Reading the dispatches coming across his desk that summer, the World Bank president was becoming increasingly nervous. The Bank would hold its annual joint meeting with the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in just a few months, and there were already signs it might be disrupted by protestors. In a late June session with his closest advisors, the president warned that ‘demonstrations might be expected’ at the meeting, and noted that he and the head of the IMF were already ‘having the matter under continuous surveillance’.Footnote 1 Over the next month, he continued to receive updates from staff members and security officials, informing his advisors in July that ‘it now was clear that riots could be expected’.Footnote 2 As the September meeting approached, media reported that protestors were planning a series of large demonstrations and that the city was covered in graffiti that replaced the Bank’s official name, the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development, with a new one: the ‘Imperialist Bank for Ruin and Destruction’.Footnote 3 By the early twenty-first century, such demonstrations would be a familiar story, as disruptions of international summits by raucous street protest became a nearly annual occurrence around the world.Footnote 4 But the summer in question was 1970, the Bank president was Robert McNamara, and the annual meeting was held in Copenhagen, Denmark.
Though it is all but forgotten today, Copenhagen marked the first time a large-scale protest greeted the delegates of international financial institutions (IFIs) as they gathered for an annual meeting. In September 1970, thousands of protestors descended on the Danish capital for marches, speeches, and teach-ins denouncing the World Bank’s ‘neocolonialism’ in the Third World.Footnote 5 When riot police confronted the protestors, who then barricaded streets and hurled stones and Molotov cocktails, plans for a peaceful demonstration gave way to what one Danish newspaper called ‘the fiercest clashes between police and protesters so far since World War II’.Footnote 6 Clearly, the Danish security services took the protests very seriously—but how did officials within the IFIs, faced with unprecedented upheaval at their normally sedate, routine, technocratic annual meeting, react to these protests? While we might expect the leaders of institutions like the Bank and the Fund to merely ignore or dismiss the protestors and their criticisms, this article demonstrates that, in fact, World Bank president Robert McNamara and his staff mounted an immediate and surprisingly comprehensive institutional response.Footnote 7 As they came to understand and define the threat posed by the protests—arguing that protestors’ ideas and actions could undermine the Bank’s legitimacy and the support it needed from not only legislatures in Europe and the United States but also from the broader publics in ‘the North’, as McNamara put it—Bank officials mounted a full-scale public and private campaign meant to counter the protestors’ criticisms and promote an alternative vision of the Bank’s role in the world.Footnote 8 In doing so, this article argues, McNamara and his staff sought to shore up the legitimacy not just of the Bank, but of the development project itself.
While the Copenhagen protests are remembered in Danish history as part of a broader post-1968 transition for the left in Denmark, this first instance of large-scale protest at an institutional summit has been largely ignored by scholars interested in global development and international institutions.Footnote 9 Copenhagen appears to matter little in official histories; the protests appear in a single paragraph of the 1973 official history of the World Bank, where they are characterised merely as left-wing ideas given ‘rather raucous oral exposition’, and they do not appear at all in a later official history.Footnote 10 Given that most IFI officials have long ‘understood their roles as technical or managerial’ and attempted to render development technocratic and apolitical, it is unsurprising that they would avoid stressing the importance of protest to their own historical trajectories.Footnote 11 But social scientists have documented a long history of protest against IFIs: not just the large-scale protests at official Bank and Fund meetings that began in Copenhagen and continued into the twenty-first century, but also the hundreds of strikes, riots, and demonstrations in places that were subject to policies promoted by the institutions.Footnote 12 Despite this extensive record of protest, however, the new historiography of development has rarely asked how such contestation might have influenced these international institutions themselves—a question that global history, with its relational methodology and its emphasis on integration and global-scale causality, can help begin to address.Footnote 13
While the new global historiography of development is flourishing, however, it has been largely marked by a divide between local-level histories and more internationally focused intellectual and institutional histories. A host of detailed new studies of on-the-ground development programmes in places like Mexico, Kenya, Tanzania, Guatemala, Tajikistan, and Ghana have demonstrated how development plans driven from above were contested from below—including by protest, strikes, and sometimes riots—as local populations refashioned what development meant and how it would be pursued.Footnote 14 These studies have done a great deal to demonstrate ‘how universal ideas were negotiated locally and ultimately reshaped’, as Artemy Kalinovsky argued, revealing how the local and the global were, as Priya Lal put it, both dialectically related and ‘mutually embedded’.Footnote 15 Crucially, these studies have offered what Sarah Foss has called ‘a more holistic analysis of the lived experiences of development’, adding necessary grassroots perspective to an otherwise elite-dominated historiography focused on states and international institutions.Footnote 16
But the question of on-the-ground contention has remained mostly marginal to the growing historiography focused on the international development institutions like the World Bank, the IMF, and the various national development agencies, UN bodies, and non-governmental organisations (NGOs) that came to steward international development at the global scale. That literature has largely emphasised intellectual and geopolitical concerns, reconstructing the theoretical and social-scientific debates in which institutional officials participated and/or demonstrating how institutions were shaped by, for example, by the strategic and ideological imperatives of the Cold War.Footnote 17 To be sure, within this broad field, a few scholars have considered how various kinds of critics of development, such as radical intellectuals, right-leaning legislators, or social movements, have shaped the histories of the institutions—but some have disavowed such influence altogether.Footnote 18 In contrast, by explicitly addressing how social protest might reverberate within the boardrooms of international institutions, this article makes the relation between street protestors and high-level development officials its object of analysis. In so doing, I return to one of the fundamental insights of Frederick Cooper, whose path-breaking work in development history demonstrated that ‘disturbances’ in British and French colonies in Africa, including strikes and riots, were a key driver of European development ideas and the institutions built to implement them in the late colonial period.Footnote 19 Development, in other words, was seen by colonial officials as a key way of pacifying populations prone to protests, uprisings, and riots, as those officials came to understand that preventing insurgency would require the remediation of poverty and want.Footnote 20 Building on this observation, this article investigates what happens when disturbances, protests, even riots confronted the highest levels of the development apparatus at a global institution like the World Bank.
The analysis that follows therefore returns to Copenhagen to seek the hidden history of IFIs’ responses to protest in the moment, as protests are planned and executed on the ground. What happens inside the Bank when a riot is happening outside? Answering this question requires reading archival sources that allow us to trace the social history of the protest from below—pamphlets, testimonies, and oral histories—on the one hand, together with and against official institutional records that allow us to uncover the contours of the reaction from above—internal institutional correspondence, World Bank oral histories, and the papers of Bank officials—on the other. How did Bank officials characterise the protestors’ demands in the moment? What threats did they identify, and how did they narrate them internally and externally? Why and how did they feel the need to respond, and what strategies did they use to do so? And what do these responses tell us about the relationship between social upheaval and the development project, as it was understood by its promoters at the Bank?
