Reparative Internationalism

Toward an International Democratic Public Finance Framework

By Will Beaman

The liberal international order faces a crisis of legitimacy, and the struggle to define its aftermath is already being organized through competing visions of global order. In the present turn, the far right has seized that terrain to stage a false choice: either accept imperial internationalism or retreat into nationalist rivalry.

This essay develops the Democratic Public Finance (DPF) framework into the domain of foreign policy and international economic governance. Reparative internationalism names the political horizon of that extension. DPF begins from a simple premise: public money and fiscal authority should be organized to expand democratic participation and shared capacity rather than to enforce artificial scarcity or market discipline.

The international monetary system makes this premise unavoidable. Nowhere is the tension between democratic participation and financial hierarchy more visible than in the global institutions that govern liquidity, development, and employment across borders.

This also requires a broader understanding of economic democracy and internationalism than political economy often supplies. Economic democracy is too often reduced to questions of workplace control, redistribution, and ownership, while international solidarity is not yet joined to the kinds of public design and institutional coordination that would support democratic repair and reconstruction in the present. A Democratic Public Finance approach insists that institutions of money, credit, and employment are central to both.

Even where strands of political economy have under-theorized money, credit, and employment as constitutive of economic democracy, or the role of internationalist architecture in liberation struggles, these questions remain open. They belong to a heterogeneous problem space shaped by developmental economics, mid-century postcolonial thought, and the 1974 call for a New International Economic Order. That declaration, advanced by newly independent states, demanded structural changes to trade, finance, technology transfer, and development governance. These questions stand alongside more recent decolonial monetary and macroeconomic work, including Fadhel Kaboub’s analyses of postcolonial economic relations and advocacy for political and climate reparations and Ndongo Samba Sylla’s critiques of monetary imperialism and neoliberalism’s colonial roots. What is more, Kaboub and Sylla join Andrés Arauz in calling for forms of regional monetary solidarity across Africa and Latin America. Democratic Public Finance revives and recomposes these longstanding questions through a focus on international public design and interoperability: the construction of institutions that widen fiscal space, coordinate liquidity, and secure full employment across borders without reinstalling the nation-state or any imperial power as the singular anchor of economic order.

What appears as an external constraint is often already an effect of how cross-border obligations are organized, recognized, and supported. International architecture, in that sense, is not a downstream consequence of discrete political achievements. It is part of the contested infrastructure through which those achievements become possible, legible, or durable in the first place.

These questions remain live today in debates over what happens when countries must use up their stocks of dollars and other widely accepted reserve assets to pay for imports, service debts, and steady their currencies. When that cushion runs down, governments face mounting pressure. They may be forced to cut spending, suppress demand, or seek outside support on punitive terms simply to keep external payments flowing.

When countries struggle to secure the dollars they need for imports, debt service, and other external payments, the resulting instability should not be mistaken for a self-moving market process. It reflects an international monetary architecture in which dollar support is selectively provisioned rather than organized around democratic participation or fiscal space. That selectivity is not incidental. It is an imperial design logic that recasts questions of public monetary design as matters of U.S. charity and benevolence and, in the present authoritarian turn, is increasingly restaged as a pageantry of opening and closing windows of solidarity and support according to loyalty and fealty.

The consequences then appear in the specific exchanges through which domestic money is traded against dollars, in the pricing of imports, and in the servicing of foreign debts. Governments and central banks then try to keep those arrangements from breaking down by using up their dollar holdings, keeping domestic currencies from falling further against the dollar, making borrowing more expensive, or taking other steps to resist the reorganization of claims in favor of dollar-denominated assets and to preserve the payment relationships on which imports, debts, and public responsibilities depend. These are defensive responses to terms that are rendered legible as neutral, ordinary, and unavoidable, while making other ways of organizing support, obligation, and participation across borders harder to name and sustain.

Too often, these dilemmas are staged as a choice between insulated national monetary autonomy and permanent exposure to external discipline. International Democratic Public Finance begins elsewhere. It treats those pressures not as fixed conditions within which each country must fight for survival, but as symptoms of a global monetary architecture organized around hierarchy, scarcity, and competitive vulnerability.

For decades, the dominant vision of international order presented itself as a framework for shared prosperity, development, and stability. In practice, however, liberal internationalism organized economic life across borders through hierarchically structured financial and trade institutions, which repeatedly treated austerity, privatization, and unemployment as the price of participation for countries facing external payment pressures.

