Multilateralism just isn’t what it used to be. Wherever you look, the big, global international organizations that dominated the postwar economic system appear to be suffering from middle age – and in some instances, irrelevance. The last major multilateral trade agreement was signed over 15 years ago, when 123 countries created the World Trade Organization (WTO) and crafted a new set of rules for international trade. Since then, attempts to conclude another big round of reforms have struggled, and goals for the latest Doha Round of trade negotiations have been watered down in order to salvage a much more limited deal. The United Nations, meanwhile, has played virtually no role in crafting international financial policy in the wake of the most recent crises – a significant departure from the 1970s when members launched radical policy initiatives redefining the very meaning of national economic sovereignty. And the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank, though retaining important resources for stabilizing the international financial system, have yet to recover from their highly controversial responses to the Asian Financial Crisis of the 1990s, and have been in many ways sidelined in crafting policy responses to the recent Greek, Irish, Portuguese, and Spanish debt crises.

Instead, the “global” multilateralism characterizing the last fifty years of international economic affairs has been supplanted by an array of more modest and seemingly less ambitious joint ventures – from regional clubs like the (shaky) European Union and (rising) Association of Southeast Asian Nations to more geographically diverse and less understood initiatives like the G-20, Basel Committee on Banking Supervision and Financial Stability Board. Like their predecessors, these institutions and forums seek to coordinate diverse sectors of the international economy and export shared policy preferences of member governments. But unlike the multilateral institutions that have largely defined international cooperation in the wake of World War II, these institutions are markedly different – and less grandiose than their predecessors. More modest in size, formality, and even inclusiveness, they play small ball on the court of international affairs and embrace what can be described as distinctively minilateral strategies of economic statecraft.