Modernizing Multilateralism: Learning from Military History
                                By World Bank President Robert B. Zoellick
                                            As Prepared for Delivery
Master, my lords, ladies, and gentlemen:
It is a distinct honor to be here today to deliver the fourteenth Stephen Roskill Memorial Lecture. Thank
you for the invitation.
I very much appreciate the opportunity to commemorate the life and work of Captain Roskill. On receiving
this invitation, I reviewed his many accomplishments – as a gunnery specialist; successful executive
officer and captain; and historian.
Individuals such as Captain Roskill enrich our lives. Though I never knew the Captain, I take a special
pleasure in being here with you to recall him.
What particularly intrigued me about Captain Roskill, across all his endeavors, was that he succeeded in
being both a man of action and a man of thought.
When Roskill was posted as executive officer to the HMNZS Leander, for example, he brought with him
extensive knowledge of damage control. He required his men to train rigorously, running exercises
during the evening watches. In July 1943, off the Solomon Islands, the drills paid off. A Japanese
torpedo hit the Leander hard. But the crew’s salvage operations helped keep the Leander afloat, and she
returned to port to fight again. Captain Roskill received the Distinguished Service Cross for his gallantry.
Roskill retired from active service in 1948 – yet that was hardly the end of his service. He had acquired
thirty years of deep and varied experience in the Royal Navy, and for thirty more years he worked to
share that experience with others.
Roskill had a particular interest in leadership. A fellowship at Churchill College created the opportunity for
him to write a book on The Art of Leadership in 1965. It’s a revealing work, because Roskill brought both
historical research and personal experience to his understanding of the subject. “I believe that the leader
is, above all, a teacher,� he wrote, “and that teaching represents the greatest responsibility that ca n be
placed on a human being.� Roskill took that responsibility seriously.
Leadership is one of the themes of my lecture, which I have titled “Modernizing Multilateralism: Learning
from Military History.� It is not as unlikely pairing as it may sound. In his book on leadership, Roskill
wrote that he hoped military history revealed lessons not only for soldiers and airmen, but that “perhaps
even those concerned with the management of men in industrial fields will also find here something of
interest, and possibly of value."
The heroic leader perhaps offered the first model, with tales drawn from battle, and some stories
perpetuated in myth. I understand one local example is the former Member of Parliament for Cambridge,
the inspired cavalry commander, Lord Protector Oliver Cromwell.
Yet, as Roskill suggested, the military experience also offered more models of leadership, especially as
states and militaries grew in size and complexity: strategic leadership; the guidance and management of
large organizations; even direction in civil-military relationships, as Andrew Roberts recently narrated in
Masters and Commanders and Eliot Cohen described in Supreme Command.
From the hot fire of small unit command to the cold calculation of steering a “military-industrial� complex,
military history offers excellent insights into questions of leadership. The “lessons� from war may seem so
fundamental because they concern life and death, whether of comrades or empires.
It also seems to me particularly appropriate that Roskill should be so closely associated with Churchill
College – this wonderful memorial to another soldier-scholar. Like Churchill, Roskill saw history as too
important to be confined to the historians.
Winston Churchill said, “The farther backward you can look, the farther forward you are likely to see.�
So let’s return to 1944, the year Captain Roskill took command of HMNZS Leander.
In that same year, representatives of 44 countries came together in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, to
devise a post-war international economy. That generation saw clear connections between economics and
security. Considering the causes of the financial and economic breakdowns in the 1920s and 1930s, they
sought to design an international economic architecture to deal with the economic, political, and security
problems that they thought would follow World War II.
The Bretton Woods plan encompassed monetary and currency issues; trade, investment, and
development; and the reconstruction of broken states coming out of conflict. This was preventive and
preemptive security of another kind. Not the deployments of battles or battalions, but an investment in
reconstruction, economic growth, and economic interdependence. The International Bank for
Reconstruction and Development, the cornerstone of what became the World Bank Group, was part of
that foundation.
