Wolfensohn may have felt he needed such blasts to rouse the troubled institution he inherited. The Bank was under fire. Its "structural adjustment programs" -- which involved tightening the fiscal and monetary policies in borrower countries -- had earned it the enmity of many NGOs, which saw it and the International Monetary Fund as the two ugly sisters of globalization. There was disquiet on the other side of the political spectrum too. The Bank's role was to lend capital at affordable rates to help poor countries develop their economies, and since its foundation in 1944, it had made a great many such loans. Yet in many of the recipient countries, especially in sub-Saharan Africa, growth had been feeble or nonexistent. If critics on the left saw the Bank as too tough, critics on the right suspected it was much too soft, handing out money to corrupt Third World politicians who simply siphoned it into their Swiss bank accounts.
Assailed on all sides, the Bank's bureaucrats -- thousands of economics PhDs from all around the world -- hunkered down and got on with what they did best: generating an awesome quantity of reports and statistics. Nothing illustrates more strikingly what a rut the Bank was in than its snail-like slowness to grasp the magnitude of the HIV-AIDS epidemic. In short, the institution needed a shakeup, and Wolfensohn's job was to administer it. This was not something Dr. Jekyll could do. It called for Mr. Hyde.
One episode in particular illustrates what Wolfensohn was up against. It occurred at a 1997 meeting of the bank's board, which represents the rich countries that are its shareholders. Wolfensohn went along expecting to give an ornamental clock and utter a few valedictory banalities to Marc-Antoine Autheman, the outgoing French representative. Instead, he was the recipient of an earful of Gallic invective. Having denounced Wolfensohn's "obsessive reference to the exclusive and irrelevant model of the American private sector," Autheman proceeded to recite a bizarre allegorical poem:
Narcissus, you complain and praise your image
Which the mainstream mirrors
Only Echo Echo responds
But who . . . would follow you but Echo
If your motto remains
Follow me, Support me, and Repeat after me.
No one had any doubt who "Narcissus" was meant to be. But the image of Wolfensohn gazing fondly at his own reflection in the "pool" of the World Bank could be turned around. For if the Bank was a pool when Wolfensohn took it over, it was a distinctly stagnant one. And far from merely admiring his own reflection in it, Wolfensohn had made it his business to stir the pool up.
"I say yes, Jim," Autheman continued, "when you care for Africa; listen to the civil society; ask for a new, unprecedented debt relief. . . . But, I say no when you respond to dissent by the threats to resign [and] criticize staff to the point where they feel humiliated."
To which the only possible response must surely be: poppycock. If one of its senior directors could come out with drivel like this, the World Bank definitely needed as much Hyde as Jekyll from Jim Wolfensohn -- and maybe more. •
Niall Ferguson is a professor of history at Harvard University and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. His latest book is "Colossus: The Price of America's Empire."
