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Unholy Trinity: The IMF, World Bank and WTO (Paperback)

by Richard Peet (Author)
3.8 out of 5 stars See all reviews (10 customer reviews)
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Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly
Geography professor Peet explores the institutional histories of the three pillars of the global financial order, from their circumscribed beginnings at the post-war Bretton Woods Conference to their increasingly central role in many Third World economies in this detailed critique. As the IMF and World Bank condition their loans on far-reaching and draconian "structural adjustment" programs, and the WTO acts as an unelected, super-government passing judgment on environmental regulations, labor standards and other supposed impediments to trade, Peet argues, these undemocratic organizations assert unprecedented levels of control over a wider and wider segment of the world's population. While maintaining a Keynesian regulatory role over the world economy, he contends, these institutions have become standard-bearers for the neoliberal ideology favored by the "Washington-Wall Street Alliance," imposing on poor countries a regimen of free trade, government austerity, export-led development and deregulation and privatization of the economy. Such policies, he says, although convenient for international corporations and investors, have been disastrous for the people of these countries, resulting in slow growth, environmental devastation, and rising poverty and inequality. Peet is an impassioned left-wing opponent of these policies, but his thoroughly researched and analytically incisive treatment ably sums up a critique that is growing in influence among activists and mainstream economists alike. Academically sophisticated but accessible to laypeople (although his discussion of neoliberal rhetoric occasionally lapses into wholly unnecessary Foucauldian jargon about "restrictive discursive spaces"), Peet's account provides real intellectual heft to back up the placards of anti-globalization protestors.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Review
"Seattle, Genoa and Prague have etched the centrality of the IMF, the IBRD and the WTO into our consciousness . This book charts the contours and the reach of these global regulatory institutions and how they serve as a fortress for the prevailing neoliberal theory of globalization."--Michael Watts, Director, Institute of International Studies, University of California
"This is a great book."--David Harvey, City University of New York
". . . provides an important history lesson of how the IMF, World Bank, and WTO were twisted from their original mandates to serve the interests of corporate globalization."--John Cavanagh, Institute for Policy Studies
-- Review

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Product Details

  • Paperback: 256 pages
  • Publisher: Zed Books (November 29, 2003)
  • Language: English
  • ISBN-10: 184277073X
  • ISBN-13: 978-1842770733
  • Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.2 x 0.9 inches
  • Shipping Weight: 10.9 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
  • Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars See all reviews (10 customer reviews)
  • Amazon.com Sales Rank: #282,344 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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19 of 20 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars good overview of the IMF, World Bank & WTO, March 28, 2005
By varmint (Boston, MA, USA) - See all my reviews
Any one looking for a good, critical overview of the history of the International Monetary Fund, World Bank, and World Trade Organization--the major institutions of international economic governance, the institutional guardians and promoters of neoliberal globalization--should check this book out. It reviews the history of these three organizations in depth. Most analyses of these organizations that I've seen just look at their current policies and critique them. Peet (and the junior student authors who assisted him) add a great deal of historical depth to this, looking at the conditions under which the unhol trinity were founded at the end of World War II, how their missions have changed over time, and the power structures in which these organizations are embedded and part of. He looks at how the changing ways the US government has used these organizations to advance the interests of the US political-economic elite (what Peet et al. call the Washington-Wall Street Alliance) on the world stage. This book also provides a progressive critique of their impact, although other sources probably go into deeper depth on that score. Since Peet is a social scientist, he doesn't just put the problem down to bad intentions, but down to bad social structures--a refreshing change from some of the simple-minded demonization of the elite you can find in some quarters. Peet particularly analyzes how the role of people's beliefs in shaping their actions within these institutions. In some ways, this is the weakest part of the book. He tries to use an analysis of discourse a la Foucault to explain the working of these organizations, explaining how the hegemony of neoclassical economics shuts out any debates of alternatives. While this is valuable, discourse analysis along can not bear the full weight of analyzing the problems with the unholy trinity--you need some sort of political-economic analysis in the lines of world-systems theory or something to make full sense of these organizations. Indeed, Peet lays out his Foucauldian analysis in the first chapter--and then those ideas barely show up again. Honestly, I would suggest anyone who's not an academic just skip the first chapter and read the rest of the book. You won't miss much. After the first chapter though, the book provides a solid overview of the history of the IMF, World Bank and WTO--and through them much of the process of globalization.
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17 of 19 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars The Politics of Writing, May 18, 2004
By A Customer
The Writers of books like Unholy Trnity make very little money for their hard work (usually a few hundred dollars a year for 3-4 years). They write books like this out of political commitment. And then people like "Not Right" (though he or she probably is, Right Wing) criticize the author for responding to an obviously political critique! This book, as the Publishers Weekly review says, provides a scholarly grounding for the anti-WTO, IMF and World Bank protests. The group of students and faculty who worked on it did a splendid job. Read it and you will see.
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23 of 29 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars Leaves a lot of questions unanswered, February 21, 2004
By Eric Kvaalen (Paris, France) - See all my reviews
I bought this book because I wanted to understand the issues behind the criticism of these three institutions. The book did help me understand their history. But after reading the book I do not feel that I really understand the issues. With a title like "Unholy Trinity", the author is obliged to give a negative view, and he (and the students who helped him) obviously have a negative view. But I found the discussion shallow. There is very little effort to present the other side--the arguments in favor of financial discipline on the part of underdeveloped nations for instance. Actually, I learned from the book that the World Bank has had poverty reduction as one of its goals for decades, and that when Robert McNamara was its head, he made a real effort to address the problem of poverty. And in spite of the legitimate criticism of the IMF, I wonder what would have happened if the IMF had not been there to bail out so many countries over the years.

