So forget the BRICS, or even IBSA. The newest grouping is MIKTA. MIKTA stands for Mexico, Indonesia, Korea, Turkey and Australia. All these countries are members of the G20. It would seem that the group met at the margins of the UN General Assembly opening.
So putting the last items in the bag for the trip to St. Petersburg. This one looks like trouble. Five years in to G20 Leaders Summits and St. Petersburg would appear to have all the characteristics of a major distraction. This would not be the first. I certainly remember how the Greek Euro crisis drove France’s G20 Agenda at Cannes right off the cliff. It would appear that Syria – and the use of military force in retaliation for the use of chemical weapons – could be even more of an agenda killer.
It was a time for informal face-to-face contact – just ended – the California summit between Presidents Xi and Obama. There is a strand of global summitry that emphasizes contact between leaders. Such contact can be disastrous of course. Kennedy’s encounter with Khrushchev in Vienna in June 1961, left leaders with misconceptions about the other that ultimately led each to take steps that raised threats and crisis. Let’s hope that nothing like this occurs as a result of this summit. And the reality is that the ‘world of summits’ has changed mightily. The two presidents will see each other again shortly in St. Petersburg Russia at the G20 Leaders Summit. And they will meet again shortly thereafter in Asia at the EAS.
What can we draw as the consequences of this informal meeting of the leaders of these two great powers? Ostensibly the two leaders are searching for a “new type of great power relationship” (xinxing daguo guanxi) – The announcement of this informal summit and the search for a different kind of relationship – read all that as an effort by IR types to avoid what international relations theory tells is the likely outcome of rivalry, friction and conflict between an established superpower and a rising one. Thus many of the foreign policy experts have indeed waded in to describe what might result from such a meeting – and give some expression to the ongoing Sino-American relationship.
Stephen Walt at Foreign Policy, the consummate realist suggested a modest result:
Neither Obama nor Xi can alter the core interests of the two countries, or wish away the various issues where those interests already conflict or are likely to do so in the future. The best they can achieve is a better understanding of each other’s red lines and resolve and some agreements on those issues where national interests overlap. In this way, each can hope to keep things from getting worse and at the margin make relations a bit warmer. … But even if Obama is successful this weekend, this effort is unlikely to prevent Sino-American rivalry from intensifying in the future. The basic problem is that the two state’s core grand strategies are at odds and good rapport between these two particular leaders won’t prevent those tensions from reemerging down the road.
Walt acknowledges the description just referred to is a pessimistic one (he does describe a far more optimistic alternative) based on “… Sino-American rivalry in the future no matter how well Obama and Xi (or their successors) get on this weekend. And so for Walt “intense competition is likely”.
Then there is Walt’s FP compatriot – Dan Drezner. Now Drezner is no realist – and in fact in some ways leans more to a neo-liberal framing of international relations (I suspect Dan may not buy this). But Drezner reflected on this upcoming summit at his blog (I anticipate that this blog post is not his final word on this) by referencing Harvard’s Iain Johnston in a piece Jognston wrote recently for International Security examining the growing Chinese assertiveness – which Johnston largely rejects. The lesson for Drezner is China is no revisionist power. As he argues, “Since 2008, China has had multiple opportunities to disrupt the US-Created international order, and Beijing has passed on almost all these opportunities.” So for Drezner the landscape is filled with collaborative opportunities between the US and China:
Now let’s be clear – China is doing almost all of this to advance its own narrow self-interest. None of the above means that China is suddenly going to embrace the US perspective on human rights or the South China Sea. Still, there are a healthy number of issue areas where China’s interests are pretty congruent with the United States, and where China has taken constructive policy steps. … My main point here is that China is a great power that is inevitably going to disagree with the United Sattes on a host of issues. China is not, however, a revisionist actor hell-bent on subverting the post-1945/post 1989 global governance. To use John Ikenberry’s language, recent Sino-American disputes are taking place within the context of the current international order. They are not about radical changes to that international order. Indeed, contrary to the arguments of some, the current system has displayed surprising resilience.
In a curious way this perspective resonates if only a little with a far more pessimistic view – that expressed most pointedly by Yan Xuetong the Dean of the Institute of Modern International Relations at Tsinghua University. A strong nationalist, and realist, Yan Xuetong is not well known outside China-expert circles. FP did themselves and their publics a great favor in printing a post by the Dean entitled, “Let’s Not be Friends“. For some time now Yan Xuetong has been arguing that leaders and their officials should not promote a vision of a trust-based collaborative relationship – those arguing for it will only be disappointed. The US and China are competitors. But that need not prevent incidents of collaboration:
States cooperate not because of mutual trust, but because of shared interests that make cooperation safe and productive. China and the United States should look hard to identify what these incentives and shared interests are – and focus on developing positive cooperation when their interests overlap or complement one another, such as on denuclearization of the Korea Peninsula, and preventive cooperation when their interests conflict, such as on preventing collisions in [the] South China Sea. … Preventive cooperation differs from positive cooperation because it is based on conflicting — rather than shared — interests. … Areas of friction are likely to become more common in the coming years, but the two countries can skillfully manage their competition if they work to minimize these emerging conflicts — not only in the military sector but also in nontraditional security sectors such as energy, finance counterterrorism in the Middle East, anti-piracy in Somali Sea, and even climate change. … Encouraging China and the United States to prioritize preventive cooperation does not mean they should abandon efforts to build mutual trust. However, it does mean the two countries can stabilize their strategic relations without it. The worst-case scenario is not that China and the United States is not that China and the United States will face more strategic conflicts in the coming years, but that they never learn how to develop cooperation based on the lack of mutual trust, thus allowing a small conflict to escalate into a major one.
