ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on one such mechanism: financial assistance from international financial institutions now entailing "structural conditionally". The story of the emergence of structural conditionality in the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund revolves around such questions and sheds light on much larger themes in an era now identified with the mystical word "globalization". In order to explain the phenomenon, the perspective informing the chapter relates the outcome of integrating markets to intensifying interaction among national political systems, an interaction increasingly buffered by international political organizations, and an interaction with a very long history. The chapter argues that a system that increasingly defers to "market" signals but refuses to give up on international political organizations capable of buffering those signals, or to sort out. It clarifies jurisdictional disputes across those organizations, perfectly reflects deep structures of governance within the political economy of the system leader.