Within two years, however, as Churchill warned, an iron curtain had descended in Europe. A new type of
War, a Cold one, splintered the world into First, Second, and Third. The World Bank worked initially to
help reconstruct Western Europe and Japan, and then sought to finance growth and overcome poverty in
developing countries.
By the time I became President of the World Bank Group in 2007, the world had changed enormously
from the founding era.
The Cold War was over. In 1989, I had the opportunity to play a role within the U.S. Government in finally
achieving a Europe “whole and free.� The Bretton Woods economic institutions had expanded their
reach, but were only slightly retooled.
The unleashed forces of globalization were creating the multipolar world economy we have today. By
2007, private sector capital flows to developing countries dwarfed public development assistance, leading
some economists to declare the reason for the World Bank to be long past. A former Managing Director
of the World Bank wrote in Foreign Affairs in 2006 that the World Bank “seems to be a dying institution.�
With due respect to the economists, who were about to be surprised by the biggest financial crash since
the 1930s, I brought a different vantage point to my new post in 2007. Drawing from history, personal
experience, and m y assessment of the international landscape, I concluded that the “Wise Men� of the
Bretton Woods’ generation had left us two legacies: first, international institutions, regimes, and alliances
– in various states of service and repair. Second, equally important, that generation had left an
intellectual, policy, and political commitment to act multilaterally to turn problems of an era into
opportunities.


Institutions matter.
The challenges that led to the creation of the Bretton Woods institutions – monetary and currency issues,
trade, investment, development, and the reconstruction of war-torn-states – remain very much with us.
And the multilateral institutions created at Bretton Woods offer just the thinnest of tissue to interconnect
the sovereign nation-states to help forge cooperative solutions to shared problems.
The solution is not to abandon multilateral institutions, with all their imperfections. The duty of leadership
is to “modernize multilateralism� for vastly different circumstances.
The rise and diffusion of private capital and free enterprise have not obviated the need for the World Bank
because the Bank was never simply about loans and grants: Its role has been to contribute to the
development of market economies in an open international system – fostering growth, opportunity, and
hope, and overcoming poverty within a better political and security order. Thought and action, as Captain
Roskill might have observed.
There is another big change afoot, one that should catch the eye of both economic and military historians.
Half a century ago, developed economies accounted for about 80 percent of global GDP. Developing
countries accounted for only about a quarter of the world trade. Most of today’s developing countries
were still colonies. Russia, China, and even India remained largely isolated from the world economy.
Today, the global economic picture is starkly different. As the international economy struggles to recover
from the greatest blows since the 1930s, developing countries are compensating for the stumbling
industrialized world. Over the past five years, developing countries have provided two-thirds of global
growth.
Today, China alone is consuming over half of the world's cement, and almost half of the world's iron ore,
coal, lead, and steel. Half of the world's pigs are eaten in China, and a third of the world's eggs. China is
the world's biggest consumer of minerals, such as copper, zinc, and nickel.
These figures may well decline as China is built. Yet India and others are still to follow. Sub-Saharan
Africa, which grew at about 5 percent a year for the decade before the crash, has returned to that rate,
and can become a future pole of growth.
These tectonic shifts pose challenges for the world’s multilateral regimes. In his excellent account, "The
World in Depression," Charles Kindleberger pointed to a political cause for the failure of the economic
powers to stop the slide into economic and eventually security catastrophe in the 1930s: Great Britain had
the experience of international leadership but no longer the means to exercise it, according to
Kindleberger; the United States had the means but not the expectation that it needed to lead. The new
multilateral institutions of Bretton Woods were supposed to facilitate U.S. leadership in a more
cooperative regime.
As the world moves toward multiple poles of growth, the multilateral institutions will need to play a role in
connecting developed and developing countries to work cooperatively.
From this vantage point, the travails of the Eurozone – or the recoveries in the United States and Japan –
are about more than sovereign debt, banks, and competitiveness. They are also about influence and
perceptions of power.
Today’s economic trials for developed countries are about more than fiscal stabilization. The United
States, the EU, and Japan need to pursue structural changes to boost productivity, innovation, and
technological advance. In the Bretton Woods order, the World Bank and WTO, not the IMF, concentrate
on these structural issues of development and growth.