I suppose it is a framing a little like: “don’t trust but verify”. The dilemma I fear however is that all this realist formulation will lead – at least in US circles if not Chinese ones – to analogize the relationship to something like the cold war contestants, even as they draw distinctions between the two sets of rivals. Simplistic competitive framing is too easy and too familiar. The Washington-types that always lean on “hedging” and insist on greater military preparedness will target the competitive and forget the collaborative. Inexorably the US and China will be characterized as the new cold war rivals.
I have argued for the necessity of wedging cooperation into the relationship and rejecting any logic to US-Soviet competition. In the past I have argued that “both friend and foe” (yi di yi you) is the better framing for the great power relationship than “neither friend nor foe” (fei di fei you) – a framing often used by Chinese experts. Starting at the post, “Not Required to Choose – A Strategy for US-China Relations” I have argued that defining the relationship as including a collaborative dimension is necessary to avoid sliding into a more difficult unpleasant great power relationship. Yes, it will be difficult especially for US decision-makers to retain the partnership aspect – that is both collaborative and competitive. -Without that collaborative element to the relationship, however, Washington leadership will be all too willing to accept just a rivalrous competitive relationship with China. It is after all politically so much easier.
Let’s not make it easy for the claque.
Image Credit: channelnewsasia.com
A quick trip to London enabled me to enjoy the valuable discussion at a small gathering brought together at Chatham House. The conference sponsored by Chatham House and the Australian Lowy Institute spent the good part of a day examining “From the G8 to the G20 and Beyond: Setting a Course for Economic Global Governance.” Presentations by officials, former officials and policy experts produced a rich context for informal discussion.
My own view was that the most intriguing discussion of the day was a back and forth over the evolving summitry structure. Now I know there will be an immediate chorus of sighs – oh geez architecture again – but the summitry structure has important implications for the global economy and the conduct and stability of international relations. So back to the discussion.
I think there was a general consensus in the room that the large emerging market powers – frequently labelled as the BRICS countries – were failing to take up leadership at the G20. This view was aptly described recently by Harvard’s Dani Rodrik. In a piece first posted at his blog and then slightly enlarged upon at Project Syndicate – my favorite economics blog site – Rodrik examined the recent efforts of the BRICS, most notably at the BRICS Leaders Summit at Durban.
Rodrik in these posts took the opportunity to first express disappointment in what is at the moment the signature initiative of the BRICS – the effort to launch a development bank, which Rodrik described rather disparagingly in the following terms:
This approach [infrastructure financing] represents a 1950’s view of economic development, which has long been superseded by a more variegated perspective that recognizes a multiplicity of constraints – …
But Rodrik did not stop there. In a criticism that was reflected in various comments at the conference, Rodrik argued:
What the world needs from the BRICS is not another development bank, but greater leadership on today’s great global issues. … If the international community fails to confront its most serious challenges … they are the ones that will pay the highest price. Yet these countries have so far played a rather unimaginative and timid role, in international forums such as the G-20 or the World Trade Organization. When they have asserted themselves, it has been largely in pursuit of narrow national interests. Do they really have nothing new to offer?
One of the conference participants took direct aim at this tepid leadership. He suggested that the premature death predicted for the G7 and now arguably countered by revival and renewed energy evidenced by the G8 or more precisely the G7, might conceivably pressure the large emerging market countries to step up to take greater leadership in the G20. It might indeed be true that the G7 efforts especially on economic questions might give the BRICS the kind of fillip that might cause them to step up in the G20. But equally possibly these countries, the BRICS especially, might view the G7 activism as isolating the BRICS – not to mention the non-G7, non-BRICS countries like Australia, Korea or Turkey – and give impetus to those who see the BRICS as a conscious counterweight to G7 and its economic statements.
Certainly circumstances conspired to show the economic efforts of the G7. For the day following the conference the G7 finance ministers and central bankers met outside London at Aylesbury. In a statement by the UK Chancellor George Osborne the Chancellor targeted the vital economic questions of the day, “monetary activism, fiscal responsibility and structural reforms.” There certainly wasn’t consensus on these difficult issues but you coud see the rising image of the established powers working on these key economic issues as they have for decades before the emergence of the G20.
It would be a terrible waste, not to mention a destabilizing step were the G20 to lose momentum and to fail to serve as the common setting for the established and rising economic powers. Certainly the meeting of these groups at the margins of various G20 meetings can be seen to be helpful – indeed they already have – but the focus on separate coalitions is overall in my estimation unhealthy for global summitry. The G7 needs to be sensitive, more sensitive then they appear to be currently, over their gatherings and the absence of colleagues from the rest of the G20.
