Money Order? The Discursive Construction of Bretton Woods and the Making and Breaking of Regulatory Space

Abstract

In this paper we analyse the ‘ordering’ of the international financial system in the 20th century, focusing upon the making and breaking of ‘Bretton Woods’. We argue for a more reflective, reflexive, and historical economic geography and for the need to take economic discourse seriously. This argument is developed by providing two accounts of the rise and fall of the Bretton Woods System. The first of these accounts is drawn from regulation theory, the second from neo-Gramscian political economy. These alternative accounts of the creation of the Bretton Woods System, and of the later reactions to its crisis, focus attention upon the central role of economic discourse in ordering economic processes in general and financial processes in particular. In making sense of the making and breaking of Bretton Woods, regulationist and neo-Gramscian approaches have afforded greater importance to issues of discursivity and have been more attentive to matters of money and finance. These developments are seen to be constituent of one another. The world of money is increasingly one of interpretative power struggles, where competing sets of scripts and discourses conjure up alternative plausible ‘orderings’ of the economic world. Moreover, the speed at which the discursive world of money and finance transforms itself continues to accelerate, so that the time—space horizons of the financial world are now at odds with those of conventional political thinking and of extant political institutions. This ontological disjuncture signifies an important imbalance between the social power of financial capital and those who would wish to bring about a ‘reordering’ of the economic world in favour of less powerful social groups.