By first recovering the largely forgotten ideas and actions of the protestors, and then seeking traces in the archival record where institutional officials can be found directly engaging them—that is, by looking directly at evidence of the relation between these two seemingly disparate spheres—this article outlines a global historical method for understanding the ways that social contestation has reverberated within international development institutions, tracing the effects of such upheaval in rarefied spaces far from the street. This mode of reading could be used for a host of other cases of protest: not only at other IFI summits, such the Bank and Fund meetings in West Berlin in 1988 or Prague and Washington, DC in 2000, but also in the developing countries where institutional policies were implemented, from Argentina in the late 1950s and early 1960s, to Egypt in 1977, India in the late 1980s and early 1990s, or Greece in the 2010s, among many others. The case presented here is therefore just a necessary first step toward a global history of protest and reaction—one that would begin to allow us to understand how those institutional reactions to different forms of protest may have changed over time. In this case, this mode of analysis reveals that while a large street protest like Copenhagen did not immediately produce rapid policy change or reform within the institutions, it did force IFI officials to grapple with protestors’ criticisms as they sought to manage the legitimacy of their organisations in the eyes of a global public—as they tried to win hearts and minds to McNamara’s vision of World Bank-led development. What was at stake for these officials, these archival traces reveal, was not merely the replenishment of legislature-dependent funding or the ability to successfully float bonds in world financial markets (though it was also that). What was at stake was, in fact, the very legitimacy of the project of international development itself.
In what follows, I first reconstruct the largely overlooked Copenhagen protests, detailing the protestors’ criticisms and actions in the lead-up to and during the 1970 annual meeting. I then outline the responses of Bank officials at the time of the protests, which were debated in staff meetings and carefully crafted in internal memoranda before being disseminated in publications, press interviews, and speeches at the meeting itself. Against contemporary actors’ insistence that organisations like the Bank were apolitical, technocratic bureaucracies above the political fray, this article demonstrates that officials like McNamara were deeply concerned with the ideas and actions of critics of their institutions in both the developed and developing worlds—and therefore found themselves having to reckon with the riots that threatened to derail not just their meeting, but their mission.
‘To build up a hatred of the World Bank’: Planning and protest in Denmark
What exactly were the protestors’ criticisms of the Bank, and what actions did they take as thousands of finance officials from around the world descended on Copenhagen in September 1970? As the meeting approached, the international press conveyed a sense of how widely protestors’ ideas were circulating, and how radical they were. A Washington Post staff writer noted, as the meetings began, that Copenhagen was covered with ‘crudely painted warnings’ such as ‘“Smash I.B.R.D. (World Bank)” and “Fight World Bankers”’, while the Financial Times detailed for its readers the ‘anti-banker posters and rabid attacks on the evils of capitalism’ all over the city.Footnote 21 Just before the meeting began, writers at The Economist reported on the ‘threat of the Danish Maoist students to break up next week’s meeting’, noting that the protestors ‘think that [McNamara’s] World Bank is inflicting a capitalist form of society on the poor and innocent countries of the world’.Footnote 22 And a Guardian columnist wrote before departing for Copenhagen himself that ‘Danish students have threated to blow the whole place up, because they say the IMF and World Bank are “tools of imperialism and capitalism”’.Footnote 23
The Economist’s characterisation of the protestors as Danish Maoist students had a kernel of truth but missed the larger ecosystem of groups behind the demonstrations, which drew from across the student, squatter, socialist, and anti-nuclear and anti-war movements that had grown up in Denmark in the preceding years.Footnote 24 During the 1960s, important currents of the left—not only in Denmark but throughout Europe and the United States—had taken up a Third Worldist politics, following the analyses and actions of radicals from Cuba to Congo. As new parties and organisations in Europe and the United States moved away from Soviet communism and as the Non-Aligned Movement grew globally, broad currents of the left in Denmark came to believe that ‘the future, and the natural place for Denmark, lay with the South’, as one historian put it.Footnote 25 This was therefore the context for the emergence of a campaign against the World Bank in Copenhagen, rooted in a Third-Worldist socialism that sought to foment global revolution through aligning with struggles for liberation in the Global South.Footnote 26 Unlike later movements that would emerge with the professionalisation and ‘NGO-isation’ of social movement organisations in the 1980s and 1990s, the Danish protestors were not seeking incremental, technical reforms to foster democratic inclusion or accountability at the IFIs—they were seeking the overthrow of global capitalism, and had come to identify the World Bank as a key tool for capitalist expansion in the Third World.Footnote 27
Planning for the protests began months before the September meeting. As early as February 1970, a Trotskyist group called the Revolutionærer Socialister had published a resolution calling for ‘mass demonstrations and actions against the “silent killers”’ at the World Bank, ‘whose weapons are paper in safety deposit boxes’.Footnote 28 Over the spring and summer, planning for the protests brought these radicals together with a loose and fractious coalition of New and Old Left groups in Denmark with nascent ties to other struggles in the United States, Europe, and the Third World. The main demonstrations would come to be planned under the auspices of a network of international solidarity organisations who called themselves the Verdensbanken-gruppen, or World Bank Group; they included the Black Panther Solidarity Committee, the Danish Vietnam Committees, the Palestine Committee, and a handful of groups active in Latin America solidarity work, particularly in Cuba.Footnote 29 Active within these groups were members of parties like the new Left Socialists (VS) and the Danish Communist Party (DKP), as well as a number of smaller socialist and Trotskyist factions—many of which Danish intelligence services had already been monitoring closely, including with secret informants.Footnote 30
This was, of course, the era of massive global protest movements against the Vietnam war and the US role in it, which by the end of the 1960s had fostered a strong politics of international solidarity across Scandinavia, putting pressure on Denmark’s US-aligned, NATO-member government.Footnote 31 But while McNamara’s well-known role in Vietnam certainly drew ire among these groups, printed materials make clear that the interests and demands of the Verdensbanken-gruppen were focused explicitly on the role of the World Bank within the broader global capitalist system. In preparation for the meeting, the group printed and distributed some 15,000 copies of a pamphlet titled VERDEN$BANKEN.Footnote 32 Analysing what they called ‘the Bank of the Western World’, articles in the pamphlet provided a deeply researched, detailed explanation of what the Bank was and how it operated. Articles outlined the Bank’s institutional structure; detailed the biographies of its US-born presidents; analysed its relation to other institutions like the IMF and USAID; surveyed the amounts and recipients of Bank loans over the previous decades; and then detailed in individual articles the specific role of Bank projects in Latin America, Indonesia, Apartheid South Africa, and Ghana. The pamphlet quickly made its way into the hands of Bank staff, who translated it into English and transmitted its contents back to Washington; the authors quoted so extensively from the most up-to-date World Bank publications that one newspaper reported that even ‘admiring Bank officials’ had to admit, ‘“they’ve certainly done their homework”’.Footnote 33
Influenced by New Left theorising about capitalism and neocolonialism, the VERDEN$BANKEN pamphlet argued specifically that the Bank was ‘a tool of monopoly capitalism’, taking aim at the institution’s emphasis, to that point, on lending only for ‘profitable’ projects as part of a larger scheme for the ‘exploitation of the developing countries’.Footnote 34 As representatives of what one historian called the ‘theory-obsessed circles of the Danish left’, the protestors drew directly on contemporaneous Marxist theorizing, understanding monopoly capitalism as a system premised on European subordination to post-war US interests, as well as increasing power for multinational, especially American, corporations.Footnote 35 They therefore targeted the Bank as one of the key ‘elements of modern imperialism’.Footnote 36 To explicitly link the Bretton Woods institutions to economic imperialism was a relatively new idea at the time. Some Soviet observers had explicitly begun to circulate such criticism of the Bank in the early 1960s as they watched Indian leaders increasingly pivot away from Soviet assistance and toward a Western aid consortium under Bank oversight.Footnote 37 In the West, the French economist Pierre Jalée had specifically taken the Bank to task in his Le Pillage du Tiers Monde in 1965 (translated into English in 1968), and the US socialist Harry Magdoff had also begun to refine his analysis of the role of the Bank in post-war capitalism in his journal, Monthly Review, between 1965 and 1968.Footnote 38 The well-read Danish protestors thus distilled these ideas into a trenchant and quite early critique of the role of the Bank in the Third World, which charged that the Bank’s reason for being was the explicit promotion of the interests of private capital, rather than actual development: ‘We see that it is the World Bank’s stated goal to support profitable business in developing countries’, the authors wrote, echoing Magdoff. They continued, ‘they do not say a word about development, not even an argument that private enterprise is the best for a country’s development. This is obviously not what they are interested in.’Footnote 39 As we will see, this was a particularly cutting criticism that came at the very moment that McNamara was advocating for a pivot away from the narrow, return-on-investment calculus for Bank-funded projects that had prevailed over the preceding decades, as he pushed for a massive expansion of Bank lending and a reorientation of the Bank’s development mission toward poverty reduction.
