popularity of the welfare state, as well as growing worries about
inequality and poverty.^10
The end of the 1990s was also marked by a major downturn in the
world economy. The East Asian financial and economic crisis that
started in July 1997 was indeed the most important global crisis since
the Great Depression. Spreading rapidly through Asia and then to
Russia and Latin America, the crisis shook confidence in multilateral
economic institutions and raised serious questions about the neoliberal
policies associated with the “Washington consensus.” Meant to foster
economic growth and stability, these policies had indeed been legiti-
mated by the success of the East Asian “models.”^11 Amidst debates on
the causes and on the significance of the Asian debacle, critical voices
began to be heard and alternative policies, more favorable to state
intervention and redistribution, were put forward.^12
In world as in domestic politics, the distance between the right and
the left seemed to narrow. Politicians and diplomats began to speak
of a growing consensus on development and of the need to combat
global poverty.^13 Mark Malloch Brown, who was then head of the
United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), put the matter
succinctly:
I believe we are at a pivotal moment in global development – an interna-
tional equivalent of the contemporary domestic debates about welfare reform
that are in different ways preoccupying countries from the United States
to France to Germany – where the right has realized that the case for doing
(^10) Carles Boix,Political Parties, Growth and Equality: Conservative and Social
Democratic Economic Strategies in the World Economy, Cambridge University
11 Press, 1998, pp. 203–211.
Charles Gore, “The Rise and Fall of the Washington Consensus as a Paradigm
for Developing Countries,”World Development, vol. 28, no. 5, 2000, 789–
804, p. 799; Joseph E. Stiglitz,Globalization and Its Discontents, New York,
12 W. W. Norton, 2002, pp. 89–132.
Barry Eichengreen, “The Global Gamble on Financial Liberalization: Reflections
on Capital Mobility, National Autonomy, and Social Justice,”Ethics &
13 International Affairs, vol. 13, no. 1, March 1999, 205–26, pp. 205–7.
In 2003, the OECD referred to an emerging “global anti-poverty consensus.” Ida
McDonnell, Henri-Bernard Solignac Lecomte, and Liam Wegimont,
“Introduction – The Global Anti-Poverty Consensus: Driving the Reform of
InternationalCo-operation,”inIdaMcDonnell, Henri-BernardSolignacLecomte,
and Liam Wegimont (eds.),Public Opinion and the Fight against Poverty,Paris,
OECD, 2003, p. 11; Alain Noe ̈l, “The New Global Politics of Poverty,”Global
Social Policy, vol. 6, no. 3, December 2006, 304–33, pp. 304–306.
168 Left and Right in Global Politics