Bretton Woods International Monetary System was invented and put in use from the end of World War II until the mid 1970s. In theory the system was designed to make banking more global and more streamlined. In fact, according to historians, "the Bretton Woods system was history's first example of a fully negotiated monetary order intended to govern currency relations among sovereign states. In principle, the regime was designed to combine binding legal obligations with multilateral decision-making conducted through an international organization, the IMF, endowed with limited supranational authority" (ucsb.edu, 2013).One of the elements of this system which manifested in practice was the fact that so much of th4e development and nuances of this system were directly reliant on the needs and policies of the most influential member of this international banking system; this member was the United States. One of the fundamental assumptions that the design of this system rested upon was the fact that the United States would be a stabilizing presence for the system as whole. "The absence of an effective external discipline on U.S. policy could not threaten the regime so long as that assumption held, as it generally did prior to 1965" (ucsb.edu, 2013). After 1965, one could argue that the U.S., was not only a destabilizing force for this system, but one which contributed to the entirety of the system's destabilization. Thus, the steadying force of the U.S. was why this exact system was able to work in the short run, but the inability of the U.S. To remain a stabilizing force was why the system was unable to last in the long run.
This is not always the case. Some may be educated and economically well off, within particular fundamentalist sects, but use an idealistic vision of the past to provide a solution to what they see is lacking in the contemporary world. This was true of the Muslim Brotherhood of 1929, which used religion as part of its ideology of colonial resistance -- and is also true of many of the
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