The VERDEN$BANKEN pamphlet condensed a larger body of activist research and publishing on the World Bank that had circulated over the summer in Copenhagen. The Danish bi-weekly New Left broadsheet Politisk Revy, for example, was among a group of publications that focused on the World Bank during the summer of 1970, launching a series of articles in late June that detailed the workings of the institution for their readers. Typical of these publications, Politisk Revy briefed its readers on what the editors called the Bank’s mandate for ‘the fight against “collectivist” economic systems’ and mission to ‘defend world capitalism … in the so-called “third world”’.Footnote 40 That series, appearing alongside interviews with Chilean socialists, translations of the writings of Black Panthers and Young Lords, and political cartoons about CIA interventions around the world, would continue in the months leading up to the September meeting, detailing what the editors saw as the ‘foreign imperialist domination’ of the Bank, which, they argued, echoing the nascent theories of dependency that had begun to circulate, was actively creating ‘underdevelopment’ in the Third World.Footnote 41 A series of other publications joined Politisk Revy in their pedagogical exercise to raise public awareness of the Bank’s activities, including the organ of the Left Socialist party, VS-Bulletin, and that of the DKP, Land og Folk, as well as the left-leaning daily newspapers Information and Politiken, which published similar articles over the months leading up to the conference.Footnote 42
As the summer progressed, protest groups began to use these publications in informational meetings to raise awareness and organise protest participation; as an intelligence services report put it, ‘It is the intention through these leaflets to build up a hatred of the World Bank, so that when the activists take direct action, people will better understand why.’Footnote 43 Calendars that circulated in the weeks leading up to the meeting detailed plans for activities during the entirety of the meeting: there would be a teach-in at the university on the Sunday before the summit began, at which foreign intellectuals like Samir Amin and Andre Gunder Frank were invited to speak.Footnote 44 On the opening Monday of the meeting, 21 September, a large march was planned from the city centre to the site of the meeting, the newly constructed Bella Center in the southern suburbs of Copenhagen, where a demonstration would be held while delegates gathered inside. This main protest was then to be followed by additional actions, including mobilisations on Tuesday when the meeting participants were to attend a performance in the city centre, and then Friday when the delegates were to be received at Copenhagen city hall. This was a plan for a comprehensive week of counter-programming, smaller in scale but strikingly similar to the gatherings that would be organised under the auspices of groups like the World Social Forum decades later.Footnote 45
While the Verdensbanken-gruppen and its allied groups planned to hold a series of large peaceful demonstrations, however, other groups on the Danish left judged these actions insufficient. Echoing the sectarian splits that happened elsewhere in left politics in the late 1960s and early 1970s, more radical factions allied with the Kommunistisk Arbejdskreds (Communist Workers Circle, KAK) and their youth wing, the Kommunistisk Ungdoms Forbund (Communist Youth League, KUF), for example, were determined to not just protest the meeting, but to interrupt it. The KAK and KUF were among the more militant groups on the Danish left, having been formed by founder Gotfred Appel as a Maoist organisation, but later breaking with Mao over what Appel considered the lack of revolutionary potential of the European working classes. In Appel’s estimation, the most important task of the European left was to directly support Third World revolutionary struggle.Footnote 46 Given this emphasis, the summit would provide a key venue for putting their theories into action. KUF members attended the early coalition planning meetings but loudly denounced the moderate stance taken by other groups, pushing for more direct action to interrupt the meeting, not merely rally outside it.Footnote 47 KUF militants argued that the Verdensbanken-gruppen’s planned speeches and marches were ‘petty bourgeois and idealistic’, and, perhaps worse, were likely to be ignored by those inside the conference centre.Footnote 48 Appel later remembered, ‘We decided that the meeting had to be stopped at all costs … the most effective solution was to make it impossible to hold the meeting at the planned location—in the Bella Center’.Footnote 49 As a pamphlet printed by the KUF argued, ‘A World Bank Congress stopped by force is worth a thousand times more than some information and even more dubious declarations of solidarity.’Footnote 50 To test their chances, the militants staged a test run: some two weeks before the meeting, KUF members on motorcycles drove onto the Bella Center grounds, smashed a set of exterior glass doors with hammers, and threw Molotov cocktails into the building. This caused a fire to break out, but resulted only in minimal damage.Footnote 51 It did, however, provoke a heightened police response throughout the city and tightened security at the meeting site, where officials erected a tall fence and stationed security forces on the roof.Footnote 52
The aborted firebombing also set off myriad rumours about planned violent actions, which were conveyed back to Bank officials in Washington, shaping the way they understood the threats posed by the looming protests. In an article titled ‘Should the Bella Center Be Burned Down?’ in Politisk Revy a few days later, editor Bente Hansen outlined the various rumours that had been circulating about ways to disrupt the upcoming meeting: not just burning down the meeting site, as someone had apparently already tried to do, but possibly cutting the cables that supplied power to the building, or even going so far as to shoot McNamara—an event that, she wrote, ‘would probably find understanding in larger circles, but also provoke understandable anti-violence reactions’.Footnote 53 Hansen openly worried that any violence at the demonstrations would turn the public’s attention away from the misdeeds of the Bank around the world, about which her publication had been attempting to raise awareness for the previous months, and toward the actions of the protestors, instead.
Indeed, many observers across the political spectrum had come to think that violence at the meeting was inevitable. On the Saturday before the meeting began, a report in the left daily Information noted with some worry that some of the more militant protestors—including, perhaps, those affiliated with the autonomous youth centre Projekt Hus—were distributing flyers about a planned ‘pig expulsion’, referring to the police.Footnote 54 The next night, small group tried to smash the front doors of the Hotel D’Angleterre, where many of the conference delegates were staying; the ensuing scuffle eventually drew a crowd of some 200 people.Footnote 55 A few KUF youth arrived on the scene carrying Molotov cocktails, and when one of them was grabbed by a police officer, he dropped a bag that contained an address where Gottfred Appel owned a printshop. A police search of the building turned up stockpiled materials for making Molotov cocktails and other projectiles; eighteen people were arrested, and a warrant was issued for Appel’s detention.Footnote 56 As Hansen and her colleagues feared, however, these small scuffles were a mere prelude to what would happen over the next two days.
