European Institute

In the maelstrom of debt engulfing the eurozone in 2009, IMF Managing Director Dominique Strauss-Kahn was “the right man in that place at that time” – both for Europe and for the Fund’s own stature. That favorable judgment is part of a well-informed, nuanced overall account of his record at the IMF that was given to European Affairs two days before the first report surfaced of the scandal that led to his downfall. The insights and evaluation came from Edwin “Ted” Truman, a highly esteemed international economist. Currently a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington, Truman has held many senior positions in the U.S. government and in the IMF.

Under Strauss-Kahn, the IMF transformed itself from being an enforcer of rules on developing countries to becoming a pivotal player in helping rescue European countries and even the euro itself amid a transatlantic financial meltdown. As a sign of its revived prominence, the Fund tripled its resources for lending. Retracing these developments in his question-and-answer session with European Affairs on Friday, May 13, Truman, a prominent “insider-outsider” in the Fund’s evolution, offered an incisive summing-up of what Strauss-Kahn succeeded in changing at the Fund and a partial list of some challenges that remain.

The chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague has formally requested arrest warrants for Moammar Gaddafi and two of his relatives for crimes against humanity.

A special variant of the G-8 – this one to bring together a “summit” of web leaders – is meeting in France ahead of the regular G-8 summit meeting this week in Deauville. In this initiative, President Nicolas Sarkozy is convening key players from the public and private sector including such influential figures as NewsCorp owner Rupert Murdoch, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, the French Minister of Finance Christine Lagarde and the European Commissioner for the Digital Agenda Neelie Kroes for a two-day debate (May 24-5) to discuss Internet-related questions -- notably how to ensure its reliability and accessibility while protecting the global system’s security.

Official uneasiness about the state of Internet governance is rising as governments on both sides of the Atlantic have come to recognize how limited their ability is to control it. The latest public symptom of this anxiety surfaced in a leaked official letter from European Commission Vice President Neelie Kroes who is also the Commissioner for the Digital Agenda, to U.S. Secretary of Commerce Gary Locke in which she sought U.S. help in stopping the deployment of a new Internet “suffix” -- ".xxx" –- to identify pornography sites on the web. “This is a major public policy concern,” she wrote, “not only because of the unknown effects it may have in terms of internet stability, but also because of the implications such blocking may have for internet censorship and freedom of expression.”