L'architecture financière internationale et les faillites d'Etat

In April 2003, the proposition by the IMF to create an international bankruptcy court for sovereign States has finally been abandoned. The main reasons for its eventual rejection were the resistance to public intervention into financial contracts and the supra-national character of the body that would have been endowed with such a right. The proposed innovation was however not negligible, as it would have separated the two main functions included in ail previous debt-renegotiation frameworks: conditionality, and the regulation, sometimes the arbitration, of the financial negotiation between the sovereign debtor and the private investors. While the former function would have remained within the realm of an un-reformed IMF, the latter would have been transferred to a new, ostensibly de-politicised, "proto-judiciary" entity. This failure has had unanticipated conséquences: local regulators have strongly re-emerged, under the form of respectively national judiciaries and central banks. If global institutions fail, globalisation may then lead to institutional "re-localisation". Such a trend underlines the risk of a possible, immediate collapse of collective action against financial crisis.