Le consensus de Paris: la France et les règles de la finance mondiale

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 rule-based 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.