No – not the planned Islamic Community Centre in Park Place – but the prayer room on the 51st floor of World Trade Center’s South Tower, where some of the building’s Muslims used to gather to pray:

“We weren’t aliens,” Mr. Abdus-Salaam, 60, said in a telephone interview from Florida, where he moved in retirement. “We had a foothold there. You’d walk into the elevator in the morning and say, ‘Salaam aleikum,’ to one construction worker and five more guys in suits would answer, ‘Aleikum salaam.’ ”

One of those men in suits could have been Zafar Sareshwala, a financial executive for the Parsoli Corporation, who went to the prayer room while on business trips from his London office. He was introduced to it, he recently recalled, by a Manhattan investment banker who happened to be Jewish.

“It was so freeing and so calm,” Mr. Sareshwala, 47, said in a phone conversation from Mumbai, where he is now based. “It had the feel of a real mosque. And the best part is that you are in the epicenter of capitalism — New York City, the World Trade Center — and you had this island of spiritualism. I don’t think you could have that combination anywhere in the world.”

There was a more makeshift facility at the top of the North Tower – a stairwell, where the Muslim staff of Windows on the World would “lay a tablecloth atop the concrete landing in the stairwell and flatten cardboard boxes from food deliveries to serve as prayer mats.”

Update: Meanwhile, Newt Gingrich (with his third wife, Callista – seemingly the first adult woman to be synthesized in a test tube) has released a new feature film, hailing “the end of times… the final struggle” against Islam.

Newt, who plans to run for President, claims that “America is experiencing an Islamist cultural-political offensive designed to undermine and destroy our civilization.” Happy times.

What is life like inside a hot-shot New York think-tank?  What does it really feel like to, say, pick up a phone and talk to the answering machine of a mid-level UN official?

If you’ve always wanted to know the answers to these questions but never dared ask, the International Peace Institute has a video just for you.  IPI (with which I have worked on and off for some years) is 40 years old this year.  And it has just released a 15-minute video to celebrate.  It’s entitled IPI’s History As Told By Those That Lived It and you can access it here (I can’t embed it in this text).  See if you can spot all the glamorous IPI staff-members above.  It’s like Mad Men for policy wonks!

“How can you reduce animal pain and increase their comfort in your laboratory?” 

This is not a question I ask myself often, as I do most of my research among humans.  However, I am somehow on the mailing list of Lab Animal Welfare Compliance - get your sample copy here - which is a magazine for people who test things on rats, etc.  This week it features an interview with Bernard Rollin, a bioethicist based in Colorado, who is not impressed by all the experiments he sees…

In perhaps his most controversial beginning advice, Rollin suggests avoiding what he calls the “mindless scientific method.”

Example: Rollin recalls working with PIs [Principal Investigators] seeking an alternative for knife castration of beef cattle, which was conducted with anesthesia traditionally. The PIs were testing whether a reproductive hormone that served as immunological castration would be a more humane method. They gave 100 bulls injections, and had a control group of 100 bulls that were to be knife castrated.

“Those researchers could have used historical controls,” Rollin says. “Members of the research team have witnessed thousands of these before. You don’t need 100 more. That’s the ‘mindless scientific method’ — you don’t need to prove the obvious.”

Ouch.

That’s the question I tackle in a background paper prepared for next year’s World Development Report, which the World Bank has just published (pdf) on its website.

So what’s the answer? In a nutshell, that although climate change and scarcity do indeed pose real conflict risks (especially in fragile states), the relationship is more complicated than you might think from all the media stories about ‘water wars‘ and the like. 

In reality, after all, it’s hardly ever possible to separate climate or scarcity impacts from wider political, economic and social drivers. As the Norwegian Refugee Council note, for instance, the problem with the idea of ‘climate refugees’ is that it “implies a mono-causality that one rarely finds in human reality”.

So it is with conflict, most of the time: it’s just not possible to separate land, water, food, energy and so on from the wider political economy context. (As one of the authors I came across put it, “it is difficult to imagine how conflict in any developing country could not involve renewable resources … developing country elites fight over renewable resources for the same reason that Willy Sutton robbed banks: that’s where the money is”.) On a related note, the paper argues that

A political economy-based approach to understanding scarcity also underscores the importance of the point that scarcity should not be viewed in isolation from the contextual factors that make an individual, community or society vulnerable – or resilient – to its effects.  While disputes over the ownership, consumption, distribution or governance of scarce resources can increase the risk of violent conflict, the key to reducing the risk of such conflicts may have less to do with access to the resources per se than to the livelihoods that they enable.  Creating alternative livelihoods not reliant on these resources, or improving access to social protection systems and safety nets, may therefore be equally viable approaches to achieving the same end. 