Viewing the World Bank as a facilitator of cooperation between developed and developing economies
influenced one of the first directions I had to set at the Bank in 2007.
Some critics had argued that the World Bank should exit the middle income countries – Brazil, China,
India, Indonesia, Mexico, Turkey, and others – and only work with the poorest states. From the
perspective of modernizing multilateralism, this shift would have been a huge strategic mistake. My aim
has been to further integrate middle incomes countries – as sources of development ideas, trading
partners, new sources of investment, and even foreign aid – into the world economy and the World Bank.
It is hard to imagine any significant problem – of the economy, environment, or increasingly, diplomacy
and security -- that can be addressed without the involvement of these emerging economies. Our
approach should be to expand the coalition of “responsible stakeholders,� not to push the emerging
economies away. Moreover, the so-called middle income countries still face enormous challenges of
development: They are the home to some 75 percent of people still living under $2 a day.
Military historians will also be alert to the connection of these developments to security. In 1987, Sir
Michael Howard, probably my favorite military historian, presented the second Roskill Memorial Lecture.
His topic was “War and Technology.� In referencing “the conquest by European powers of virtually the
whole of the world outside the western hemisphere during the nineteenth century,� Sir Michael pointed
not only to weaponry, but also to the economic, industrial, and social skills that created a period of so-
called “Western� dominance. The old order will not return. The open questions, as the present crisis
eventually abates, are who and what will be positioned as future powers – and how might they work
together, or at least live with one another.
Professor Paul Kennedy, in the Seventh Roskill Lecture in 1997, made a plea for the special attributes of
naval history in posing questions for times like ours. Dr. Kennedy explained how many historians had
become “uncomfortable with the study of power and conflict,� turning inwards to work on social groups,
gender, and family. These are important components of development, as well as history. But Professor
Kennedy properly observed that maritime history by definition looked “outwards� and broadened one’s
field of vision by interconnecting historical genres.
Similarly, my vision of the World Bank is sourced more broadly in what used to be called political
economy.
The Bank connects genres across disciplines and groups. We operate across networks – governments,
private companies, NGOs, other international agencies, foundations, research institutions and
universities. Yet to be effective as a multilateral “interconnector,� the Bank needs to recognize and adapt
to shifts in power, while using its capacities to assist weak and strong alike to solve common problems.
The identification of mutual interests to pursue or even of frictions to manage -- within frameworks that
encourage cooperation, negotiations, and mutual benefits -- needs to be facilitated. The World Bank
seeks to do so for the 187 countries that are its shareholders.
Some economists have a hard time understanding these broader multilateral purposes of the World Bank.
Some commentators just assess the World Bank through its lending volumes compared to other sources.
I have suspected that one of the problems is being called a “Bank.� Most people associate banks with
lending money – at least until recently. When most effective, however, the World Bank Group integrates
three mutually supportive elements: developing knowledge to share among countries; using individual
projects to develop markets, institutions, and capacities that extend benefits beyond the specific
investment; and diverse financing -- whether equity, loans, guarantees, grants or risk management – to
achieve specific results that can improve lives and countries.
Militaries that mistakenly confuse tradition with unthinking rigidity tempt fate and foes in war. Even
fearsome instruments of battle – Prussia’s regiments under Frederick the Great – will be shockingly
overwhelmed if they do not adapt, as Napoleon showed.
Multilateral institutions such as the World Bank can face a similar fate. They draw talented and motivated
people, with a diversity of national and cultural experiences. Yet I believe the legitimacy of multilateral
institutions derives above all from their effectiveness. Governance of and within multilateral structures
relies heavily on processes and committees, and checks and balances.
Reports abound and initiative can be stymied. Many constituencies seek recognition – risking least
common denominator calculations and even paralysis. Public bureaucracies can drift for a long time
without being “sunk.�
Perhaps that is why I found Captain Roskill’s leadership – combining thought, action, and teaching – so
compelling.
