Election or selection?
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The resignation of IMF Executive Director Dominic Strauss Kahn has opened the possibility of a welcome change in how the lead man is selected for the top job in one of the world's two best-known international financial institutions.
Since the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank were established just after World War II, the two Bretton Woods institutions have operated on the basis that the head of the IMF has always been a European and the head of the World Bank has always be an American.
But Strauss Kahn's departure – preceded by a blunt call for him to do so by US Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner – comes at a time when Europe considers leadership of the IMF as being strategically important to "remain at home", to ensure a European approach to a solution to Europe's current national financial and regional monetary problems.
But Europe is itself divided over who should get the top job.
A front-runner is French Finance Minister Christine Legard. But, her qualifying credentials notwithstanding, other Europeans insist Strauss Kahn should not be replaced by a fellow French citizen.
Germany wants the next IMF chief to be a German. But socially liberal France insists its candidate should not be ruled out on the basis of socially conservative Anglo-Saxon concerns.
The alternative approaches vary.
Europe can simply replace the exclusive geographical selective mechanism with a simple "one country-one vote" election, with the candidate receiving the most votes gets the job.
Or, whatever the new mechanism, it should allow for consideration of candidates from emerging economies.
Mexico and South Africa are offering alternative candidates. But so is Turkey, which sees itself as a bridge between East and West in the Arab World and an emerging powerhouse on the world stage.
Clearly, the current global dispensation demands reassessment of the selection mechanism to allow for views alternative to the imbedded European bias.
Those who have run the IMF so far have failed to find positive solutions to avoid the financial and monetary crises that are afflicting European economies at present.
The IMF's European leaderships have never had to implement their recommendations on European soil. Usually bitter IMF prescriptions have been mainly filled in developing countries, some of which have nonetheless emerged to be global powerhouses.
The BRIC states (Brazil, Russia, India, China) and others like South Africa – are showing they have within their ranks what it takes to ride the current global economic and financial storms. They are therefore insisting that solutions to Europe's problems – which affect the rest of the world – are not in the sole intellectual property preserve or domain of blue-blooded Europeans.