Bottom line? Yes, resource scarcity and climate change will increase the risk of conflict – but more often as a threat mutiplier than as stand-alone drivers of conflict. And that means donors and developing country governments alike will have to think much harder about resilience across the board – and especially about questions of the effectiveness and legitimacy of natural resource governance regimes.

Background paper for the World Bank’s 2011 World Development Report by Alex Evans on whether resource scarcity and climate change will cause increased violent conflict (September 2010)

Download Report

So the World Bank has finally published its big report on landgrabs (this after an earlier version of it was leaked at the end of July, as I noted at the time): here’s the news release, a 4 page issues note and a pdf of the report itself.

The report is upfront about the fact that many recent land access deals have been bad news for poor people – the result, it says, of factors like weak land governance and a failure to protect local communities’ land rights, lack of country capacity, unclear investor strategies, or lack of overall national development strategies that can help to identify where investments can be helpful. World Bank MD Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala puts it like this in the press release:

These large land acquisitions can come at a high cost. The veil of secrecy that often surrounds these land deals must be lifted so poor people don’t ultimately pay the heavy price of losing their land.

The report divides countries up into four categories, on the basis of two main variables: whether or not they have lots of surplus land, and whether or not they have a big ‘yield gap’ (i.e. between actual and potential agricultural productivity). Depending on which quadrant countries fall into, different considerations for governments and investors alike become apparent.

Arguably the key task for governments identified in the report is the deceptively simple prescription to “improve land governance to ensure that the pressures from higher land values do not lead to dispossession of existing rights”.

This means, according to the Bank, ensuring that existing rights are sufficiently protected to create the basis for voluntary transfers, having state land identified geographically and ensuring transparent mechanisms for its “management, acquisition, divestiture and imposition of land restrictions”, making complete and current information on land rights available to all, and ensuring accessible mechanisms for dispute resolution.

All fine in principle, though in practice about as politically charged as it gets. The Wilson Center’s Michael Kugelman, who edited an excellent publication on land grabs last year, is unimpressed, arguing that “the World Bank’s talk about codes of conduct and other normative modes of fostering good investor behavior is well-intentioned, but ultimately naïve”. That may well be true – although it’s not wholly clear to me whether the World Bank can really do that much to twist governments’ arms into playing nice on the issue.

It’s been a rough couple of weeks for UN peacekeeping, with (i) the fall-out of the DRC mass rape story; (ii) Rwanda’s threat to pull troops out of Darfur in response to the UN report on its role in the Congo; (iii) a less well-publicized but worrying Indian proposal to stop deploying helicopters in DRC and Sudan.  This last development could signal a broader Indian disengagement from UN ops, with serious consequences for the organization’s overall operational abilities (something I’ve warned about before).

Two weeks ago, I wrote a brief post about the need to rethink the fundamentals of peacekeeping.  I promised to offer a few ideas about this on the blog – and I still will – but for now these urgent developments are crowding out longer-term strategic issues.

I’d worry less about individual set-backs and withdrawals if they weren’t taking place in the context of worrisome debates about how much UN operations cost ($7-$8 billion a year) and if this can be sustained.  The French ambassador to the UN recently told the Security Council that “in the context of budgetary austerity, the cost of peacekeeping [is] increasingly difficult to manage.”  Private chats around and about NYC indicate that the French aren’t alone in this view.  I’ve just written a briefing for ZIF, the German think-tank, on peacekeeping in the age of austerity. Here’s the opening summary:

UN peacekeeping has not faced drastic budget cuts during the financial crisis. But the UN is not immune to economic stresses: major donors, including members of the EU, are looking to keep costs down. These constraints could harm the UN as it prepares for possible crises in Sudan and the Middle East. Budgetary disputes could also damage relations with big troop contributors to the UN like Brazil and India. To avoid this, EU governments should make counter-cyclical strategic investments in UN peacekeeping to (i) sustain confidence in big UN military operations in Africa; and (ii) increase support to its light-weight political missions, including those in Afghanistan and the Middle East.

