Hierarchical multiplicity in the international monetary system: from the slave trade to the Franc CFA in West Africa

ABSTRACT

This article investigates the relationship between international currency hierarchies and ‘societal multiplicity’. I provide an historical sketch of how West African societies and the rest of the world have engaged in trading money for slaves and raw commodities for centuries. I concur that societal multiplicity can indeed be seen as lying at the root of the global monetary system with its multiple currencies. However, my analysis offers three criticisms: First, the multiplicity project fails to give adequate attention to hierarchies in general and to those that come with monetary relations in particular. Second, Because of the existence of the world market, there is always a global and hierarchical sphere that is non-identical to societies and transcends their interaction. Third, money as both global and multiple relation points at the need for a more dynamic understanding of ‘society’ as political and economic borders do not necessarily map unto each other.

KEYWORDS:

• Money
• slavery
• West Africa
• Franc CFA
• debt

Acknowledgements

The author is grateful to Benno Teschke and Justin Rosenberg for hosting him in 2018 at the Department of International Relations at the University of Sussex, to the astute participants of their research seminar as well as to the participants of the stimulating EWIS workshop on ‘multiplicity’ at the University of Groningen. Thanks also to the anonymous reviewers and the patient, challenging and constructive editors of this special issue. Special thanks are due to Ndongo Samba Sylla for his ongoing intellectual companionship and constructive critique.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 On the classic distinction between abstraction and concretion, see Marx (1877), Heine and Teschke (1996), Koddenbrock (2015).

2 Special Issues such as this one and in the German Zeitschrift für Internationale Beziehungen and in the past in International Relations and the Cambridge Journal of International Relations bear witness to the ongoing endeavor.

3 As Quinn Slobodian has usefully developed in his recent The globalists (2018) political theorists and what are best described as ‘activists’ from Carl Schmitt to Friedrich Hayek were quite conscious about the schism between politics and the economy and developed strategies to counteract or exploit this schism. Carl Schmitt dreamt of a return to national borders, the ‘neoliberals’ chose instead to design institutions that did not allow national institutions to encroach on the protection of global capital accumulation based on extensive protections of private property and the opportunities to assetize it (Pistor, 2019).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Kai Koddenbrock

Kai Koddenbrock, acting professor of International Political Studies at the University of Witten-Herdecke, researches the politics of global inequality and the intersectional analysis of global capitalism. Expanding his work on symptomatic responses to global inequality such as humanitarian aid and peacekeeping he has focused recently on theories of capitalism and money. He currently develops a political economy of monetary dependency of ‘frontier markets’, combining insights from financial economics, dependency theory and the domestic growth models literature. He has published The practice of humanitarian intervention (Routledge, 2016) and numerous scholarly articles among others in the European Journal of International Relations, Third World Quarterly and Journal of Cultural Economy.