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Conjuring the spirit of multilateralism: Histories of crisis management during the ‘great credit crash’

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 June 2015

AMIN SAMMAN
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Abstract

In recent years, critical scholars have emphasised how the recollection of past events as traumas can both constrain and widen the political possibilities of a present. This article builds on such research by suggesting that the management of contemporary financial crises is reliant on a ritual work of repetition, wherein prior ‘crisis’ episodes are called upon to identify and authorise specific sites and modes of crisis management. In order to develop this argument, I focus on how past crises figure within the public pronouncements of four key policymaking organisations during the financial instability of 2007–9. I find that while the Great Depression does enable these organisations to reaffirm old ways of managing crises, both it and the more recent Asian crisis are also made to disclose new truths about the evolution of multilateralism as a form of governance. In so doing, I argue, these historical narratives reveal how the management of global financial crisis depends upon a kind of ‘magic trick’. Rather than a strictly rational, historical process of problem solving, contemporary crises are instead negotiated through a contingent and self-referential conjuring of crisis-histories.

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Articles
Information
Review of International Studies , Volume 42 , Issue 2 , April 2016 , pp. 227 - 246
Copyright
© 2015 British International Studies Association 

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References

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44 I discuss these and other narrated threats of recurrence at length in Samman, Amin, ‘The 1930s as black mirror: Visions of historical repetition in the global financial press, 2007–2009’, Journal of Cultural Economy, 5:2 (2012), pp. 213–229CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For a similar analysis that focuses specifically on trade discourse and policy, see Siles-Brügge, Gabriel, ‘Explaining the resilience of free trade: the “Smoot-Hawley” myth and the crisis’, Review of International Political Economy, 21:3 (2014), pp. 535–574CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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66 Ibid., Section I. Paradoxically, in this schema the task of ‘crisis prevention’ is at once both never and always the same – never, because each new solution always has its particulars, and always, because these solutions never actually solve the problem which prompts them (namely, the emergent properties of globalisation itself).

67 Ibid., Section I.

68 Ibid., Section I.

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71 Jean-Claude Trichet, ‘Remarks on the Recent Turbulences in Global Financial Markets’, New York (14 April 2008), Section III, available at: {http://www.ecb.int/press/key/date/2008/html/sp080414_1.en.html} accessed 23 June 2009.

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