I’m not suggesting that we’ll see a collapse in funding for peacekeeping. But it’s easy to see how budgetary worries can distort strategic debates about what the UN can do:

France wants costly missions downsized but opposes shrinking UN forces in former colonies like Côte d’Ivoire and Lebanon. The U.S.defends the mission in Liberia. If the U.S. queries the cost of a mission France likes, the French duly question the number of peacekeepers in Liberia.

There are deeper tensions between the main financial supporters of UN missions and big troop contributors like India (which provides crucial assets to UN missions in Africa) and Brazil (which is essential to the mission in Haiti). The latter argue that their decision to put soldiers in harm’s way means they should have more say in peacekeeping decisions.

Major financial contributors like Germany and Japan respond by arguing that they should also be given more opportunities to shape the future of the missions they pay for. They complain that the rising Asian economies pay a tiny part of the peacekeeping budget. While Germany still pays 8% of the costs (a slight reduction on previous years), China pays 4% and India less than 2%.

There are always tensions between “those who pay” and “those who play” in UN ops, but I can imagine a perfect storm emerging as (i) budgetary pressures push the payers to be ever tougher on costs, and (ii) exogenous strategic concerns and bad PR drives players like India and Rwanda to take their forces away from the UN.  To counter these converging trends, we need stronger strategic arguments for UN ops.  I raise some in the ZIF paper, and will return to the topic here soon, as promised.

News just in from Colum Lynch at FP’s Turtle Bay blog:

Sha Zukang, the U.N. undersecretary general for Economic and Social Affairs and the organization’s most senior Chinese official, offered U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon a toast last week at a retreat in the Alpine resort town Alpbach that degenerated into an intoxicated rant against the United Nations, the United States, and his boss, Turtle Bay has learned.

“I know you never liked me Mr. Secretary-General — well, I never liked you, either,” Sha told Ban at a dinner attended by the U.N.’s top brass, according to a senior U.N. official who attended the event. “I didn’t want to come to New York. It was the last thing I wanted to do. But I’ve come to love the U.N. and I’m coming to admire some things about you.”

The blunt dinner remarks — which came after Sha had a few drinks  – prompted U.N. officials to approach Sha and try to coax him into putting down the microphone, according to a U.N. spokesman and several U.N. sources who were there. It didn’t work. Sha continued a lengthy speech, in which he also expressed his antipathy toward the United States. “It was a tribute gone awry,” said a second senior U.N. official who was at the dinner. “It went on for about ten or fifteen minutes but it felt like an hour.” Ban was described as having smiled and nodded awkwardly during the Sha rant, but he allowed the dinner to continue.

U.N. officials said that Sha realized that he had gone too far, and that he spent much of the following day out of sight. “Sha Zukang was deeply apologetic when he met the Secretary General in person early the following morning at his own request,” said Farhan Haq, the acting deputy U.N. spokesman, in a statement to Turtle Bay. “He said that he had risen to speak the previous evening because he felt that recent criticisms of the Secretary General had been unfair and that he wanted to set the record straight. However, Sha told the Secretary General that he realized that the way that he spoke, coming as it did after he had had a few drinks, was inappropriate, as it went too far. He was also aware that his statements had embarrassed and irritated other senior advisors.”

[snip]

Sha’s colleagues, including Catherine Bragg, a humanitarian relief official, tried to approach Sha to persuade him to calm down. But Shaw continued. At one stage, Sha singled out a senior U.N. official, Bob Orr of the United States, and said “I really don’t like him: he’s an American and I really don’t like Americans,” according to the senior official. But he then went on to credit Orr for delivering a commendable speech at the U.N. conference on climate change in Copenhagen, in which Orr praised Ban for taking a courageous stand and laying the groundwork for progress on global warming. “He was right,” Sha said, according to the official.

See also.

Following up on my post last week about the spike in wheat prices and the rioting in Mozambique that killed (at last count) 10 people, it emerges this morning that the government of Mozambique has backed down and won’t after all try to cancel the 30% subsidy it currently applies to wheat.

That’s going to be pretty horrendous for Mozambique’s Treasury, as Reuters note:

The government will introduce austerity measures to help fund the subsidies by freezing salary and allowance increases for senior government officials and curbing foreign travel.

