The World Bank and social transformation in international politics: liberalism, governance, and sovereignty, by David Williams, Abingdon, Routledge, 2008, 152 pp., £65.00 (hardback), ISBN 978-0415453004
David Williams has written a book on the World Bank in Africa that is both profound and ambitious. In essence, the question he explores is: how do we understand the World Bank's modalities of intervention ideationally? For Williams, the datum is the establishment of liberalism in late eighteenth-century Europe. It is here that the liberal canon is forged out of the loci classici of Immanuel Kant, John Stuart Mill, Adam Smith, and John Locke: the individual, propriety, the competitive market, and secular law. These ideas, Williams argues, have worked their way through modern history deviating or consolidating through processes and events such as imperialism, decolonisation, and the Cold War, coming to ‘constitute’ the World Bank. What makes the Bank interesting is its institutional effort to make liberalism a project, based in actual practices of social engineering. If liberalism bequeaths to us the mainstay of the West's political values (freedom, rights, and so on), it also provides us with a template for the establishing of political authority and techniques of intervention – to ‘remake the world in its image’ (p. 12). Eschewing orthodox approaches to the World Bank that evaluate its efficacy, its institutional form, or its history, Williams cuts into the liberal genre to identify a political project that is both expansive and beset with tensions (perhaps even contradictions). Williams’ argument is that the World Bank can be understood as an embodiment of liberalism's universal ambitions – with all of their attendant difficulties.
Clearly, Africa is a very good place to start to engage with the question that drives the book. No other region has been subjected to as much attention and such levels of intervention by the World Bank as Africa. In chapters three and four, Williams provides authoritative and concise overviews of the World Bank project in Africa: from economic liberalism to a broader and tendentially more complex ‘toolbox’ of micro-management within the state often bundled under the rubric ‘governance’.
It is at this point that questions emerge. Chapters three and four could be read largely as descriptive narrative. Here, we find ample space for institutional complexity, the role of individuals, and the interplay of ideas with material forces that are clearly going to be prominent in an intergovernmental lending organisation. Of course, all of this matters; but in what ways do these things matter for the liberal project?
Or, to put it differently, how do we understand the force of ideas in institutions? There are two suggested answers to this question in the book. One is that it is heuristically sustainable to speak of liberalism doing things; not because this is literally true but because it provides a convincing account of complexity. Thus, we have ‘liberalism has tried to ground its project’ (p. 22). Secondly, we have ‘liberals’, a social category that dominates institutions like the World Bank. Neither of these ontological references is ‘wrong’, but both have their baggage. Ideational explanations can be weak on agency and get away with it (something that many who follow Foucault don't seem too concerned with even if they berate Marxism's determinism). References to liberals can tempt analysis into the abstract: a referencing of a form of agency that is deduced rather than identified. This latter point is interesting because one of the key critiques of liberal intervention is its reified sense of the individual – homo oeconomicus. Could it be that ‘liberals’ in Williams’ book are an analogous ‘homo liberalis’? It is not simply empiricist to claim that those who staff the Bank are themselves culturally constituted; they are not from nowhere.
The book moves on in chapter five to a case study of Ghana. Williams presents this in characteristic style: concise, balanced, and detailed. Here, we get a striking sense of the project's ambitions: its infusion into almost all aspects of the state, its specificity, its indifference to Ghana's own forms of authority unless they can be ‘seen’ through a liberal lens. What the chapter shows, however, is ambition, not practice. The account provides absolutely convincing detail on ambition, but less on the practices that ensue from the project design, funding, and technical detail. Again, this is not simply an appeal to a need to look at ‘results on the ground’ (which are always ‘complex’ and unintended in some fashion) but rather to ask how we take the Bank's interventions. In this reader's judgement, the long and concerted history of the Bank et al.'s involvement in African states has been to forge quite limited zones of liberal practice which are not even coextensive with the central state, let alone at the provincial or district level; and ‘society’ is another thing altogether. It might be that a reader who is wanting to learn about the Bank's effect in Africa who picks up Williams’ book as a starting point would imagine a process similar to the Enclosures in Britain – a sweeping disaggregation of communities under the harsh disciplinary panopticon of states whose sovereignty has been lost to the Bank's heroic global ambitions.
Williams does note that he is not concerned to determine the extent to which the Bank has succeeded; but then what the book is showing us is a transformatory ambition rather than transformatory practice. This is where the book finishes: on the normative issues raised by the effects of World Bank intervention. I would have liked to read more about this. Issues about the normative status of consequentialism and relativism lurk under the surface. It is easy to agree with Williams that the Bank's universalism, its monadic view of societies, and its bullish interventions into African sovereignties evoke normative opprobrium. Perhaps the challenge for students of the Bank is to try to develop ways to evaluate its actions – which are constantly repackaged and reinvented – in ways that marry an interest in social practice with normative thinking which is flexible, progressive, and tolerant. But that would take us back to the liberal genre once again…