Voice and Vote for the Weaker Nations: Mexico’s Bretton Woods

Abstract

This chapter examines the leadership role played by Mexico in the planning and execution of the Bretton Woods conference, and explains Mexico’s privileged position there as the result of an active partnership over many years between Mexican and US financial experts. Over the two decades before Bretton Woods, Mexican diplomats, political figures, and economists had been consistently fighting for poorer countries to have ‘voice and vote’ in international economic organizations. This advocacy led Mexican officials at Bretton Woods to fight for the inclusion of a vision for the development of the “weaker nations,” and not simply the reconstruction of Europe; a just distribution of responsibilities within the new institutions; and more equitable representation in the new international bodies. Mexican experts, this chapter demonstrates, both foresaw, and attempted to forestall, issues of inequity in the new global economic order.