Every forty or fifty years, a few men sit round a table and make decisions that affect generations. There’s every likelihood that we’re close to approaching such a time again. On the fifteenth of this month, 20 world leaders will meet in Washington, DC; another summit is planned for December. Look to see if the urgency that we’ve seen throughout the world, the shared sense that things have been allowed to slide long enough, lasts. If it does, then we might soon be assisting at the birth of that rarest of creatures: a new and genuinely useful multilateral organisation, something with the teeth that fresh-won consensus provides. The last time those men met round a table, World War II was coming to an end, and the world was being politically divided, at Yalta; and economically harmonised, at Bretton Woods. And now we’re being primed to expect “a new Bretton Woods”: by Gordon Brown, Nicolas Sarkozy, Ban Ki-Moon and others. And if so, India should be pushing hardest of all.

The reason that a new Bretton Woods is being called for is that we’ve been unable to prevent crises or moderate the excesses that the high-spirited lads in international finance seem to be prone to. Perhaps some additional regulatory structure is called for; and, like at the original Bretton Woods, this structure will shape the destinies of nations, but will itself be shaped by the ephemeral balance of power at the moment of its birth.

Which is why India needs to be pushing. Objectively, India is still a bit player in the international economy — and particularly in international finance. In any system being designed with that in mind, its interests would get short shrift. But there are specific reasons why India holds a slight tactical advantage at this moment, which could be turned into a strategic advantage lasting for decades.

... contd.