ABSTRACT
As 1994 was the fiftieth anniversary of the Bretton Woods Conference, there has been an upsurge of discussion during recent months about whether new global economic summits should be convened in order to examine the challenge facing the post Cold War international order. The financial media have carried numerous articles questioning the future role of the institutions created at Bretton Woods as well as how the international economic system will absorb the re-entry of three billion people who had previously excluded themselves from the global marketplace for goods and capital because of Marxist or mercantilist economic policies. Should the major industrial nations attempt to re-create exchange rate target zones in order to lessen currency volatility? Should the mission statements of the World Bank and the IMF be redefined in order to focus their efforts on the world's poorest countries even more explicitly than is already happening? Will the new World Trade Organization be able to mediate trade disputes more effectively than the GATT system which was created after 1947 without such an institution? Does the former Soviet Union need a new Marshall Plan in order to achieve currency stabilization and establish credible institutions for promoting its transition to a market economy? Will the emergence of a more multi-polar global economic system encourage increased economic nationalism or will the rapid growth now occurring in global trade and capital flows erode the role of the nation-state as the dominant organizational unit in the international system?
