What the hell is Bretton Woods and what kind of beasts lurk there? And if you aren't strolling through it at night why the hell should you care? In a sense we are all strolling through Bretton Woods and are prey to the beasts that were born there at a conference way back in 1944 - the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT). And if your job has been gobbled up by the international economy or you are suffering from government cutbacks - you'd better look carefully for the teethmarks of Bretton Woods. This year the beast turns 50 and we at NI felt that it was worth a venture through the forest of international economics to explore how Bretton Woods is still shaping the lives of all of us - North and South.

This issue is very much the product of the '50 Years is Enough' campaign. This campaign has grown out of Third World frustration with the way the rules established at Bretton Woods have been rigged against the South. For decades Third World critics have complained about the high-handed fashion in which the World Bank and the IMF have tried to impose their economic blueprint. The human and environmental costs of making the South 'competitive' have been high indeed. This is a realization that is also beginning to dawn on trade unionists and activists in the North as they see their communities and livelihoods decimated by the ravages of 'globalization'.

The issue came together at the suggestion of Doug Hellinger at Development GAP in Washington DC, and owes much to the hard work of Cheryl Brown and Ross Hammond of the same organization. They are of course not responsible for the final product. Perhaps even more thanks is due to those activists in the Third World who have risked careers and even personal safety to expose the negative effects of globalization on their societies. The anti-anniversary campaign gives us all an appropriate opportunity to say 'enough!' and end the silence about alternatives to the unsustainable economic model spawned at Bretton Woods.

A theme we keep returning to these days at NI is the challenging of conventional understandings of various histories - Columbus, the Gulf War and now Bretton Woods. This is not due to some morbid preoccupation with chewing over old bones. Rather it is because we find that 'the present is history'. Only by tracing the problems of the present to their roots in the past can we hope to move beyond them.

50 years is enough
Richard Swift shows how the Bretton Woods Conference helped shape a global economy built on inequality and waste - and how people all over the world are fighting back.

That martini magic
An irreverent look at World Bank apologetics by Joanne Henderson.

Riders of the apocalypse
The new World Trade Organization has put the environmental issue on its agenda. But this is cold comfort for environmental activists, as Pratap Chatterjee explains.

SAP is really sapping us
Ayesha Imam looks at how structural adjustment programs (SAPs) are adding to African women's heavy burdens.

Simply - how Bretton Woods
reordered the world.

Special pull-out supplement
Adjusting structures, destroying lives:
A structural adjustment map of the world.
Heretic in Babylon: an interview with former World Bank economist Herman Daly.
The 50 Years is Enough
Campaign: an action guide.

Life and death in the free zone
Mark Fried dissects the pinstripe revolution in Latin America which has turned tin miners into street vendors.

Fast money
Now you see it, now you don't. Brahm Eiley on the way the modern casino economy can produce instant wealth for a few but little else.

Letters
Letter from Lagos
Updates
Reviews: plus Franz Kafka classic
Curiosities
Endpiece: by Olivia Ward
Country profile: Colombia

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