Description
The article examines the role of the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) in the global
financial architecture (GFA) for the integration of peripheral economies into global
finance during the 1990s. Even though there has been increasing attention to and a surge
in academic studies concerning the BIS, its relation to peripheral countries, as the BIS
expanded its membership and incorporated several new members during the 1990s, has
been overlooked. While this study seeks to unpack the increasing interaction of peripheral
central bankers within the transnational networks of central bankers established through
the BIS, it aims to fulfil two objectives: first, empirically understand the specific role
played by the BIS for the articulation of peripheral economies into global finance and
hence to highlight the special role of the BIS played in the GFA during the 1990s.
Secondly, I aim to contribute theoretically to the study of global governance by
employing a critical political economy approach, specifically transnational historical
materialism. Based on a reading of Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks, I propose a
novel and critical approach to the socialisation function of global financial governance to
cast light on its social purpose, which would help to understand the role of the BIS by
focusing on the role of ideas and power relations. The research shows how the BIS has
been crucial in propagating central banking ideas to the periphery, and the
conceptualisation of socialisation from a Gramscian perspective corroborates how it has
unfolded for the central banks of peripheral countries.