Analysts said the bread price about-turn would put pressure on an expansionary budget designed to tackle Mozambique’s lack of roads and electricity, a legacy of years of civil war. Consequently, the government would have to rely more on foreign direct investment and external aid flows, both of which could fall victim to another global economic slowdown, said analyst Celeste Fauconnier of FirstRand in Johannesburg. “It will definitely put further strain on the budget,” she said.

A classic case in point, then, as to why targeted social protection measures are a way better option for developing countries coping with unrest over food prices, than economy-wide subsidies, price controls or export restrictions.

Unfortunately, though, there’s often political opposition to social protection: Treasuries worry about the long term fiscal commitment, while middle classes fret that it’ll encourage welfare dependency, a concern not supported by evidence from development research. (For more on social protection and how it relates to hunger, see this WFP report (pdf) from last year, which I co-authored.)

One other interesting angle in all this is the fact that Mozambique’s former PM, Luisa Diogo (profile), is to be a member of the new UN High-level Panel on Global Sustainability, which meets for the first time on 19 September. The Panel, which has a pretty impressive line-up of members, will be an excellent chance to look in the round at improved global management of scarcity issues – and having Diogo on board is definitely a plus for the Panel’s coverage of food security issues.

Earlier this week, Alex linked to a blog-post by Tyler Cowen on why diplomacy is a “a stressful and unrewarding profession.”  I’m afraid I found much of the post a bit silly.

Diplomats, we learn, work with “little hope for job advancement, serving many constituencies, and having little ability to control events.”  The same is presumably true of a lot of plumbers, dog-walkers and Anglican bishops.  Tyler observes that diplomats suffer from a “false feeling of power” because their authority is “borrowed power from one’s country of origin rather than from one’s personal achievements.” Well, yes, welcome to the nature of existence in modern bureaucratic society.  A car salesman would be lost without car-makers.  A best-selling author requires the framework of editors, PR folk and Amazon to advance their personal achievements.

But Tyler does capture a real complaint about the life of the modern diplomat.  Whereas ambassadors of yesteryear enjoyed a lot of autonomy, the current generation are dependent on their capitals and struggle to influence decisions at home.  Our Person in X is at the mercy of turf wars back home between junior officials.  Now, individual ambassadors can hardly make up their own policies on climate change.  But there are still times and places where old-fashioned diplomacy is required.

I’m thinking, as I often do, of the nastier backwaters of the globe – places where old-fashioned conflicts bubble  away, and you need personal political contacts if you want to affect the bubbling.  In a paper published in July, Bruce Jones and I argued that the UN and other international organizations have lost sight of the political dimensions of conflict, relying instead on the placebos (or pabulum) of semi-scientific conflict indicators.  The same is sadly true of a lot of diplomatic services today.

In a significant new report for RUSI Richard Teuten and GD alumnus Daniel Korski argue that its time to tilt the balance of British diplomacy back towards the guys on the ground, at least in conflict zones:

The report suggests developing the function of the National Security Council (NSC) to take on a stronger coordinating role, with British ambassadors taking the responsibility as the ‘whole-of-government’ representative in-country. They propose the systematic development of a more robust supply of civilians and military officers ready to work together in hostile environments, including closer integration of civilian-military personnel and assets, with structured career incentives to encourage collaborative, cross departmental work.

Amen to that! I have questions: in a lot of cases, the real challenge is not just joining up UK initiatives towards a country at risk, but combining everything on offer from the EU, UN, World Bank, etc. Daniel and I have previously argued in favor of shifting greater responsibility to the EU’s people in the field to do just that.  But aren’t we swimming against the tide of history?  Diplomatic services, not least the UK’s, are going to keep on getting cut left, right and center in the name of austerity in the next few years.  Next time we have to deploy a bunch of over-educated but ill-prepared interns to some failed state that we’ve ignored for years, don’t blame Korski or Gowan.

NB: you can see Teuten and Korski live at RUSI in London on 24 September.  Register here!

In April 2009, I noted that UN forces in the Democratic Republic of Congo mounted an anti-rebel operation codenamed “Rock of Steel”. This week, after mass rapes near a UN base in the DRC, the UN mounted operation “Shop Window” which is aimed at “reassuring the population and demonstrating its efforts to use all available resources to fulfill its mandate to protect.” As I’ve noted before, the UN presence in the Congo is in a mess, and the shift in codenames may symbolize its loss of confidence.

Watch out for news of “Operation Cuddly Kitten” in the DRC shortly.

