Introduction

One of the most dramatic, systematic, and intrusive forms of external intervention in Africa over the past two decades has been “structural adjustment” – the efforts of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank, and the major industrial states to get governments to reform their economies in significant ways. Structural adjustment is seen by powerful external actors as the way to reverse the decline and marginalization of African states as globalization accelerates. Most of these countries, however, have seen structural adjustment, with its high and detailed levels of conditionality, as a major threat to their sovereignty and politically dangerous; they have resisted it through the passive strategies of what I have called the ritual dances of reform (Callaghy and Ravenhill 1993). The result has been increasingly weak, sometimes failing, states.

One of the primary results of structural adjustment has been rising levels of external debt. It is mostly “official” debt owed to major Western countries, the International Monetary Fund, and the World Bank. Since the late 1950s, bilateral debt has been rescheduled by creditor countries organized into a mechanism that came to be known as the Paris Club, while multilateral debt could not be rescheduled. The Paris Club became the core of the international debt regime for official debt – that is the actors, norms, processes, and mechanisms focused around countries unable to service their bilateral debt.