The Mount Washington Hotel in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire. (Reuters/Brian Snyder)
Throughout history, international orders have been constructed, contested, upended and dismantled. The current international order goes back to the end of World War II. The period before — between the two world wars and including the Great Depression that resulted after the 1929 stock market crash — had already proven that a multilateral scheme based on a gold exchange standard was not optimal (or even possible, given that gold reserves were primarily held in the central banks of a few states), and, ultimately, it was unfit to respond to a global financial crisis.