Social Crisis Within the Historical Progression of the Norm of Modern Development at the Bretton Woods Institutions

Abstract

In the ongoing political debates over how Greece should overcome the consequences of the burden of its debt, a major phenomenon of the current global financial and economic structure is commonly avoided; namely, a process of global structural adjustment of social systems, dramatically known by peripheral economies in the past decades. In an attempt to explain the process, the following chapter draws on contributions from the international economy, historical, and institutional sociology. It traces how with the increasing influence of deregulation of financial capital, former isolated countries are now capable of tightening up the strings of the global economic system over the social system. The distrust of global debt rating agencies over the credit of the United States, Spain, Greece or Italy, represents an upcoming reality of core western territories on an historical process of “modern development”.