Thinking about the World Bank’s “accordion” geography of financial globalization

Two “flagship” World Bank reports, entitled The Long March—A Reform Agenda for Latin America and the Caribbean In The Next Decade (1997) and the World Development Report, 1999–2000 (2000), are the subject of this paper. Both publications attempt to come to terms with the policy and practice of structural adjustment in the context of a new geography of global finance. This paper argues that the geographical imagination employed in both World Bank reports is the product of a dominant statist geographical imagination that struggles to explain contemporary developments in the geography of money. The paper starts with a brief discussion of the Mexican peso and debt crisis, and the World Bank’s practice of structural adjustment. Through an interrogation of both World Bank papers, thought is then given to the purchase of territorialized state-based mappings of the global economy. The paper wraps up with a brief conclusion concerning the explanatory salience of scale. Internationally mobile capital is here to stay. Growing trade links, new communication technologies, and increasingly sophisticated financial products are making national borders more porous to financial flows. The challenge facing policymakers in developing countries is how to navigate through this financially integrating world (World Development Report 1999-2000, 2000: 85). [W]hereas the horizons of the world of money and finance are global and deterritorialized, the political imagination seems wedded to territorialism and the borders of the nation state (Leyshon &Thrift, 1997: 290).