At first, the planned demonstrations were peaceful. On the opening Monday of the meeting, the Verdensbanken-gruppen and affiliated groups held their main rally, gathering between 5,000 and 10,000 people in the city centre before leading a march to the Bella Center, largely without incident. Outside the cordon at the Bella Center, what one Danish newspaper called ‘the foreign speakers’, including a twenty-six-year-old Tariq Ali and the Swedish author and activist Sara Lidman, rallied the crowds.Footnote 57 Lidman told the crowd that McNamara had invited the ‘all the world’s capitalists to a meeting so that they could together feast on what they had extracted from the Third World’.Footnote 58 Ali, for his part, was described in a press report ‘bellowing into a microphone a denunciation of police brutality and a demand that the World Bank “take back its charity”’.Footnote 59 Another newspaper reported that ‘delegates crowded behind the barbed-wire fences as the marchers shouted “Hang McNamara” and “imperialist bank for ruin and destruction”’.Footnote 60 But while strong words were directed at the attendees behind the fence, there was no violence. A Verdensbanken-gruppen organiser would later tell the press that the gathering had gone according to plan, and that ‘our demonstration at the Bella Center on Monday was the largest and most peaceful in Denmark for two years’, since the uprisings of the summer of 1968.Footnote 61 Tellingly, however—as some had feared would be the case—there is relatively little press coverage of these peaceful demonstrations and their message, because that night, protestors found themselves in a pitched battle with the police.
The conference delegates were set to have dinner that night in the Tivoli Gardens in the city centre, and they were protected by some 1,100 helmeted police officers as demonstrators arrived from the Bella Center rally. Quickly, the police began to try to push demonstrators back from their cordon, and fighting began. Stones and other objects were lobbed at the police; one newspaper report alleged the protestors carried ‘cobblestones and firebombs, bicycle chains and nails, potatoes garnished with razor blades’—though no one ever produced proof of having seen one of these infamous riot weapons.Footnote 62 As the police attempted to push protestors away, the demonstrators began to build barricades by dragging benches into the street and lighting debris on fire; cars were overturned in a few places. The windows of a series of storefronts were smashed, including a local Danish bank as well as offices of US companies like Pan-American Airlines and American Express.Footnote 63 The glass doors at the modernist Hotel Royal, where McNamara was staying, were also shattered. One newspaper described the scene as a ‘veritable battlefield’.Footnote 64
The next night, Tuesday, turned even more heated. McNamara and US Treasury Secretary David Kennedy were scheduled to attend a performance at the Royal Theatre with the Danish king and queen, and demonstrators arrived on the scene to greet them. Reports differed on how the violence began that night; a Reuters wire published the next day said that ‘fire bombs and stones rained down on delegates’ and that one unnamed guest was hit and taken away by ambulance.Footnote 65 Danish journalists present, however, reported that the demonstration had been largely peaceful until a police commander shouted ‘pull the batons and hit hard!’ and the phalanx of police moved into the crowds, swinging.Footnote 66 Warning shots were fired by police, apparently the first time in post-war Danish history that police had used guns at a demonstration.Footnote 67 In response, Molotov cocktails and what a conservative paper called ‘Ho Chi Minh nails’—a kind of caltrop, a multi-pointed metal device bent in such a way that could be thrown into the street and would always land with a point up that could puncture a tyre—were lobbed toward the police lines; a few police were injured and their motorcycles burned.Footnote 68 It was after this night of rioting that Danish newspapers described the scene as the ‘fiercest clashes between police and protesters so far since World War II’.Footnote 69 A few days later, another large peaceful protest was held when the conference delegates were received at Copenhagen city hall. Former World Bank staffer William Bennett would later remember, ‘there must have been 10,000 people outside with a big sign: International Bank for Destruction’.Footnote 70 Despite the size and scale of these peaceful protests, however, the nights of rioting came to dominate press coverage both in Denmark and internationally over the next few days.
After the demonstrations wound down, the Danish public began to grapple with what had transpired. Most establishment coverage disparaged the rioters; the mainstream paper Berlingske Tidende wrote derisively, ‘the thinner the arguments, the bigger the cobblestones’.Footnote 71 But even a writer at the left daily Information lamented, ‘the serious work that other and larger groups have done to create a better popular understanding of the real role of the World Bank has gradually been completely shattered by the fire bombs, the stones and the sticks’.Footnote 72 Even the leader of the KAK, Gottfred Appel, was apparently appalled by what had happened. A confrontation with the police was precisely what KAK and KUF members had been instructed to avoid—they were to interrupt the meeting, not clash with the cops. But, as one member later remembered, ‘one thing led to another, and suddenly we were caught up in heavy street fighting’. When the protests began, Appel had been away from Copenhagen, meeting with members of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) in Jordan, as part of his mission to support Third World liberation struggle. Upon his return to Denmark in the middle of the protests, Appel was apparently furious, as the KAK member recalled: ‘They called us immature and adventurist. We were summoned to the school bench, so to speak, and told to read Marx’s Capital, Lenin, and so on.’Footnote 73
One result of Appel’s dressing-down was that this small group of militants would renounce this kind of spectacular street action and take their campaign of Third Worldist struggle underground. For nearly two decades following the protest, the members of the group who remained involved would stage a quiet but shockingly effective campaign of heists and large-scale robberies—stealing millions of dollars from banks, government facilities, and armoured cars, and sending the proceeds to the PFLP, all while never claiming responsibility or publicising their movement. They would be caught only in 1989, when Danish police stumbled into an apartment on the Blekingagade that contained a large stockpile of weapons, earning them notoriety as the Blekingegadebanden, or Blekinge Street Gang.Footnote 74 Thus, the 1970 World Bank protests came to be remembered in Denmark as a key turning point for an infamous group of underground militants on the Danish left. But while largely forgotten in the wider imaginary, the protests turn out to also be remembered as a key turning point for others there in Copenhagen that September: World Bank staff themselves.
‘The possibility of damage to these institutions’: Reactions at the Bank
How, then, did officials inside the World Bank understand this range of protestors and their various critiques, ideas, and actions? Why might this group of foreign activists, long-haired New Left students, and Molotov-cocktail-wielding militants have mattered to the finance ministers and professional economists who had gathered in the Bella Center to debate monetary policy and economic growth? And if, indeed, they mattered, how did the institutions respond? Given the incredulity with which much of the foreign and Danish press covered the protestors’ ideas about capitalism and imperialism, and the ways that the protest has been dismissed and written out of official institutional histories, we might expect that officials like McNamara and his subordinates would have largely ignored the protestors and their critiques. But, in fact, following the fragmented institutional archive reveals that rather than rejecting or dismissing the protestors and their ideas, McNamara and his staff instead led a concerted, multifaceted effort to counter the protestors and their critiques, expending considerable resources to do it.