The FT’s big front page splash today (“Fears grow over global food supply“) has sent a ripple of interest through the wider media – expect to hear a lot about the issue on the broadcast media over the course of the day. So is this a repeat of 2008? In a word, no – though it could yet become one, and even if it doesn’t, we need to regard this as a wake-up call. Here’s a quick summary.

What’s going on? Wheat prices are soaring. A year ago, a tonne of wheat cost €141; today, it costs €231, and most of the rise has happened over the last few weeks. Meanwhile, meat prices have hit their highest level in 20 years. The overall FAO Food Price Index rose 5% during August, and is back to where it was in late autumn 2007 (when the food price spike was well underway) – though it’s still some way off its peak during summer 2008.

So why are prices rising? For wheat, the main driver has been adverse weather – principally in Russia, but also in parts of the EU, Kazakhstan, Australia and Ukraine. The effect has been compounded by export restrictions, again with Russia (which has banned wheat exports outright) the main driver. On meat, the issue’s more to do with demand (especially in emerging economies, where people are increasingly shifting to meat-rich ‘western diets’) – though the supply side has also lagged.

But why the sudden spike in media coverage? Media interest has stepped up over the last 24 hours because of two things that just happened: a food price riot in Mozambique that left 7 dead, and Russia’s announcement that it will extend its export ban on wheat for 12 months.

Is this 2008 all over again? No. Despite the adverse weather in Russia and other countries, the world as a whole is on course for a bumper crop this year – the third highest on record, according to the International Grains Council. Stock levels are also much more comfortable than they were in 2008, providing more of a buffer. And the 2008 food spike was greatly amplified by a concurrent oil price spike (reaching $147 at the top), which made food more expensive by upping fertiliser, energy and transport costs, as well as making it more attractive to put crops into biofuels. Today, by contrast, oil is at $76 – still high, by historical standards, but a long way off 2008 levels.

So there’s nothing to worry about? No, that’s not the case either. The situation could still get a lot more serious – if more harvests get damaged by extreme weather, if price bubbles develop through investors going long on futures markets, if the oil price starts rising, or if more countries start implementing export bans or restrictions.

Looking to the longer term – with food demand forecast to rise 50% by 2030, even as trends like water scarcity, climate change, intensifying energy security risks and competition for land constrain supply growth – there are strong reasons to think that 2008 wasn’t “just a blip”.

Most of all, remember that for many poor people, the food price spike didn’t end in 2008. The number of undernourished people in the world was 850m before the food spike; today, it’s over a billion – not surprising, when you reflect how high food prices have been since then by historical standards (again, see the FAO Food Price Index), or on the fact that poor people typically spend 50-80% of their household income on food.

So what do we need to do? See The Feeding of the Nine Billion for a full answer to this – but the short answer is, a) invest in a 21st Century Green Revolution that produces more food, more sustainably, more resiliently, and in a way that works for small farmers; b) scale up targeted social protection systems to protect people like the ones rioting in Maputo (and which make a lot more sense than price controls or economy-wide subsidies); c) start getting serious about making international agricultural trade more resilient, especially through better crisis management mechanisms and probably including new rules against sudden export restrictions; and d) do a serious global deal on climate change. And get a move on. (more…)

That’s the rather arresting finding of new research from the University of Texas, published in the journal Energy (which should be behind a paywall, but someone’s helpfully posted it here). The key message in the paper is this:

The global peak of coal production from existing coalfields is predicted to occur close to the year 2011 … It is unlikely that future mines will reverse the trend predicted in this BAU [Business As Usual] scenario.

Now if true, that obviously has rather far-reaching consequences for climate policy – and, indeed, for the most basic assumptions used by the IPCC, as the authors explain:

Based on economic and policy considerations that appear to be unconstrained by geophysics, the IPCC generated forty carbon production and emission scenarios. [Our research] provides a reality check on the magnitude of carbon emissions in a BAU scenario. The resulting base case is significantly below 36 of the 40 carbon emission scenarios from the IPCC … After 2011, the production rates of coal and CO2 decline, reaching 1990 levels by the year 2037, and reaching 50% of the peak value in the year 2047.

Grist magazine’s David Roberts summarises the two key implications of this:

1. If coal is soon going to get harder to reach and more expensive, an enormous investment in carbon capture and storage may not make sense. Remember, building the infrastructure necessary to run our economy on renewables and efficiency will itself be an expensive, energy-intensive undertaking. If our fossil-fuel savings are running low, we urgently need to spend every penny of that energy wisely. If we waste a huge chunk of it on CCS only to find coal drying up, we’ll have that much less to put toward building post-fossil infrastructure.

