Le consensus de Paris : la France et les règles de la finance mondiale
Rawi Abdelal
The Paris Consensus: France and the Rules of Global
Finance
This article is about the institutional foundations of the
globalization of finance. These institutional foundations are both informal
and formal. Until the 1980s the formal rules of the international financial
architecture – most consequentially in the European Union (EU), Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), and International Monetary Fund (IMF) – condoned and privileged capital controls. The
EU and OECD adopted new rules obliging members to liberalize capital in
the late 1980s. During the middle of the 1990s the IMF debated new rules in
favor of capital freedom, but the proposal was defeated. Three policy makers
in the EU, OECD, and IMF played decisive roles in formulating these new
rules in favor of capital freedom: respectively, Jacques Delors, Henri Chavranski, and Michel Camdessus – all three French. This is a paradox because
the French had done more than any other country to obstruct the creation of
new rules in favor of capital mobility for more than three decades. In this
article I offer three narratives of the institutional foundations of capital
freedom that constitute this French paradox. Then I offer an explanation for
the French paradox based on three ideas: the difference between French rulebased globalization and U.S. ad hoc globalization; the organization building
imperatives of each episode for the French, particularly in the EU; and the
embrace of the market by the French Left in order to alleviate the undesirable distributional consequences of circumvented financial regulation.
• Plus royaliste que le roi : le triomphe de la rigueur dans la France
de Mitterrand
• L’Europe de Jacques Delors
• Le Château et Henri Chavranski
• Le FMI et la liberté de circulation sous le mandat de Michel Camdessus