critics about a variety of global problems, including the decline of labor standards,
environmental degradation, and social injustice. In the case of the World Bank, we examine to
what extent the lively debate concerning the role of the state in development theory and practice
has led to a significant change in the World Bank’s neoliberal orthodoxy. Do these debates
presage progressive policy changes in the WTO and the World Bank?
In this paper, we suggest that recent shifts in the discourses of the WTO and the World
Bank may initially appear progressive to the extent that they incorporate the arguments of
critics. However, we argue that the process by which hegemonic discourses have included new
ideas and issues may be regressive insofar as prevailing trade and development paradigms are
reified. In other words, the introduction of new issues into the dominant discourses of trade and
Convention