So why did McNamara and those around him care about the ideas and actions of these protestors? Uncovering the answer requires situating the events of that week in their broader context. Copenhagen was not, of course, McNamara’s first protest—far from it. One Danish paper, referencing the former Defense Secretary’s long history of being targeted by demonstrators, reported that ‘McNamara’s only comment on the fights was that he felt at home.’Footnote 75 It was true that McNamara was used to facing Vietnam-related protests, and these affronts continued even after he left the Defense Department and was appointed to the Bank. In November 1968, a little more than six months into his tenure as president, McNamara visited Calcutta to tour a Bank-funded project there and was confronted with protests so disruptive that he was forced to flee the city by helicopter, as demonstrators burned him in effigy and took over the airport shouting ‘The Vietnam warmonger shall not enter Calcutta!’Footnote 76 But as his time at the Bank continued, the protests began to take on a new character—targeting not just McNamara personally and his role in Vietnam, but instead directly attacking the institution and its development mission. Beginning with the ‘lively controversy’ at the infamous Columbia University conference on development in February 1970, continuing with a group of ‘hecklers’ who targeted an international development meeting at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington, DC in March, and including the strident critcisms raised by youth at the Second World Food Conference in The Hague in June, the Bank and other international development institutions were coming under increasingly bellicose attacks.Footnote 77 Also in June, McNamara was targeted by some 1,000 student protestors at a meeting on international development policy in Heidelberg, West Germany. There, a group of gathered students again charged that McNamara was a ‘war criminal’, but also argued that the meeting was convened by international capitalists seeking ‘to work out more effective exploitation of oppressed peoples’, a quote that Bank staff transcribed and sent back to Washington—and that McNamara would personally share with the Bank’s board.Footnote 78 Following on the heels of these smaller protests over the course of 1970, Copenhagen signalled to McNamara and his staff that a new front had been opened in the battle to protect the legitimacy of the World Bank and its development mission.
Crucially, the Copenhagen protests also came at a time of profound change within the Bank, as McNamara spearheaded not only a bureaucratic reorganisation of the institution and a massive expansion of its lending capacity, but also a shift in how the Bank approached the world in which it worked. McNamara famously oversaw a dramatic shift in the Bank’s approach to development, from an emphasis on economic growth and projects that produced a calculable return on investment to one that stressed the reduction of global poverty.Footnote 79 Historians have amply demonstrated how, over the course of his first five years at the Bank, McNamara consulted philanthropists, government and finance officials around the world, and a range of development economists both inside and outside the institution as he worked out how the Bank should best address the question of poverty—narrating a shift in development thinking driven by largely by technocratic experts within a relatively rarefied epistemic community.Footnote 80 But a return to the archive demonstrates that the contention and protest that marked 1970, culminating in the first large, violent demonstration at a World Bank and IMF annual meeting that September, also clearly shaped how McNamara and his staff understood the threats posed to the Bank and its development agenda.
As has been well established, for McNamara, there was a causal link between poverty and upheaval, subversion, even revolution. He had already made this argument back in 1966, when as Defense Secretary he gave a controversial speech to newspaper editors in Montreal that argued that there could ‘be no question but that there is an irrefutable relationship between violence and economic backwardness’.Footnote 81 In line with the Cold War vision of his old friend, John F. Kennedy, McNamara deeply believed that, as he put it in Montreal, ‘Security is development. Without development, there can be no security.’ Despite this warning, however, when he took over as the president of the Bank in 1968, support for funding international development, and therefore for the Bank’s mission, was declining in both the United States and Europe—coming under attack not only from critical development economists, but also from legislatures who ‘were becoming disillusioned with foreign aid’ and increasingly sceptical of appropriating new resources for development.Footnote 82 In response to these challenges, McNamara had organised the Pearson Commission, which had recommended in 1969 that rich countries spend more on development aid and therefore allocate more funds to institutions like the Bank.Footnote 83 He told Lester Pearson, the commission’s head, that he was facing the ‘problem of how to mobilize effective opinion in the “North” behind an adequate development program’, and he was seeking to sway ‘opinion around the world and particularly in those key countries which need to be convinced of the urgency of the problem and the possibly of a solution’.Footnote 84 It was in this context, then—of McNamara’s own experience with upheaval and insurgency around the world, his linking of unrest and violence with unaddressed poverty, and the declining support for development and foreign aid that marked the late 1960s—that the challenge of Copenhagen was interpreted inside the Bank.
McNamara’s initial reaction to the reports of expected protest revealed precisely how he understood the threat posed by the protestors and their critiques. When he met with the Bank’s Board of Directors in mid-July, having received the reports that protests were expected in Copenhagen, McNamara told the assembled leaders, ‘I am not at all concerned, and I don’t think you would be concerned about the danger of physical damage, either property or personal.’ Though such a danger might exist, he went on, ‘I think of much more importance to us and something we should all consider … is the possibility of damage to these institutions. They’re much more fragile than property, and they are much more fragile than people, and they are also much more valuable.’Footnote 85 Here, McNamara was identifying the protestors and their ideas as a threat to the very legitimacy of the Bank and its development mission, which was, he admitted, already in a fragile state. McNamara and his staff would therefore devise a comprehensive strategy to prevent ‘damage to these institutions’ that would start in Copenhagen but reach well beyond.
Of course, even if McNamara disavowed worrying about physical security, the Bank and Fund undertook extensive security precautions, including working closely with local police and continuously receiving information from the Danish intelligence services.Footnote 86 With this information, staff worked to develop contingency plans should the delegates be blocked from attending the meeting; fired suspicious employees at the Bella Center who might compromise access to the meeting site; and even went so far as planning to move McNamara in a rented truck between locations during the conference, so that he could not easily be tracked by protestors.Footnote 87 One key concern for all parties was the presence of what staff called ‘foreign activists, whether from Sweden, Germany, France or the Netherlands’—something McNamara also mentioned to the Board of Directors when he briefed them in July, concerned that protestors could not be prevented from entering Denmark.Footnote 88 Here, the upheaval in Europe since the movements of 1968 loomed large. A former World Bank staffer, William Bennet, would later recall the presence of such foreign protestors, specifically noting in an oral history, ‘we had magnificent displays of anger by the far left, a bunch of very tough Swedes who came over, about 2 or 3 thousand of them. One night at the opera they were throwing shoes with nails driven through them into the crowd. They burned a bunch of policeman’s motorcycles.’Footnote 89 The vividness of Bennet’s recollections—regardless of their veracity—underscores that, already in 1970, IFI officials were concerned about the development of transnational activist networks, particularly those coming from the rich countries, organising against them.Footnote 90
The security precautions, however, were just a small part of the preparations; the real battle was to ‘rally the necessary public understanding and support’ of the Bank, as McNamara stressed in his marquee speech at Copenhagen.Footnote 91 In fact, the recognition that the Bank needed to engage the broader public—beyond finance ministries, legislatures, and the financial press—was a key part of McNamara’s reorganisation of the institution. In 1968, he had overseen the transformation of the relatively unimportant Public Relations Department into a larger and more comprehensive Information and Public Affairs Department, and in 1970 he moved its jurisdiction to report directly to the office of the president. One of the new tasks assigned to the office was ‘monitoring and analyzing outside events and opinion with regard to the Bank’s operations’, indicating that understanding and shaping how the Bank was seen was key to the Bank’s plans.Footnote 92 A strategy of public relations was, therefore, key to McNamara’s plans to reorient the Bank’s work—the institutions would not successfully redefine and expand development if they could not secure broader public support, particularly in the Global North. In this way, members of McNamara’s staff largely defined the threat at Copenhagen as an epistemic one that could be met by fostering a better understanding of the Bank’s work. Officials within the Bank bureaucracy therefore devised a number of tactics to respond to the looming protests beyond their coordination with security services: identifying and deploying sympathetic Third World representatives to defend the Bank on the global stage; crafting a comprehensive media campaign of publications and interviews that redefined the Bank’s mission and its place in the world; and mobilising Bank personnel for in-person debates and appearances to disseminate this new vision of the Bank in the world.