As faith in this institutional order has eroded, the far right has offered its own alternative: nationalist competition among strong states, each seeking advantage in a world of strategic rivalry.

Neither model addresses the underlying problem. Liberal internationalism preserves hierarchical financial arrangements that restrict fiscal space for most of the world. Nationalist internationalism abandons cooperation altogether and risks normalizing economic fragmentation and geopolitical conflict.

What is needed instead is a different framework for international economic governance—one grounded not in hierarchy or withdrawal but in participation.

A reparative foreign policy therefore requires more than a change in diplomatic posture. It requires treating the international monetary system itself as a site of democratic public finance rather than as an instrument of imperial hierarchy.

I. Authority as Participation

A reparative international architecture begins by reframing how authority operates. In the prevailing international order, authority is exercised through hierarchy: a small number of powerful states and financial centers shape the conditions under which other societies must govern their economies.

The alternative is participation. Participation does not simply redistribute power within an existing hierarchy. It reorganizes the institutions through which economic life is governed so that societies can participate in shaping the economic conditions that govern their lives.

This shift has a certain experimental quality. Participation is not merely a new map of who belongs within an existing order. It is a world-making practice through which democratic capacity is built across borders.

A participatory international architecture continues the unfinished work of decolonization by changing the institutional conditions under which political and economic decisions are made. Instead of requiring countries to navigate rules designed elsewhere and enforced through external discipline, it creates institutions through which societies can participate in shaping the economic and financial environment that governs them.

In this sense, decolonization is not only a political project but a monetary one: it requires transforming the institutions that govern liquidity, credit, and employment so that they expand democratic participation rather than enforce financial hierarchy.

For Democratic Public Finance, foreign policy therefore begins with the institutions that govern money, liquidity, and fiscal space across borders.

Internationalism, in this sense, means organizing the institutions of money, credit, and employment so that societies can participate in shaping the economic conditions that govern their lives.

Anti-imperialism, correspondingly, means building institutions that prevent any power from monopolizing the monetary and financial conditions under which other societies must govern their economic lives. What these debates too often share is a survivalist baseline: a picture of self-enclosed political units forced to defend themselves within a hostile monetary environment rather than participate in designing the institutions that govern that environment in the first place.

II. The Monetary Question

Countries pursuing ambitious domestic programs are often forced into austerity, unemployment, privatization, or political retreat not because those outcomes are economically inevitable, but because access to dollars and reserve assets remains scarce, hierarchical, and politically managed.

International Democratic Public Finance does not treat externally denominated debt as a settled social fact. Even the most sophisticated MMT discussion has often treated foreign-currency debt as a stable marker on a spectrum of sovereignty, agency or capacity, as though “externality” were simply there to be measured. But what counts as external denomination is itself conditioned by an ongoing order of collective design: by the legal, financial, administrative, and discursive arrangements through which receivability, refinancing, reserve practice, enforcement, and public support are organized across borders and rendered durable as common sense. The topology is therefore the reverse of what it often seems. Sovereign refusal, denomination, or imposition does not stand prior to international monetary design. It is itself organized through that design. The issue, then, is not simply what degree of room for maneuver a country possesses in advance. It is how the international monetary order organizes the terms on which its obligations will count, travel, and be supported.

This is why the dollar’s global role cannot be treated as neutral—and certainly not as a foundation for democratic renewal. When access to dollars and other widely accepted reserve assets is concentrated at the top of the system, fiscal space everywhere becomes organized around imperial asymmetries. In the current order, that fragility is often resolved through austerity: governments are told to cut spending, suppress wages, privatize assets, or tolerate unemployment in order to regain access to the external means of payment they need for imports, debt service, and exchange-rate support.

Reforming this system requires expanding the institutional mechanisms through which countries can gain access to the external means of payment they need when they face dollar shortages and other external payment pressures, without sacrificing domestic democratic priorities.

One concrete example already exists in the network of central bank swap lines that the Federal Reserve extended during the global financial crisis and again during the pandemic. These facilities stabilized global financial markets by allowing foreign central banks to access dollars when they faced payment shortages. Yet access to these lines remains restricted to a small group of privileged partners.

A reparative international architecture would expand such mechanisms and place them within multilateral institutions so that access to the external means of payment countries need is not a discretionary tool of imperial power but a normal feature of global economic governance.

