CURRENT PRESIDENT of the World Bank, Robert B. Zoellick, sat down for a long talk with TNI's executive editor, Justine A. Rosenthal, almost a year into his tenure at the Bank. Zoellick discussed his new agenda-from putting the pieces back together in failed states to how to make a rising power like China a benign stakeholder in the international system. Seeing this as a time as pivotal for the World Bank as the years post-World War II, Zoellick looks at how to reformulate an international-development heavyweight sixty years on.
Justine A. Rosenthal (TNI): You're rapidly approaching your one-year mark at the World Bank Group. How do you see the Bank fitting into the global framework right now?
Robert B. Zoellick (RBZ): If you think about this in the sense of foreign-policy or security architecture, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (later the World Trade Organization) were created with a certain set of assumptions about failures in the international economic system in the 1920s and 1930s, which people believed led to fascism and conflict. Those institutions were designed to deal with those perceived problems. But the world has changed. The challenge now is determining how to create a new multilateralism that works in the new environment. The Bank Group remains one of the world's great multinational institutions. But sixty years have passed, and it is time for an overhaul. How do we create the opportunity for poor states to prosper and grow? How do we encourage China and India to be responsible stakeholders in the development system? For states coming out of conflict, how do we engender hope and prevent the spread of ethnic conflict and disease?
