ABSTRACT
States need to cooperate more in building consensus for a normative framework that is universally acceptable. In international economic relations, normative power i.e., the capacity to bring normative changes, takes different forms, and is exercised in different ways. In contemporary international economic relations, the increasing bilateral nature of its modus operandi has been accompanied by an admixture of non-economic conditions in packages of unidirectional norms. There is much to be said about the unlinking of economic engagement from political expectations in foreign economic relations that the Bretton Woods institutions have hitherto strived to promote—not least because it lends itself to the undermining of the economic foundations of the architecture of the international trading order.
