Abstract

The Fund has made abundant use of travaux préparatoires, although from time to time there has been discussion of the weight that should be attributed to them in general or in relation to a particular problem. It is probably safe to say that the degree of reliance on travaux preparatoires in the solution of a problem is proportional to their clarity. This working rule sometimes transfers the debate from the meaning of the text to the meaning of an earlier draft. Although uncertainty as to the inferences that can be drawn from travaux preparatoires sometimes tends to produce a general skepticism about their usefulness, when they have been clear they have made weighty or even decisive contributions to the solution of some problems of interpretation.

The Fund has made abundant use of travaux préparatoires, although from time to time there has been discussion of the weight that should be attributed to them in general or in relation to a particular problem. It is probably safe to say that the degree of reliance on travaux preparatoires in the solution of a problem is proportional to their clarity. This working rule sometimes transfers the debate from the meaning of the text to the meaning of an earlier draft. Although uncertainty as to the inferences that can be drawn from travaux preparatoires sometimes tends to produce a general skepticism about their usefulness, when they have been clear they have made weighty or even decisive contributions to the solution of some problems of interpretation.

The Fund’s basic travaux preparatoires are the Proceedings and Documents of the United Nations Monetary and Financial Conference. These are two volumes, of almost 2,000 pages, published in 1948 by the U.S. Department of State.27 They are, of course, a collection of the working papers of the Bretton Woods Conference of July 1 to 22, 1944, at which the Articles of the Fund and of the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development were drafted. The volumes also reproduce the British plan for an International Clearing Union and various other proposals that were forerunners of the Articles.

The examination of any important problem of interpretation of the Articles, whether or not under Article XVIII, usually begins with a study of any relevant material in the Proceedings and Documents. This is not always rewarding, largely because little in the way of discussion is recorded, and it is, therefore, difficult to say with confidence why the various drafts of a provision were proposed and why the final version was adopted. If the Proceedings and Documents are not always helpful, this must not be understood to mean that they never give guidance.28

In order to facilitate the work of the Bretton Woods Conference, a preliminary meeting was held at Atlantic City, New Jersey. On June 15, 1944 a group of American experts met there and were joined a little later by experts from 15 other countries. The Atlantic City Conference produced a document on the basis of which the deliberations on the Fund’s Articles began at Bretton Woods. The Atlantic City documents have not been published, but many of them are available within the Fund, and they are sometimes useful in resolving ambiguities, although, of course, less often than the Bretton Woods documents.

Another source of material is the Parliamentary debates and hearings on the proposed Bretton Woods legislation of certain member countries, which was designed to authorize them to join the Fund and make provision for the performance of certain obligations under the Articles. These debates and hearings were subsequent to the negotiation and drafting of the Articles, and they are therefore travaux preparatoires of the legislative enactments and not of the Articles, but they took place soon after the Conference and sometimes present the views of experts who took leading parts in the negotiations. Of this material, by far the most comprehensive and detailed are the Hearings before the Committee on Banking and Currency of the U.S. Senate in June 194529 and the Hearings before the Committee on Banking and Currency of the U.S. House of Representatives in March, April, and May 1945.30 In those hearings, the colloquies between U.S. Government officials who participated in the Bretton Woods Conference and members of the Committees are of the greatest interest. The late Senator Robert Taft, who was a lawyer by profession and a critic of the Fund project, took an active part in the Senate hearings, and his pointed and persistent questions addressed to these government officials did much to get useful information on the record.31

A further source of historical material is a document entitled Questions and Answers on the International Monetary Fund, issued by the U.S. Treasury on June 10, 1944. It is a document of some length, consisting of 35 questions and the answers to them, many of which are detailed essays. It was issued by the Treasury in order to educate American opinion on certain aspects of the Joint Statement by Experts on the Establishment of an International Monetary Fund of the United and Associated Nations.32 This was a statement of principles adopted on April 21, 1944 by the technical experts of more than 30 countries, in which they expressed their personal views without binding their governments. The Questions and Answers was also circulated a few weeks in advance of the Bretton Woods Conference to the delegations that were going to attend that Conference.

The Questions and Answers is a useful document because of the lucidity with which it is written and because it was produced by officials who were responsible in large part for the original proposal for a Fund and for working on its subsequent versions. Notwithstanding the great merits of the Questions and Answers, it must be used with caution, not only because it was produced by one country only, but also because in the Articles as finally agreed there were many important departures from the principles of the Joint Statement. The citation of the Questions and Answers in Fund discussions of an ambiguity in the Articles has sometimes led to interesting debates about the weight to be attributed to the document, or to the sections cited, in the light of the subsequent intentions of the drafters of the Articles.

Another source of information about the drafting history of the Articles is on a much lower level of importance and usefulness. For their personal convenience during the Bretton Woods Conference, some members of the U.S. Delegation arranged for stenographic minutes to be taken of the meetings of Commission I of the Conference, the Commission charged with formulating the Articles of the Fund. These minutes do not constitute anything like a full record of the deliberations on the Articles because so much of the debate was conducted in specialized committees reporting to Commission I. Nevertheless, even this incomplete record is helpful in eking out the not very adequate travaux preparatoires. At the request of the Fund, the U.S. Government consented to the transmission of a copy of the minutes to each executive director of the Fund. The United States assumed no responsibility for the text and it is, of course, completely unofficial. The text, often garbled, has never been edited, checked, or agreed, and, therefore, it has not been made available outside the Fund.