In December 1999, police fired tear gas and rubber bullets into a mob protesting the World Trade Organization meeting in Seattle. A central theme of this and similar anti-globalization protests is that the WTO, IMF, World Bank, and other global institutions are “runaway” international bureaucracies implementing a “Washington consensus” formulated by professional economists and other neo-liberals who have made their careers within these agencies (Stiglitz 2002; Rich 1994). Other critics charge that these international organizations (IOs) are imperialist tools of the powerful, exploiting poor and disadvantaged countries for the benefit of the West. Although they have not yet taken to the streets, American conservatives, at the other end of the spectrum, argue that these IOs fail to promote the interests of the United States (Meltzer Commission Report 1999; Krauthammer 2001).

Meanwhile, Europeans complain about the “democratic deficit” within the European Union (see Pollack 2003a: 407–14). As the EU expands its competencies and grows to twenty-five members, critics charge that the simultaneous deepening and broadening of the union is driven by unaccountable bureaucrats in the European Commission and the highly insulated judges of the European Court of Justice. Divorced from electoral pressures, these increasingly powerful EU institutions have allegedly escaped popular control. French and Dutch voters retaliated against the Brussels-led integration project by rejecting the proposed EU Constitution in June 2005.