Leadership requires offering a sense of direction that fits changing circumstances. The direction must
point the way consistently, but be flexible enough to move with opportunities and to encourage ideas and
innovation throughout the organization. Then executives need to set and pay attention to specific goals.
And Execute, Execute, Execute.
Some of B.H. Liddell Hart’s axioms of strategy – “keep your object always in mind,� “adjust your end to
your means,� “ensure that both plan and dispositions are flexible –adaptable to circumstances� – offer
support for my practical guidance.
Leadership of organizations is about much more than formal designs, linking plans, budgets, and goals.
As von Moltke cautioned, “no plan of battle ever survives contact with the enemy.�
The results matter. A focus on outcomes may seem obvious, but assessments of public institutions are
often driven by intellectual debates, political positioning, and current ideological fashions. We need
thought plus action.
Or as Churchill wrote, “I pass from the tossing sea of cause and theory to the firm ground of Results and
Facts.�
So what directions and actions have driven the World Bank Group’s modernization over the past five
years? Let me touch on five.
First, developing countries need to be the World Bank Group’s clients and partners – not objects of policy.
It’s an important shift of mindset. We need to do development with clients, not to them. Just as foot
soldiers are no longer cannon fodder, so the poor of today cannot be the cannon fodder of development
schemes.
Clients have vastly different needs. If the best textbook solution doesn’t fit the client’s political economy
context, then we haven’t helped solve the problem.
One example is countries dealing with fragility and conflict. In 1944, the “R� in IBRD stood for the
reconstruction of Europe and Japan; today countries such as Afghanistan, Cote d’Ivoire, Haiti, Liberia,
and South Sudan need to find ways to combine security and development, so they can break the cycles
of fragility and violence, poor governance, and poverty.
The World Bank’s recent flagship World Development Report on Conflict, Security, and Development
examined these issues, and the Bank has created a new operational and knowledge hub in Nairobi to
support countries coming out of conflict.
Middle-income countries have a different set of needs. They still need the Bank’s assistance, but
increasingly important to them is the sharing of knowledge and experience. The Bank needs to work with
the emerging economies to share their experiences with others and to encourage them to assume greater
international responsibilities in the changing multilateral system.
The World Bank put this new problem-solving approach to work when food and fuel prices surged at the
end of 2007. Some World Bank economists, thinking in aggregate terms, said that returns from high
commodity prices would allow most countries to offset the danger. Others suggested the problem would
be best handled by humanitarian agencies, not long-term development institutions. But tens of millions of
poor people had no cushion to soften the blow. Families went without meals. Farmers couldn’t get the
inputs they needed. Food riots broke out. If, as Napoleon supposedly said, “An army marches on its
stomach,� people without food will march on their governments.
We needed to address the critical short-term problems. But at the same time, we recognized that higher
prices and greater demand for farm products from growing populations offered an opportunity to promote
longer-term growth if the Bank could help boost productivity and production.
The Bank Group worked with UN agencies to set up a Global Food Crisis Response Program and create
a rapid financing facility to support farmers.
Today, the Bank’s investments extend across the agricultural value chain – in research, property rights
(including for female farmers), seeds, irrigation, fertilizer, storage, and marketing – always encouraging
private sector development. We are also using financial expertise to help farmers and food buyers
manage risks through weather derivatives, crop insurance, and futures markets.
When the food and fuel crises were overtaken by a global financial crisis, the World Bank mobilized more
than $200 billion of financial commitments to support developing countries, disbursing much of it rapidly.
Equally important, we addressed specific market breakdowns by expanding trade finance, recapitalizing
banks in developing countries, and purchasing distressed assets. We worked with others to meet specific
regional needs, for example credit contractions in Central and Eastern Europe and borrowing backstops
to permit expansionary budgets in Southeast Asia.
The peace in the Balkans depends in part on economic stability and the prospects of integration with the
EU. Southeast Asia, once a landscape that evoked a battleground, now represents a source of growth,
young democracies, and Islamic societies that are embracing modernity. What would be the full price in
peace and security of their economic distress?