As a first step in rebutting the protestors’ charge that the Bank was merely exploiting the poorer countries for the gain of private capital, officials decided to solicit positive public testimony from officials from the developing world. In Washington in July, McNamara told his advisors that he was thinking of ‘asking EDs and Governors from developing countries to “stand up” for the World Bank Group in Copenhagen’.Footnote 93 And the documentary record indicates Bank officials did just that: within a few weeks, for example, the lead Public Affairs official in the Bank’s European division, Julian Grenfell, reported back to Washington that he had spoken at length with Mohamed Nassim Kochman, the executive director for Mauritania who would be elected at the 1970 meeting to represent a large group of African nations with the Bank. Grenfell mentioned the protests, including the recent disturbance in Heidelberg, to Kochman; the Mauritanian asked to see the protestors’ manifesto so he could reference it in a report he was due to submit. In response, Grenfell reported to Washington, ‘I suggested to him that he should not make too much of it; while the Bank wanted sincere support for what it was doing, it did not want to appear to be wholly on the defensive.’Footnote 94 That is, Bank officials wanted a refutation of the protestors’ claims without direct reference to the protestors themselves, which might draw further attention to them. Grenfell made this explicit, arguing to Kochman that it was ‘better to keep direct rebuttal of the manifesto up one’s sleeve for use with the press when they approached Africans at the Annual Meeting itself’.
Kochman then suggested other African representatives who might be useful, indicating that the Somali finance minister ‘could be mobilized’, that groups of African governors could be made available for interviews on Danish television and radio, and that he was also ‘keen that we use Veerasamy Ringadoo’, the finance minister of Mauritius, in the campaign to defend the Bank.Footnote 95 Grenfell concluded in his report to Washington that he was confident they would be able to ‘get Nassim to mobilize support at Copenhagen’, and noted that ‘it’s a great relief to know that at least one of the ED’s representing African countries is thoroughly aware of the key role the Africans will have to play in Copenhagen and beyond’—indicating that staff were gearing up for an ongoing fight over the legitimacy of the Bank. And indeed, the record of the addresses delivered at the meeting gives some indication that those called upon actually carried out this task in Copenhagen. In the short speech by Ringadoo, for example, he made some of the common complaints frequently lodged by Directors from the less developed countries, arguing strongly against the ‘traditional profitability tests’ that had long accompanied Bank loans—an echo of the protestors’ criticism in the VERDEN$BANKEN pamphlet—and asserting that his country needed more and faster financing at lower interest rates. These were perennial complaints from Third World delegates. But, in concluding the speech, he also added, ‘after writing this I was glad to hear the sincere and humane approach of Mr. McNamara’, and urged that ‘the approach and sympathy of the President should permeate the rank and file of the Bank Group’.Footnote 96 Ringadoo thus appeared to be trying to play that ‘key role’ that Bank leadership had urged, standing up for the institution and its leader.
Reactions in the press to this attempt to have African executive directors ‘stand up’ for the Bank in the context of the ongoing protests were, however, mixed. The mainstream Danish paper Berlingske Tidende seemed to go along with McNamara’s strategy, writing that ‘while one developing country delegation after another inside the Bella Center … stands up and highlights the World Bank’s activities as something close to their only hope in an otherwise almost hopeless situation’, the protestors, claiming to know better, rioted outside.Footnote 97 The Wall Street Journal was more ambiguous, however, arguing that while inside, ‘officials from poorer countries grumble that he isn’t doing enough to help them develop … outside, left-wing demonstrators boisterously protest that the former Pentagon boss is doing far too much to spread “monopoly capitalism”’. The reporter went on, however, to argue that in fact, ‘among close observers of the 113-nation development agency, there’s at least a small streak of doubt as to who is more nearly right’.Footnote 98 Similarly, the Washington Post’s reporter on the ground summed up the events by concluding that the Bank was moving to meet the demands of the poorer countries, but that ‘the trouble is, the underdeveloped nations of the world, no less than the less polite kids in the streets of Copenhagen this week, want faster action’.Footnote 99 Thus, despite the attempts to stage-manage support from the developing world, criticisms from both inside and outside the meeting site were reaching a broad international audience—indicating, perhaps, that McNamara was right to worry.
If Bank officials were not getting the press coverage they hoped to elicit, however, it was not from lack of trying. In fact, Bank staff worked zealously to shape the press narrative and respond to the criticisms of protestors in the public sphere. Already in late June, Bank and Fund secretarial staff in Copenhagen had decided they should undertake what they called ‘a calculated program of step by step education of the public’ through the Danish and international press over the next six weeks.Footnote 100 As part of that strategy, staff wrote that ‘more emphasis on the word “development” and less emphasis on the word “bank” would be helpful’ in countering the propaganda protest groups were circulating—a rhetorical move that reflected the more substantive changes that McNamara was planning for the institution.Footnote 101 But the question of exactly what to say in response to protestors’ criticisms remained key. In July, the head of Public Affairs, William Clark, recruited Thomas Blinkhorn, a thirty-four-year-old journalist who had recently completed a fellowship programme in economic development at Harvard, to the effort to shape the narrative—and to do so explicitly in the face the protestors’ criticisms. Clark asked him to ‘prepare a briefing book for McNamara, asking the nastiest kinds of questions that you can’, Blinkhorn remembered in an oral history.Footnote 102 Blinkhorn produced a memo for McNamara in late July titled ‘Dirty Questions (or more appropriately) Polluted Queries’, that ventriloquised what he called ‘the nasty questions that some students and their professors harbor about the World Bank’, and provided suggested answers.Footnote 103 The questions focused on some of the key criticisms that were appearing in the Danish protestors’ propaganda: Bank support for repressive authoritarian regimes, its refusal to lend to socialist governments, and the tendency of the long-prevailing model of development to ‘be more exploitative than beneficial’ because it increased indebtedness while hindering progress. Locating the origins of protestors’ criticisms squarely in academia, it cited C. Wright Mills, Harry Magdoff, Franz Fanon, and Herbert Marcuse as academic purveyors of such ideas that ‘help shape student attitudes’.Footnote 104 The responses that Blinkhorn formulated, however, were far from dismissive. To the question of increasing indebtedness, he suggested the answer: ‘we believe that some new, significant adjustment will have to be made in the international monetary system so that poor nations burdened with external debt will not be forced to stymie their internal development’. Further, in response to a question about the ‘disastrous’ side effects of capitalist development, Blinkhorn acknowledged, ‘A post-industrial, rapidly urbanizing society, for instance, throws up all sorts of urgent sociopolitical dislocations that are either caused or aggravated by the capitalist system’—but he argued for ‘powerful redemptive features’ of the welfare state that could have ‘wholesome mitigating effects’. Perhaps most importantly, Blinkhorn sought to co-opt some of the critiques for McNamara himself, pointing out that the Bank president had spoken out against wealth inequality and urged that the Bank pursue policies that could ‘help produce greater social justice’—an idea that McNamara had begun to push in public statements at the time.
