This year marks the 80th anniversary of two conferences that helped to create the international order after World War II. The Bretton Woods conference, held in New Hampshire in July; and the Dumbarton Oaks conference, organised in Washington D.C. from August to October, established the financial and political architecture of the post-War world.

Eighty years are a blink in the eye of global history. The world order envisaged at those conferences is being challenged, although it is too early to say that it is unravelling.

Bretton Woods drew up blueprints for the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (the main component of the World Bank) and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Dumbarton Oaks complemented the economic part of the global infrastructure politically by leading to the United Nations charter that was adopted in San Francisco in 1945.

These institutions lie at the heart of the global order to this day notwithstanding criticism of the role that they play in upholding a post-War status quo that privileges the interests of the victors over those of countries that have come to the international fore since then.

The World Bank, and even more, the IMF are accused of ignoring the needs of poor countries, in the first case by imposing structural adjustment loans to force free-market economics on nations; and in the second case, by attaching conditions to its loans that are too harsh and that have harmed developing countries.

As for the United Nations, many consider the veto powers at the Security Council exercised by the five victors of World War II - America, Britain, China, France and Russia (the erstwhile Soviet Union) - to this day to be anachronistic. Those veto powers invest the former victors with a degree of ultimate control over the world that is unwarranted given the present state of international affairs, in which countries such as India and Brazil deserve recognition for their contributions to the global order. Hence the need for fundamental reform of the Security Council.

There is much to be said for this critique. The UN Security Council represents one of the tenets of international relations, which is that the balance of power among members determines the viability of international organisations.

In an important article for the journal Engelsberg Ideas, Andrew Ehrhardt writes of the British contribution to the success of Dumbarton Oaks. "One of the more curious features of the British plans for a world organisation - something that separated it from American thinking which, for the most part, was along similar lines - was the idea that a future organisation would be dependent on a balance of power between the great powers at its centre."

Ehrhardt adds: "Ironically, as American leaders such as Secretary of State Cordell Hull were speaking of a new world organisation putting an end to 'balance of power politics', such an arrangement was seen by British officials to be an essential feature if the security council was to function properly."

And so it did. The UN and its Security Council came to stay.However, the point is that the balance of power among the victorious five at the end of World War II represented the distribution of power at that time as well. Germany and Japan were defeated, taking their economic and military heft out of the global equation for the time being.

Now, not only are a united Germany and a resurgent Japan back in global action, but dissension has broken out between the three balancer powers in the Security Council: Western America, Britain and France; Slavic Russia; and Sinic China. Within the interstices of their rivalry have remerged powers that need recognition.

The global distribution of power has changed. Hence the balance of power, too, should change to reflect the new reality. Dumbarton Oaks needs to be updated if it has to exist at all.

The Economics of it all

Meanwhile, the Bretton Woods order is being challenged by the countervailing rise of China-centric economic arrangements such as the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) and the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB). Initiated in 2013 after the Global Economic Crisis of 2008-2009 led China to conclude apparently that the West was on its historical way out, the BRI marked China's first steps on its own claim to international economic power. The AIIB of 2016 followed, both organisations emphasising the role of physical infrastructure in the creation of a new international economic edifice.

China intended to rescue the post-2008 world much as America's Marshall Plan of 1948 had sought to revitalise the economies of a war-devastated Europe, provide markets for American goods, build reliable trading partners, and support the development of stable democracies in Western Europe against the power of the Soviet Union (which, by then, had become a hostile partner in world affairs).

The BRI has come under criticism that it is a Chinese vehicle for debt-trap diplomacy, but it survives as an expression of Chinese global power.

Only time will tell whether Bretton Woods and Dumbarton Oaks will continue to guide international affairs in the face of such challenges.