Across North Africa and the Middle East, the Bank is building on the experience of the Arab World
Initiative the Bank launched in 2007. Sharing the lessons of successful development and governance
from other regions, the World Bank is combining ideas for inclusive growth with steps toward
transparency, effectiveness, and social accountability.
The Bank is working with all its clients on fundamental long-term investments to lay the foundations for
recovery: especially infrastructure; safety net programs to protect the poor; and financing for the private
sector.
I have explained to my colleagues how the Bank’s drive to be faster, more flexible, and innovative for our
clients can draw from the military’s insight into tightening the “OODA loop� – the need to rapidly “Observe,
Orient, Decide, and Act� -- a concept first developed by a U.S. Air Force colonel and military strategist,
and originally applied to combat operations.
Second, the Bank Group emphasizes free enterprise and the development of the private sector. This is
an important evolution from the Bank’s founding era.
The financial crisis has not shaken developing countries’ embrace of markets and the private sector. The
vast majority of countries might not use Churchill’s language, but they would generally agree with him that
“The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings; the inherent virtue of socialism is the
equal sharing of miseries.� For developing countries, their compass points toward a relentless
pragmatism: They are more interested in what works than in the debates that seem to paralyze many
developed countries.
The Bank’s private sector development begins with public policies to strengthen the environme nt for
investment, whether domestic or foreign, including through an educated, skilled, and healthy workforce.
The Bank’s “Doing Business� report helps countries assess how they compare with others in empowering
entrepreneurs, especially smaller businesses.
IFC, the Bank Group’s private sector arm, invests in companies and financial enterprises that can support
developing country businesses and markets. For example, IFC is committing about $3 billion through
about 180 private equity funds to build markets through which investors can supply longer-term risk
capital to owners of local companies.
I am especially pleased that in 2010 IFC created a new Asset Management Company to supplement
IFC’s traditional model of raising money in bond markets and then inves ting it. The AMC taps sovereign
wealth funds, pension funds, and other institutional investors and channels investments to profitable
opportunities identified by IFC. The venture opens up a completely new channel of financial
intermediation. The AMC now totals over $4 billion, almost $3 billion of which had little previous exposure
to Africa and other less recognized emerging markets.
Third, the World Bank group has sought to catalyze action on global needs, ranging from biodiversity and
climate change to trade and financial markets, through a pragmatic, on-the-ground approach. Many of
these issues relate to non-traditional threats to security.
The Bank’s comparative advantage is practical, problem -solving with developing country clients.
Combining that relationship with new experience, tools, and partnerships enables the Bank, for example,
to boost trade and lower costs through expediting customs, assisting with financing, getting goods to
markets, and connecting producers to supply chains.
The Bank Group has raised over $6 billion from governments for new “climate investment funds� to help
countries improve energy efficiency and technology, lower emissions, and protect against climate change.
These funds have mobilized about $50 billion worth of projects in 45 developing countries. As UN
negotiators debate what a “Green Fund� might look like, the World Bank has one up and running.
The Bank has brought financial innovation to bear on plans to develop medicines, protect wildlife, lower
the costs of humanitarian food and supplies, and create natural disaster insurance.
On my next stop on this trip – in Singapore – the Bank will help launch a new S-O-S partnership to Save
Our Seas from overfishing, pollution, and deadzones.
Fourth, promoting good governance and anti-corruption are an integral part of development.
The best militaries do not rely just on force. They stress integrity, high standards, shared responsibility --
and honor. When successful, they earn the trust of their members and their societies.
When I arrived at the Bank in 2007, the Bank’s anti-corruption work was mired in frustrations, suspicions,
and conflict. An independent review panel, headed by former U.S. Federal Reserve Chair Paul Volcker,
provided an invaluable “wiring diagram� to enable the Bank’s integrity staff to work more effectively with
field operations, clients, donors, and the Bank’s own Executive Board.
Yet the Bank needs to do more than just investigate, prosecute, and penalize fraud and theft. We need to
set standards, live them, and promote their broader adoption.
In many resource-rich countries, the primary challenge is for the government to use income wisely,
counter corruption, and broaden the benefits of growth.
