The governance discourse as legitimating strategy of financial elites in the sovereign debt restructuring field

Abstract The legitimacy of the construction processes of norms of global scope is a key element in order to disseminate and enforce them. In this context, the promoters of the new ICMA clauses models, in use of the governance discourse, made an extended effort to present their emergence as the result of an open, inclusive and horizontally cooperative political matrix. This article analyzes the composition and dynamics of this matrix in order to show who –how and why– participated in the design of these models. Similarly, the article compares this matrix with that of the UN created for wording an alternative solution to ICMA-clauses, in order to empirically show who were the agents excluded from this matrix. Contrary to what the specialized literature postulates, this paper argues that the ICMA-models emerged from a political matrix led and controlled by the sovereign-debt market elites that was strategically closed to those agents with potentiality for changing the current restructuring regime. The article warns that those elements of the governance discourse that promote democratic values can be ideologically used –as actually happened in the concrete case– by the elites to present their own regulatory criteria as legitimate and to extend them to vast areas of the planet.