At around the same time that Blinkhorn was preparing his hypothetical press inquiries, journalists in Denmark were also preparing real ones to which the Bank had to respond. Uffe Ellemann-Jensen—then an editor at the national broadcaster Danmarks Radio—submitted a set of questions to McNamara for a broadcast interview to take place in Denmark. Some questions drew from the 1969 Pearson Commission report, as well as the speech that McNamara had given a few months earlier at the development conference at Columbia University, but some were strikingly similar to those prepared by Blinkhorn, drawing on the criticisms that the protestors were raising. Questions included ‘Can it be avoided that the World Bank influences the political situation in the countries that receive the aid?’ and ‘Isn’t it so that many developing countries—right or wrong—consider the World Bank as an instrument of “western imperialism”?’Footnote 105 The Bank’s Public Affairs office prepared a detailed response to these questions, in which officials continued to stress the multilateral nature of its work and the participation of representatives from the poorer countries:
Suspicion that the Bank is an instrument of ‘western imperialism’ undoubtedly exists in some quarters. But generally our relations with member countries are extremely cordial, although differences of opinion on specific issues do arise from time to time … When differences arise, it is easy to use dirty epithets about ‘western imperialism’, etc. It is not so easy to prove, on the basis of given facts and figures, what the better alternative would be on strictly economic grounds.Footnote 106
The responses further insisted that the Bank was not influenced by ‘Western powers’ because its policies formulated over the preceding two decades were a ‘pragmatic mixture’. And countering the criticism that the Bank favoured private enterprise, they insisted that ‘by far the biggest proportion of our lending has been to Governments, and for public-sector projects’. Thus, these memos reveal the extent to which the Bank staff responsible for shaping the institution’s public image were concerned with countering the kinds of critiques protestors were raising not by belittling the protestors or questioning their expertise, but by demonstrating that the Bank was, in fact, concerned about many of the same things that the protestors were.
When McNamara arrived in Denmark, he used these talking points in the broadcast planned interview with Elleman-Jensen, where was asked what he thought about the protestors who frequently dogged him.Footnote 107 His reply gave them a surprising amount of credit: ‘Well’, he said, protests ‘are one of the new political weapons, not just in Calcutta but the USA and in Western Europe, and they are a reflection of people seeking new goals and new ways of achieving their goals’. He went on, ‘I believe these demonstrations are going to continue and to the degree that they force all of us to reexamine our objectives and to the degree they force all of us to accelerate our action to deal with these human problems, in the end they may serve a useful purpose.’Footnote 108 By recognising the legitimacy of the some of the protestors’ claims, as well as their right to make them, McNamara hoped to accommodate the protestors, thereby taking the edge off their criticisms within Denmark and Europe more broadly.Footnote 109
McNamara’s words were then immediately deployed in the press. A few days later, the clip was broadcast in a television interview Elleman-Jensen conducted with Politisk Revy editor Bente Hansen, shortly after the journal published the controversial ‘Should the Bella Center be Burned Down?’ article. After playing the clip, Elleman-Jensen argued to Hansen, ‘You see, McNamara does not disagree about the main issues concerning demonstrations’ and challenged her assertion in print that shooting the Bank president would be ‘understood in larger circles’; Hansen was forced to back-pedal and went on the defensive.Footnote 110 Bank officials immediately transcribed the broadcast and sent it back to Washington by cable, noting Hansen’s strident criticisms of the Bank’s ‘blood-stained work’, but dismissing her influence, saying that she was ‘rather good-looking but was nervous and agitated and could not have created much credence with viewers’.Footnote 111
In addition to media appearances, Bank staff also engaged with critics directly, as when Public Affairs director William Clark directed Thomas Blinkhorn to bring some Bank economists to Copenhagen to debate their critics. Blinkhorn arrived in Copenhagen with two economists from the Bank’s Young Professionals (YP) programme, Denmark’s Soren Holm and South Africa’s Basil Kavalsky, and they ‘went on a little debating tour’, he remembered, which involved both students and professors ‘screaming and yelling … against the World Bank and international capitalism’.Footnote 112 He went on to describe being downtown on the Tuesday of the rioting, and seeing some of the students carrying rocks and smashing windows, ‘and some of them were the same ones we were debating. “Look over there, there’s Hans!”’, he remembered. But he also remembered having real sympathy with some of the points the students had raised: ‘when we were debating with the students, there were some points on which I thought the students were correct’, he recalled, ‘but I could not publicly say that without jeopardizing the institution and having a front-page article that says an official of the World Bank agrees with us, you know?’Footnote 113 This up-close experience with the protestors would mean that Copenhagen came to be seen as a transformative experience for Blinkhorn, as well as for other young staff, as they reckoned with the Bank’s role in the world.
Inside the Bank, many of the issues raised by protestors were taken up by a group of staff that called themselves the 5:30 Club, a somewhat informal regular gathering for debate and discussion, particularly among those recruited by the Bank’s YP programme.Footnote 114 Though the group was founded shortly before the Copenhagen meetings, many staff explicitly remembered the protests as a formative moment for the group, inspiring serious internal discussion about Bank policy, especially among those who were self-styled reformers.Footnote 115 Richard D. Stern, a long-time Bank staffer recruited via the YP programme in 1970, recalled being surprised by the overall conservatism of some of his fellow recruits; he arrived with long hair and described having ‘been on the streets demonstrating throughout the 1960s’.Footnote 116 He remembered discussing Copenhagen in 5:30 Club meetings, and recalled William Clark, the head of Public Affairs, ‘describing the antics of the demonstrators and belittling their ideas. The condescension of the YPs toward these demonstrators (many of which became mainstream Bank thinking in recent years) was just palpable’—a condescension he clearly did not share.Footnote 117 Another long-time staffer, Leif Christoffersen, also recalled ‘There were a lot of people who felt that inside the Bank, if the outside world is critical about what we are doing, that we are perhaps having too much of a capitalist approach, that some of the social issues need to be better addressed and we should have an open forum for that to be discussed inside the Bank.’Footnote 118 Similarly, Ismail Serageldin also remembered McNamara telling the members of the 5:30 Club, ‘I’m looking to you to help me change this institution and turn it around’, which Serageldin took as a mandate for reform.Footnote 119 He later recalled, referencing subsequent social movements, ‘The protests—Narmada, 50 Years—made it possible for people like myself to fight battles within the Bank.’Footnote 120 For a number of Bank staff, then, the Copenhagen protests served as a catalyst in thinking critically within the Bank about the role the institution was playing the world; the criticisms protestors were raising about Western domination, the Bank’s emphasis on profit and private-sector growth, and the plight of the poorest became incorporated into the strategies the Bank used as it shifted its emphasis from economic growth to the reduction of global poverty.
McNamara, of course, was the driver of these changes, and his missionary zeal to transform the organisation cannot be reduced to merely the reaction to protests in Calcutta, Heidelberg, or Copenhagen. But, in contrast to many of the staff tasked with public relations, McNamara understood the protests as much more than just an epistemic threat to how the Bank was understood by outsiders, requiring new rhetorical strategies. Rather, he interpreted the surprisingly strident demonstrations that met him in Copenhagen as one part of a rising tide of demonstrations, strikes, and riots around the world—and therefore as a more fundamental kind of challenge. While he did not directly reference the protests raging outside when he gave his address at the Bella Center, he did warn in that speech of ‘a much wider social and political crisis which grows deeper with each decade and threatens to round off this century with years of unrest and turbulence’, he said, ushering in ‘a “time of troubles” during which the forces of historical change threaten to disintegrate our frail twentieth-century society’.Footnote 121 For McNamara, that disintegration had certainly been on display not only in the struggles for decolonisation around the world, including in Vietnam, but also in the ways those struggles had inspired movements throughout the Global North, including many of the protests he had faced, and was facing, as Bank president. He emphasised, however, that he understood such troubles as the result of progress unevenly distributed—and therefore as a challenge that his new vision of Bank-led development could meet.