Other paths point in a similar direction. In Africa and Latin America, regional monetary proposals associated with thinkers such as Ndongo Samba Sylla and Andrés Arauz have emphasized currency cooperation, regional clearing, and solidarity-based reserve arrangements as ways to reduce dependence on hierarchical dollar mediation. These efforts underscore that reparative internationalism need not mean a more benevolent top-down order. It can also mean building interoperable institutions below and across the current hierarchy.

Such reforms would not eliminate international inequality overnight. But they would reduce the ability of financial hierarchy to discipline democratic governments pursuing full employment in an inclusive way.

III. Employment, Industrial Strategy, and Participation

Debates about development strategy often frame employment as a byproduct of industrialization. According to this view, jobs should emerge naturally from successful sectors and industries institutionally positioned to attract investment and external demand.

A participatory framework reverses that priority. Employment is not merely an outcome of economic strategy; it is a condition of democratic participation.

This does not mean abandoning industrial policy. It means recognizing that industrialization can proceed under different background conditions. One option is to organize economic life around unemployment as a disciplinary mechanism, forcing workers and communities to compete for access to livelihood and public standing. Another is to establish employment as a public commitment, ensuring that participation in economic life is not contingent on meeting a narrow test of market usefulness.

That distinction matters because unemployment is not simply an economic shortfall. It is also a way of sorting people into more and less legitimate forms of social contribution. A participatory framework rejects that sorting function. It insists that industrial transformation should widen the terms on which people can appear as contributors to public life, rather than narrowing them around one dominant image of usefulness.

Economic democracy, in this sense, means organizing the institutions of money, credit, and employment so that participation in public life does not depend on meeting a narrow test of market usefulness.

Full employment has long functioned as a public aspiration, especially in the postwar period, when mass unemployment came to be seen as incompatible with democratic legitimacy. But over time the concept was narrowed. In much mainstream economic theory, full employment no longer means that everyone who wants to work can do so. It names a moving threshold consistent with a certain tolerated level of unemployment, often justified through concepts such as the Non-Accelerating Inflation Rate of Unemployment. Under that definition, full employment becomes a vague macroeconomic target rather than an institutional obligation.

This narrowing is often defended through the language of inflation. Inflation is treated not only as a technical problem of prices but as a signal that participation has exceeded its proper bounds: that wages are rising too quickly, that public spending has become excessive, or that “make-work” has replaced disciplined production. In this way, inflation discourse helps naturalize a background level of unemployment as a necessary restraint on social excess. It also organizes distinctions between forms of labor that are recognized as productive and those that are cast as marginal, redundant, or improperly supported—distinctions that have long been entangled with judgments about skill, disability, and social worth.

Democratic renewal has to reject those logics more fundamentally. When unemployment is treated as the necessary price of order, and inflation as evidence of improper public spending or socially excessive participation, the ground is laid for harsher distinctions between worthy and unworthy labor, disciplined and undisciplined populations, productive and burdensome life. Those distinctions do not mechanically produce fascism, but they help make fascist categories newly legible. A democratic politics of full employment cannot simply soften those judgments at the margins. It has to reorganize the terms on which participation, contribution, and public support are recognized in the first place.

A participatory framework rejects that narrowing. Full employment is not simply a desirable aggregate outcome. It is a democratic commitment that requires institutions capable of creating work when private markets do not. It also reframes the problem of inflation, not as a reason to withhold participation, but as a question of how to organize spending, production, and pricing so that expanded participation can be sustained without reproducing the categories of excess and exclusion that authoritarian politics exploits.

A job guarantee is one way of giving that commitment concrete form. It is a public commitment to provide employment to anyone who wants to work, rather than leaving access to livelihood to the disciplinary terms of the market. It belongs to a longer history of demands for democratic inclusion, civil rights, and public responsibility for livelihood. Its importance here is not only programmatic but conceptual: it names a form of full employment that refuses to treat access to work as a privilege allocated through unemployment, exclusion, or externally imposed scarcity.

This commitment should not be confined within national borders. In the current international order, even the effort to secure full employment is constrained by dollar dependence and external payment hierarchies. If unemployment is treated as an acceptable adjustment mechanism in the global economy, the result will be recurring cycles of austerity, migration crises, and political instability.

A reparative international architecture must therefore treat full employment as a shared global objective. Job guarantees provide one way to institutionalize that commitment. By establishing employment as a right rather than a privilege, they ensure that industrial transformation occurs within a framework of participation rather than exclusion.