2. If there’s much less coal than widely assumed, climate change may not be humanity’s biggest problem. Most of the more dire IPCC climate change scenarios assume endlessly rising energy demand and use, and thus endlessly rising CO2 emissions. But those models tend not to pay heed to the physical world. If some of the new research on coal reserves is accurate, it is mathematically impossible to emit as much as the high-end IPCC scenarios. There just won’t be enough fossil fuels.

I’m a bit suspicious of the methodology the researchers used to yield the 2011 peak date, and want to see some peer reviews of it by people who know more about solid fuels than me. But it’s interesting to see peak oil analysts broadening their argument to encompass power generation as well as liquid fuels for transport – an argument they’re applying to uranium for civil nuclear power as well as to coal, as for instance in this quote from an energy analyst in a recent edition of Energy Bulletin:

I feel the uranium market right now could be the world’s most unbalanced commodity market. . . . the planet, by means of the nuclear power industry, consumes approximately 172 million pounds of uranium per year, as well as the planet only produces about 92 million pounds of uranium per year. The supply deficit is produced up through above-ground inventories, which are becoming worked down pretty quickly…

Again, can’t vouch for the data sources. But interesting, and worth hunting around to see what other evidence is (or isn’t) out there.

Tyler Cowen sets it all out:

I see diplomacy as a stressful and unrewarding profession.  A good diplomat has the responsibility of deflecting a lot of the blame onto himself, and continually crediting others, while working hard not to like his contacts too much.  And how does he or she stay so loyal to the home country when so many ill-informed or unwise instructions are coming through the pipeline?  Most of all, a good diplomat requires some kind of clout in the home country and must maintain or manufacture that from abroad.  The entire time on mission the diplomat is eating up his capital and power base, and toward what constructive end?  So someone else can take his place?  And what kind of jobs can you hope to advance into?

Diplomats are in some ways like university presidents: little hope for job advancement, serving many constituencies, and having little ability to control events.  Plus they are underpaid relative to human capital.  They must speak carefully.  They must learn how to wield power in the subtlest ways possible. Who was it that said?: ” Diplomacy is the art of saying “Nice Doggie” until you can find a stick”.

Colum Lynch, meanwhile, is chewing on the hypothesis that if being a diplomat sucks, being one at the UN really sucks:

Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who served as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations from 1965 until 1968, approached his job with trepidation, recalling that a generation of top American officials had been sent to New York to see their careers run aground. “I had seen Stevenson humiliated. Goldberg betrayed. Ball diminished. Wiggins patronized. Yost ignored. Bush traduced. Scali savaged,” Moynihan recalled in his memoirs on his U.N. days, Dangerous Place. “I had twice said no to the post I was now to assume.”

Dean Acheson, an affirmed believer in multilateral diplomacy, ran into Moynihan at the Metropolitan Club in Manhattan to convey his contempt for the top American job at the U.N. “Moynihan,” Acheson said. “My respect for you took a precipitous decline when I learned you even considered that ridiculous job.”

On the fight brewing between the US and Europe over IMF board seats that I wrote about last week, David Bosco at Foreign Policy has been talking to Ted Truman, a former US Treasury official now at the Institute for International Economics. Truman’s take:

First, he argues that the American gambit was not sudden but is a response to what he characterizes as longstanding European intransigence. He believes that Europe has failed repeatedly to respond to American signals of discontent over the past five years.  “In 2008 and 2009, they basically said that this issue was not on the table,” he recalls. In that context, the new U.S. position is “an aggressive move in the context of a pretty aggressive defense.”

He also emphasizes the oddity of current European policymaking in a body like the IMF. It’s not as if each of the European seats offers a unique policy perspective. Through the EU, individual member states coordinate their positions in advance. “They just get eight to ten voices every time an issue comes up,” he says. Truman contends that it might actually be better to revert to a smaller board, not least for reasons of cost. IMF executive directors and their staffs are relatively expensive, and in today’s environment of budget-slimming there could be some non-trivial savings for the Fund in a pared-down board.

On this issue, Washington is aligned with India, China and Brazil in an effort to tame traditional European prerogatives. If that trend continues, it could spell trouble for Europe in the world of multilateral institutions.