The contrast between success at Bretton Woods in 1944 and relative failure in the trade negotiations between 1945 and 1948 has implications for the hypotheses explored in this book. Historically, trade was more prone to deadlock than exchange rates, for trade was often more highly politicised than international monetary issues which were usually seen as technical matters best left to central bankers, and only understood by economic experts. Monetary issues rarely became a matter of partisan politics that determined elections or party identity. ("From Bretton Woods to Havana," in Deadlocks in Multilateral Negotiations, Amrita Narlikar, ed.; pg. 49)
On the one hand, I'm not an expert in this area. On the other hand, I find this explanation unsatisfying. Daunton is basically saying, well, we just think about monetary issues as a distant, "technical" issue, while we think about trade as immediate and open to political interaction. I'm not sure I believe this; and even if I did believe it, it would just push the question back a step. If we think of the two issue areas differently, why do we do that? So there are two possible trains of thought here.
1) If I do believe the offered explanation, what accounts for the different ways of thinking about the two issues? After all, in practice both have important effects on the national/global economy, so there's no a priori reason to think people should be personally interested in one but not the other; and I'm unconvinced that the one issue area is objectively all that much more complicated or "technical" than the other. One possibility is that it has to do with the mechanism for the effects caused by policy in each area. The effects of monetary policy are, I think, pervasive but non-specific and indirect from the perspective of specific industries. The effects of trade policy, on the other hand, while also pervasive are often very industry-specific and very direct. There's more payment to getting involved politically in trade policy, because you have a shot at very materially changing your own playing field if you succeed, and it's cheaper to do so because the issue area can be hived off into many separate fields. Getting policy-makers to pass a rule that only affects your industry has to be easier than swinging them on an issue of national-level policy.
2) If I don't believe the offered explanation, what might be a better explanation? Earlier in the chapter, Daunton refers to, regarding monetary policy, "...the emergence of a broad degree of consensus between technical experts; and the formulation of a plan by two countries - Britain and the United States - whose financial clout meant that it could largely secure its wishes within the broad consensus on policy." So basically... there was no deadlock because all the key players wanted roughly the same thing in monetary policy (not as clearly the case in trade policy). The fact that monetary policy was designed to prevent a recurrence of a catastrophe that everyone had already gotten a chance to experience, while trade policy negotiations were more an attempt to secure hoped-for gains even if it caused some short-term adjustment pains for domestic interests relative to existing policy, probably helped. To me, this seems a more intuitively satisfying explanation. I think the power of "everyone agreed on this" vs. "key players disagreed on this" to make the difference between success and failure in negotiation tends to be undervalued in negotiations literature!
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