IV. Beyond Benevolence

This framework is not a call for American benevolence. A system in which the United States occasionally extends support while retaining the power to withdraw it would simply reproduce the exceptional and discretionary character of imperial governance.

The goal instead is to embed access to external means of payment, balance-of-payments support, and employment commitments within international institutions. Balance-of-payments support here means securing and stabilizing access to the international currencies needed to meet external payment obligations without slashing jobs, wages, or public spending. This matters in part because currencies are never singular or self-enclosed objects. As I have argued elsewhere, “the dollar itself is not a coherent entity. It is already a choreography: a composite of coins, notes, deposits, reserves, and credit instruments—issued across the balance sheets of banks, treasuries, courts, and municipal governments, each with their own histories, idioms, and institutional rhythms. It has never been a single thing.”

One existing coordinate for thinking through that transition is the IMF’s Special Drawing Rights (SDRs). Created and allocated by the IMF, SDRs are an international reserve asset—a potential claim on widely usable member currencies—that can widen access to external means of payment without reducing support to bilateral favor or market punishment. They do not solve the problem on their own, but they point toward forms of international monetary coordination less dependent on unilateral U.S. discretion and more compatible with a reparative architecture.

Balance-of-payments support from the United States to postcolonial countries could be a step in that direction. But it should be understood as transitional—part of a broader effort to embed these responsibilities in multilateral frameworks that prevent any single state from monopolizing the conditions of global economic governance.

Nor does reparative internationalism require Americans to endure economic hardship as a form of reparation. On the contrary, it requires domestic fiscal policy in the United States itself to be organized around full employment and job guarantees. A country that manages its own economy through unemployment and scarcity cannot credibly support a more participatory global order.

The issue is not simply that support has too often been distributed cruelly rather than kindly. It is that support itself has been organized as an instrument of selective favor rather than as an ordinary condition of international participation. In the present authoritarian turn, that selectivity becomes more theatrical–and more spectacularly brutal–but it is not new.

The aim is not sacrifice but an order in which coordination is institutionally secured: a world in which societies can pursue democratic economic strategies without being disciplined by external financial constraints.

V. Practicing Reparative Internationalism in the Present

Progressive lawmakers do not need to command international institutions in order to begin advancing this framework. The present already offers ways to begin institutionalizing it.

Part of that work is rhetorical. It involves recognizing people, places, and forms of labor as public capacities where dominant policy language still treats them as fiscal burdens or economic costs, while refusing the assumption that unemployment, migration, or underdevelopment represent excess human lives to be managed through discipline. Even before institutions change, political language can begin to reorganize what counts as value, capacity, and participation.

Part of the work is domestic and programmatic. Public employment initiatives, care infrastructure, green development, debt relief, and other DPF-style policies do more than address local needs. They rehearse a governing logic in which public money is used to widen participation and build collective capacity. They help establish that full employment is not a fantasy or a slogan, but an institutional obligation.

Part of the work is transitional and international. Progressive lawmakers can support debt restructuring, oppose austerity conditionality, advocate for expanded swap lines, and back reforms that give other countries greater room to pursue inclusive social provisioning. These measures fall short of a fully reparative architecture. But they help soften the ground for one by weakening the idea that global order must be organized through scarcity, punishment, and hierarchy.

Because these hierarchies are continuously organized rather than simply inherited, they can be contested in the present through rhetoric, program design, and transitional institutional demands.

Reparative internationalism, then, is not only a future arrangement at the level of global institutions. It is an inter-temporal practice of recognizing capacity where others see cost, widening participation where others impose discipline, and advancing reforms that loosen the grip of hierarchical finance.

VI. Conclusion

The crises of the twenty-first century—financial instability, climate change, migration, and geopolitical fragmentation—cannot be addressed through a return to the institutions and assumptions of the late twentieth century.

What is required instead is a reparative internationalism centered on participation.

This means building and revising institutions to widen fiscal and democratic space rather than restricting it through austerity and external payment discipline. It means refusing to predicate participation in public life on a narrow test of economic usefulness. And it means treating participation as a world-making practice through which democratic capacity is built across borders.

The point is not merely to redistribute capacity within a fixed world order, but to reorganize the terms on which capacities, obligations, and claims come to count at all.

The goal is not a world organized around hierarchy or benevolent patronage, but one in which societies can participate in shaping the economic conditions that govern their lives.

In that sense, reparative internationalism names the unfinished institutional work of decolonization: a world organized around democratic participation.