extolled the spirit of GATT rules. In addition, conservatives and the
business community actively pushed the GATT–WTO to extend the
liberalization of the world economy beyond the exchange of manu-
factured goods.
On the strength of their rising authority, the Bretton Woods insti-
tutions managed, in a few years, to redefine development politics.
The “Washington consensus” became the emblem for the neoliberal
reforms promoted jointly by the IMF, the World Bank, the GATT–
WTO, and the governments of the North. The term became fashionable
to a degree that dismayed John Williamson, the British economist who
had coined it, with a narrower meaning in mind. Once it had slipped
out of the control of experts, the idea of a “Washington consensus”
served as a shorthand reference to the proximity, both geographic and
intellectual, of the main strongholds of development-related inter-
national power. As Ngaire Woods reminds us, the policies imple-
mented in the name of this “consensus” were in fact challenged on
both sides of the political spectrum.^73 These challenges, however,
were hardly symmetrical: the opposition to the “Washington con-
sensus” mobilized a major portion of the left, but only a small part of
the right. Overall, it was truly a conservative “counter-revolution”^74
that the Bretton Woods institutions piloted as of the 1980s.
A new development agenda
Fostered by the political right, the rearrangement of North–South
relations brought a redefinition of development objectives. The new
agenda was based on the axiom “that there is only one economics,
and that economics is a universal science equally applicable to all
societies.”^75 With the failure of the socialist experiment and the dif-
ficulties faced by Keynesianism, the notion that there might exist a
distinct discipline called “development economics” – more open to
state intervention – was increasingly called into question. British
economist John Toye relates that in the mid-1980s the US represen-
tative to the Asian Development Bank flatly declared, “the United
(^73) Woods,The Globalizers,p.1.
(^74) John Toye,Dilemmas of Development: Reflections on the Counter-Revolution
in Development Economics, second edition, Oxford, Blackwell, 1993.
(^75) Gilpin,Global Political Economy, p. 311.
158 Left and Right in Global Politics