The book seems to lay all the blame for the problems of the poor on the "Unholy Trinity", and none on the often corrupt governments of the underdeveloped nations or on any other factors. The main author, Richard Peet, is a professor of geography, and at some points tries to give a geographical interpretation to the question of how the world is run, maintaining that there is an axis from Washington to Wall Street, with an offshoot to Harvard University in Massachusetts, which issues policies for the rest of the world.

Peet takes the world-view of Italian communist journalist Antonio Gramsci and French post-structuralist philosopher Michel Foucault. This states that the world is controlled by a "hegemony", by which is meant a dominant system of thought, and, according to Foucault, this system of thought is maintained through a "discourse", meaning a constrained set of ideas that are allowed to be discussed. This results in sentences like, "Discourses with hegemonic depth originate in a few discursive command centres where only a limited set of ideas are allowed responsible presentation and elaboration. In analysing these spaces, the clusters of economic and political institutions that carry out the production and legitimation of theories, and the dissemination of policy prescriptions, are the crucial agents." I find this kind of analysis superficial, by refusing to look into the ideas themselves.

The text is sometimes hard to understand. For instance, "These diverse articulations, between the global and the local, can be described using a set of geopolitical terms that combine the political-discursive-rational dimension with the geographical-organizational-power dimension."

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Most Recent Customer Reviews

4.0 out of 5 stars Devastating critique of globalization,but errors are made about Smith and Keynes
Peet is largely correct in his claims that the International Monetary Fund(IMF),World Bank(WB),and World Trade Organization(WTO) have ,since 1981,mistakenly imposed... Read more
Published 8 months ago by Michael Emmett Brady

5.0 out of 5 stars Whose Hitler?
In a word, if you like living in a sovereign nation, then write your Congressional representive, your Senators, and have the US removed from these organizations. Read more
Published on April 3, 2007 by Book & Music Lover

5.0 out of 5 stars good class action
This is what university work should be like: a professor leading a group of studnets in common action and collectieley publishing their work. Well done. Read more
Published on October 3, 2005 by Declan Hayes

1.0 out of 5 stars Not Right
I think that it is pathetic for one of the authors to actually review and rate his own book. It seems as if this person is obsessed with selling as many copies of his book as... Read more
Published on May 10, 2004

5.0 out of 5 stars Florida again
The Florida reviewer criticizes the book's discussion of Foucault, but doesnt know how to spell his (Foucault's) name! Specify the criticisms so they can be replied to. Read more
Published on April 14, 2004

1.0 out of 5 stars Horrible
Please do not buy this book; the author (...) lacks any knowledge of the topic he discusses. The whole discussion about Focault and the so-called "hegemony" is irrational and... Read more
Published on April 7, 2004

5.0 out of 5 stars Posing new questions, not answering ready-made ones
I am a contributing author to this book. This book was written over a period of two years, during which the authors carried an extensive and detailed research on how the global... Read more
Published on March 4, 2004 by Mazen Labban

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