Bretton Woods Institutions

Realism can be used to analyze how the Bretton Woods Institutions have contributed to the development problematique of the Third World and the Global Financial Crisis. There are many concrete country cases show how the Bretton Woods Institutions display their realist perspective as they are controlled by and seek out the interest of the United States and western countries. The Bretton Woods Institutions are commonly understood to refer to the international monetary regime that prevailed from the end of World War II until the early 1970s. Taking its name from the site of the 1944 conference that created the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank, the Bretton Woods system was history's first example of a fully negotiated monetary order intended to govern currency relations among sovereign states. In practice the initial scheme, as well as its subsequent development and ultimate demise, were directly dependent on the preferences and policies of its most powerful member, the United States (Cohen 1993).
The Bretton Woods Institutions have played a major role in the African financial crisis and made very realist decisions which benefited the United States before anyone else. Since 1980, the most ubiquitous and consequential set of policies affecting developing countries including those in Africa has been a series of economic reforms sponsored by the World Bank, IMF and other multilateral and bilateral donors. From its inception, these policy measures or structural adjustment packages, sometimes referred to as neoliberalism, assumed that growth and development would arise from the stabilisation, liberalisation and privatisation of economies.
At the centre of the origins and evolution of adjustment have been developments in Africa. The continent has been a petri dish for the international aid community. New aid modalities based on largely erroneous theoretical assumptions have been introduced with little regard to the consequences to local populations. In...