The Economist took note of the congruence of McNamara’s approach with the demands of the protests, writing, ‘That the Bank itself should latch on to some of the more explicit grounds of protest—not least to the staggering idea, at any rate to bankers, that the economic process, even when most successful, can positively worsen pressures of population and squalid urbanisation—has been a notable and noble event in Copenhagen this week.’Footnote 122 By Copenhagen, that is, it had become all too clear to McNamara that unrest, rioting, even revolution could result from the uneven processes of development, as billions were left behind in rural areas and urban slums around the world, and as critics in the Global North took up their plight. Unrest dogged him as he travelled the world, and it was now threatening even placid, wealthy Denmark. But the only way to address the vast ‘social imbalance and deepening misery’ that modernisation was producing around the world, was, he argued, more development—and particularly more financial support from the richest countries.Footnote 123
McNamara therefore argued that the Bank should take up the mantle of what he called in his closing speech at Copenhagen ‘greater social justice’, addressing the question of poverty and deprivation—the issues toward which he would soon reorient Bank lending, rapidly doubling the volume of Bank lending and targeting rural poverty in particular.Footnote 124 But this change did not derive from a mere moral commitment to the poor or as a penance for his prior missteps in Vietnam. As McNamara’s speech made clear—given inside a building surrounded by thousands of protestors, protected by armed guards and razor wire—the expansion and reorientation he would undertake was necessary to prevent the looming ‘time of troubles’, as he put it. What was needed to address this upheaval was therefore not the diminution of the role of the Bank, but its vast expansion. More aid, McNamara argued in closing at Copenhagen, was required for the ‘fundamental security of societies progressive enough not to explode into lethal revolution’. As the riots got closer and closer, that is, the need for development, as a key strategy of counterinsurgency, became all the more pressing.
Conclusion
At the close of the meeting, the Washington Post’s staff writer in Copenhagen noted the novelty of the ‘student demonstrations … which, now initiated, are likely to haunt international gatherings of this kind in the future’.Footnote 125 It was, we now know, a prescient warning, as such protests would become increasingly common by the 1990s. But despite massive social-scientific interest in those later ‘anti-globalisation’ movements, most scholars have all but forgotten the protests in Copenhagen, and they have been largely ignored by those seeking to understand the intellectual and institutional history of global development institutions, as well. In fact, one historian has argued that despite a ‘growing sense that the Bank was a tool of US foreign policy, the various critiques of development that emerged in the 1970s had little impact on the organization’, asserting that the Bank had a ‘tendency to sidestep its detractors’.Footnote 126 This not uncommon interpretation, however, perhaps unwittingly reproduces the Bank’s own insistence that its work was technocratic, non-political, and far removed from the street. Indeed, much of the new historiography that examines international development institutions has thus far focused on intellectual debates, inflected by Cold War ideologies, among development professionals. But histories that remain largely in the register of intellectual contest—with scholars and practitioners trading theories at conferences and in academic journals—leave us with the distinct impression that what goes on inside the boardrooms of an international institution could only be influenced by the geopolitical manoeuvrings of politicians or the disciplinary deliberations of economists, never by direct contention from outside or below.
A return to the internal records demonstrates, however, that faced with the looming protests in Copenhagen, the Bank chose not to ‘sidestep’ the protestors or their ideas, but to confront them, head on, to prevent the possibility of ‘damage to these institutions’, as McNamara put it. In the context of other ongoing challenges to the Bank—not least among elected officials in the United States and Europe who oversaw appropriations for important parts of the institution’s funding, and whose support for development was already on the decline—Copenhagen represented not just an immediate security problem, but in fact a more enduring and consequential attack on the mission and the legitimacy of the institution. That Bank officials, from the newly hired Young Professionals all the way up to the president, narrated the protests this way in internal meetings, media appearances, and subsequent reflections is certainly surprising, especially given the way that Copenhagen has been ignored in official Bank histories. That they expended considerable time and resources crafting a multifaceted response that drew in people from across the Bank’s orbit—not just security officials and intelligence services, but representatives from the Global South, professors and students in the Global North, staff across multiple departments and divisions of the Bank, and media figures across the world—is all the more so. How can we explain these unexpected, and heretofore overlooked, responses?
In one sense, Copenhagen was merely a few days of banner waving, slogan shouting, and brick throwing by young people variously characterised in Bank documents as Trotskyists, Maoists, socialists, and radicals. But it was also one incident among many that year alone where critics of development and of the role of the Bank in the world were raising increasingly strident condemnations—at the Columbia development conference, the Mayflower Hotel meeting, the World Food Conference, and the Heidelberg meeting. And this was to say nothing of growing contention over development projects in the places where the Bank and Fund worked; there had already been protests in Argentina, Ceylon, and India targeting the institutions and the governments that worked with them, and such demonstrations would only grow in frequency over the course of the 1970s. But while they have been largely ignored in the literature, a close read of the institutional files reveals Bank staff grappling with this contestation, from junior economists reckoning with the job they had signed up for, to McNamara himself linking the lack of development with social upheaval, even ‘lethal revolution’, around the world. Though the fires of 1968 had been extinguished, the embers of revolution still smouldered, and protestors like those in Copenhagen were proving increasingly willing to throw literal fuel in the name of anti-imperial solidarity. Facing this threat, McNamara and his staff insisted that more development, not less, was key to prevent the world from burning.
Contest over how development worked, who it benefited, and what it meant was therefore not confined to the seminar room or the pages of academic journals. By the time finance officials from around the world touched down in Copenhagen in September of 1970, it had become clear that the battle over ideas about development was being waged on not only explicitly political grounds but was also being taken to the street. Officials within the World Bank, therefore, as this article has demonstrated, took up the fight directly, accommodating and event co-opting some of the protestors’ criticisms for themselves in an attempt to blunt their impact and bolster institutional legitimacy. In so doing, Bank staff crafted narratives—arguing for more emphasis on the word ‘development’ and less on the word ‘bank’; insisting that reforms were already underway; and taking up the mantle of ‘greater social justice’, for example—that would prove crucial to McNamara’s strategy to redefine the Bank’s mission and reorient the Bank toward poverty reduction over the next decade. Copenhagen was therefore a crucible in which, forced to reckon with the riots that had arrived at their doorsteps, Bank staff came to define not just the role of the Bank in the world, but the very project of development itself.
The forgotten history of Copenhagen is, of course, just one episode in a larger global history of development protest and reaction. The 1970s and 1980s would see an acceleration of demonstrations, strikes, and riots against development projects and institutions around the world, and therefore this episode represents just one small step toward recovering a history long overlooked. But Copenhagen is, I argue, illustrative of the kinds of institutional responses historians can uncover if we do not assume (as leaders in these institutions would often like critics to) that institutions like the World Bank are technical, rational, apolitical bureaucracies above the political fray—but instead return to the archives and situate our histories of international development institutions within the contentious politics they have long engendered.
Acknowledgements
The author would like to thank the anonymous reviewers as well as the participants in the Harvard International and Global History Seminar, the Yale Global and International History Workshop, the American University Historical International Studies Research Cluster, and the University of California Santa Barbara History and Political Economy Colloquium for feedback on this project. In addition, she wishes to acknowledge archivists at the Arbejderbevægelsens Bibliotek og Arkiv in Copenhagen, the Library of Congress, and the World Bank for their research assistance.
Financial support
None to declare.
Competing interests
The author declares none.
Christy Thornton is an Associate Professor of History at New York University, where she is also affiliated faculty in the Department of Sociology and the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies. She is the author of Revolution in Development: Mexico and the Governance of the Global Economy (University of California Press, 2021).
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