The Bank can help build institutions to prevent corruption, improve transparency, and involve civil society
in supporting good governance. It also helps governments – increasingly at the sub-national level – to
strengthen financial management, procurement systems, audit institutions, and other systems that
promote accountability.
This won’t be enough. The World Bank will need to break through harder obstacles. The Bank has
already put some new tools in place: an agreement with the Regional Development Banks on cross-
debarment; new penalties; a Stolen Asset Recovery initiative; an International Corruption Hunters
alliance; and a new fund to support citizens and civil society groups that will press for accountability.
Fifth, openness and transparency can “democratize development.�
Like modern militaries that push responsibility and decision-making down the chain of command,
development needs to empower individuals and communities. The World Bank certainly does not have
all the answers.
When making decisions that can have enormous impact on people’s lives, th e Bank – and its partner
governments – must listen to those closest to the issues.
For the World Bank, “democratizing development� starts with giving people the tools to gather data and
better understand development issues, along with opportunities to share insights.
Yet institutions resist opening up. Information can be power. Opening up means revealing mistakes and
addressing critics, which is difficult, but ultimately makes institutions more effective. Many militaries have
developed impressive capabilities to be “learning organizations,� assessing experience rigorously. In the
case of the World Bank, making the organization accessible improves performance and shows people
what the Bank does and how it works. Transparency is the best antidote to conspiracy theories.
In 2010, the World Bank rolled out two transformative policies to make the institution more accessible,
transparent, and accountable.
Our new Access to Information policy releases vast number of documents and gives the public more
information than ever before about the Bank’s projects, analytic and advisory activities, and proceedings
of the Board. Modeled on Freedom of Information programs in India and the United States, it’s the most
extensive such policy of any multilateral organization.
The Open Data Initiative may turn out to be even more important. Under this program, the Bank is
making thousands of datasets freely available to everyone with an Internet connection. Today, anyone –
from a PhD student in Australia to a farmer in Kenya – can download our data, analyze it, and come up
with solutions.
The Bank will work with communities to map their own social infrastructure – such as health clinics,
schools, and water sources – so villagers can hold officials to count. The next step is to allow people to
use hand-held devices to let the Bank know, from any location, what is really going on with projects.
All these programs represent a very different model from the “Bank knows best� attitude of the past.
I hope that tonight I have been able to give you an idea of why “modernizing multilateralism� is important
and what it has meant for the World Bank Group. Like Captain Roskill, our quarterdeck has sought to
combine ideas and action.
Since I began with the connection of the multilateral system and the World Bank to a world coming out of
conflict and seeking security, I’d like to close with an idea often rediscovered by military historians: Don’t
fight the last war.
Over time, the World Bank’s aim should be to help countries move Beyond Aid.
There will always be a need for humanitarian aid, and for some time to come, poor and conflict-riven
countries will require development assistance. The goal, however, should be to move beyond
dependency. Our aim should be to shift from a paradigm of charity to one of mutual economic benefit.
What would such a world look like?
It would provide poor countries better access to world markets, while allowing them to hedge against
fluctuating commodity prices, spiking fuel costs, and natural disasters.
It would facilitate foreign direct investment, innovative financing, and technological transfer so that
developing countries can modernize agriculture, industry, and services.
It would support good governance, openness and transparency – to ensure that governments pay more
attention to citizen voice and social accountability, and that private sector initiative is rewarded, basic
services delivered, and prosperity broadly shared.
It would support multilateral innovation to forge progress on open trade and investment, access to energy,
food security, competition in services, and climate change.
It would be a world in which all countries tap the energies and genius of all people – not least girls and
women, an under-realized source of growth everywhere.
Much of the World Bank’s history has been associated with the Third World. The Third World is now an
outdated concept. But development is not. In fact, lessons of development – just like principles of sound
economics and security – are increasingly applicable to all countries.
Whether histories are about militaries or economies, or about the international orders within which they
operate, the stories and studies ultimately relate to our societies and how they interact.
And that is what modernizing multilateralism should be about: learning from the past; adapting for the
present; and creating for the future. Sometimes the farther backward you can look, the farther forward
you are likely to see.