Year XXXVIII, Number 3, November 2025

Guido Montani 
Professor of International Political Economy at the University of Pavia. Former Secretary General and President of the MFE.

Political rights and civil liberties deteriorated in 60 countries, with El Salvador, Haiti, Kuwait, and Tunisia comprising the largest score declines. Only 34 countries reported improvements in freedom, with Bangladesh, Bhutan, Sri Lanka, and Syria recording the largest gains. Among the 66 national elections being held across the world in 2024, 40 percent experienced violence related to voting and political parties.

In this webinar, I will summarize four key observations that I have elaborated on in a forthcoming paper to be published in a collection of essays by The Robert Triffin International. I will focus only on the topics relevant to today’s debate, namely the relationship between multilateralism and the reform of the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Today, the crucial challenge is to explore a possible reform of the United Nations, which has been in crisis for years, a situation further aggravated by the Trump presidency.

The first observation concerns the declining role of the United States as a great world power. This process became evident at the end of the Cold War, following the fall of the Berlin Wall. After a decade of “U.S. monopolarity”, which some people have confused with the end of history, it became relevant, with the rise of China as the new major world power – along with Russia, India, Brazil, Indonesia, and the European Union – that the international political system was becoming multipolar. The Trump presidency illustrated that the multilateral order of the United Nations, built by President Roosevelt with the USSR, at Yalta, is increasingly marginal. Trump has substituted
 
bilateralism for multilateralism. Multilateralism requires shared institutions for the peaceful settlement of international disputes, although that is not always possible. On the contrary, bilateralism can lead to the creation of a world empire, if the major power prevails over the others.

The second observation concerns the relationship between military power and economic power. It is clear that Putin’s Russia aims to achieve invincible military supremacy, but economically it is only an exporter of raw materials. On the contrary, Russia can aspire to become a world power, militarily but also economically. At the moment the European Union, is only an economic power, with no visible indication aiming to develop its own foreign policy on a global scale. It survives in the shadow of the USA. In this anarchy, it seems increasingly difficult to counter a trend towards growing international struggle for supremacy, with possible catastrophic outcomes, such as nuclear war. The people of the planet are resigning themselves to living with hotbeds of tensions and with bloody wars. Those who have not yet lost hope in a peaceful future – as the federalists - wonder if it is still possible to activate a process of reform of the surviving institutions of the multilateral system created in the post-war period.

The third point concerns the European power vacuum. Unfortunately, European citizens and all the governments of the world note that the European Union has neither the will nor the means to propose a policy of pacification between Russia and Ukraine. The EU is unable to act to stop the serious crisis in the Middle 

East, where Israel is thinking about people who were subjugated by military force. In the European Union, the only reaction to these challenges has been the Commission’s proposal “RearmEU”, a plan to encourage the national rearmament of member countries without an explicit objective for a common European defence. At the moment , the Union is preparing to accept the US claim in order to increase national military spending to 5% of GDP in the coming years. It is an orientation to the perspective of a race, without limits, for armaments on a world scale and that subtracts resources from social expenses. It is a sign of the EU submission to the international rules of power politics, in an era in which nuclear weapons, satellite networks and the military use of AI make unpredictable a catastrophic planetary war.

The fourth observation concerns a possible active role for the EU in reversing the arms race and launching a worldwide process towards international peace and justice. A first response to this challenge was provided by the President of the ECB, Christine Lagarde, in her speech
 
in Berlin (26/5/2025). Lagarde has proposed that the euro becomes an international reserve currency alongside the dollar. It is a first step towards a serious reform of the international monetary system. It is also a proposal for EU foreign policy, as an alternative to the arms race. Foreign policy is based on two crucial powers: the purse and the sword. Lagarde’s proposal can be developed in the direction indicated by Robert Triffin. He showed that the IMF can become a world central bank, using the “Bancor”, proposed by Keynes at Bretton Woods, as the international reserve currency. In this case it is not possible to elaborate on the technical details of this proposal. However, it is possible to say that it would have the potential to re-establish monetary and economic multilateralism, therefore the peaceful cooperation between States is necessary to address the looming environmental crisis and for a fairer distribution of Gross Global Income between rich and poor countries. It is a process of pacification, not perpetual peace, but I would like to remind you that the Franco- German pacification was the first step towards the current European Union.

Speech on the occasion of the Federal Committee of the UEF, June 21st 2025.