WTO, the World Bank did come to acknowledge that inequality
undermined economic inefficiency and aggravated social conflicts.
Revealingly, however, its policy conclusions remained in line with the
Bretton Woods orthodoxy.^94 For one thing, the Bank focused on the
inequality of opportunities and paid little attention to the inequality
of outcomes. Also, while admitting that international inequalities
were more pronounced than internal inequalities, the Bank continued
to concentrate on the domestic constraints to development, in keeping
with its contention that “developing countries hold the keys to their
prosperity.”^95
Fundamentally, the UN and the Bretton Woods institutions
maintained their contrasting approaches toward globalization and
governance. The Bretton Woods institutions’ oft-repeated view that
“growth is the tide that lifts all boats” was openly contested by the
UN Secretary-General, who reiterated his belief that “no rising tide
in the global economy will lift all boats.”^96 For UN agencies, glob-
alization and growth could have positive effects only if they were
“grounded in a human-rights approach and the human empower-
ment concept of development.”^97 This outlook, however, carried
little weight with the IMF, the World Bank, and the WTO, who
simply did not consider the promotion of human rights to be part of
their mandate.^98 From their perspective, global economic integration
not only increased “the size of the cake,” but it also responded to
an innate human desire “for expanded horizons and freedom of
(^94) See World Bank,World Development Report 2006: Equity and Development,
95 New York, Oxford University Press, 2005, pp. 9 and 57–66.
96 Ibid., p. 206.
Rodrigo de Rato, “A Rising Tide That Lifts all Boats: How Europe, by
Promoting Growth, Can Help Itself and Help the World,” speech by the IMF
Managing Director at the Austrian National Bank Seminar, Vienna, May 22,
2006 (www.imf.org/external/np/speeches/2006/052206.htm); Kofi A. Annan,
“Millennium Development Goals Have Unprecedented Political Support,
Secretary-General Says at London Event,” address by UN Secretary-General to
the St. Paul’s Cathedral Event on the Millennium Development Goals, London,
97 July 6, 2005 (www.un.org/News/Press/docs/2005/sgsm9984.doc.htm).
Kemal Dervis, “Statement by the Administrator of the UNDP at the Executive
Board of the UNDP/UNFPA,” New York, January 24, 2006, p. 4 (http://content.
98 undp.org/go/newsroom/june-2006/statement-dervis-exec-20060619.en).
International Monetary Fund, “Common Ground and Differences of View
Between the Bretton Woods Institutions (IMF and World Bank) and the World
Council of Churches,” Washington, DC, October 22, 2004, p. 1 (www.imf.org/
external/np/exr/docs/wcc102204.htm).
192 Left and Right in Global Politics