Let’s not throw away the first and best setting for collaborative efforts between established and rising states. Both form and substance are required.
Image Credit: G7 Finance Ministers May 11, 2013 Alyesbury – google.com
Now I think it was my colleague Dan Drezner over at Foreign Policy who spent some time – at the moment I am at a loss to remember the exact piece – defending the G20 against the dismissive attacks that members of the media are so fond of producing following a G20 meeting.
Well our friends – in this case Chris Giles and Robin Harding at FT – were hard at it at the G20 finance ministers’ and central bank governors’ meeting during the just recently concluded ‘Spring Meetings’.
Here is a gem of a comment from these two media souls:
Since 2010, it has turned from being a cohesive group of te world’s most important economies, ensuring they took collective decisions to solve difficult problems, into a body that spends hours negotiating the punctuation in a communiqué that adds little. … Countries still value the G20 greatly as a forum for dialogue, but complain that too many nations sit round the table and make unnecessary interventions, with little genuine discussion. It has turned into a talking shop without much bureaucracy or idea of its role. Outside a crisis, when nations want to solve problems and are willing to make sacrifices, the G20s relevance to people and companies is diminishing rapidly.
Mean spirited at least. But are the two right? Their judgment seems to me to ignore again, the “incremental” but necessary efforts of contemporary global summitry decision-making. The contrasting views expressed are bit like a “hare and tortoise” assessment of the G20. Media looks for the success of the hare and is continually disappointed; for some of us this is about the tortoise and we remain patient.
Look it would be great to have this grand bargain-style G20 – the kind these two media folk and other media types seem to crave but that is not what the G20 offers – nor indeed do many other global summitry settings. These summits are iterative and depend on the hard work of working groups, ministerial gatherings, sherpa meetings, secretariat work and the work of developed transgovernmental regulatory networks. The constant reference by media and experts to the actions of the G20 at the abyss in 2008 and 2009 hardly defines the manner in which the G20 acts. The current efforts on financial reform and SSBG – strong sustainable and balanced growth – are difficult policy developments. So a quick look at the boring communiqué is required. Some takeaways:
Worthy of headlines from the media – probably not. To the extent that these actions and reports don’t lead to key national commitments – meaning regulations and laws – then our media friends may be right. But progress in some or all of these many initiatives warrant some attention. And it is all this work that media folk are quick to just ignore.
I would also say that collective discussion – contentious though it may be – over Japan’s quantitative easing policies – is important. For the moment, it would appear that most of the G20 are prepared to accept that these Japanese actions are not steps in competitive devaluation, which might, if so described, lead to national responses that could harm many. We will have to see, however, the impacts on some of the large emerging market countries and then their responses.
Finally, on the economic growth front it is evident that the G20 believes that not enough is being done to counter global economic weakness. Clearly a key culprit in this is the EU and in particular the eurozone, though the UK figures in as well. This of course appears to be a continuing drama from the close to irresponsible actions in the eurozone. I have consistently argued that the G20 has little role here – but to urge a change of course which it appears now to be doing. But the G20 is constantly being dragged into this European drama.
The bottom line is that the media misses the work in progress – and announces failure. I think that is going too far at this point.
Image Credits: logo – www.pnswb.org and picture – www.nannewsngr.com
Kevin Rudd, the former Prime Minister and Foreign Minister of Australia has been on the “speechifying path” recently – I guess that’s what comes with others running the show. He has been in North America and in the granddaddy of foreign policy journals – Foreign Affairs – he has provided an interesting addition to the examination of US-China relations – “Beyond the Pivot: A New Road Map for US-Chinese Relations“. But my suggestion is that rather than a road map his piece is more detour as he describes contemporary global summitry and how summitry today can be used to achieve both progress and stability in this most important of great power relations.
Now I must say I am a fan of Rudd – far more knowledgeable about, and interested in, international relations and international policy than most contemporary leaders. He has written a serious piece on US-China relations. Shining a light on the new leaders and what this new leadership should examine probably would have been enough for me but in addition he has become a strong proponent for advancing the US-China relationship by a regular series of summits between the leaders – Xi Jinping and Barack Obama. While I am never one to ‘pooh pooh’ summit advocacy, I think our former Australian leader has missed the contemporary structure of summitry and the effective means to influence contemporary regional and international stability.
So let’s drop back for a moment and examine global summitry. Now at the global summitry project here at the Munk School of Global Affairs the working definition of global summitry is:
The variety of actors – international organizations, transgovernmental networks, states and select non-state entities – involved in the organization and execution of global politics and policy. Global summitry is concerned with the architecture, the institutions and most critically the political and policy behavior and outcomes in global governance.
This is not your old style summitry. It is not primarily about the “great man” theory of summit leadership – you know key leaders gazing intently across from each other determined to avoid conflict, or advance a new strategic direction – be they Chamberlain and Hitler or Kennedy and Khrushchev or a little closer to Rudd’s theme – Mao and Nixon .
I have pressed the case in this Rising BRICSAM blog and will again in the new ejournal Global Summitry we are about to launch at the Munk School of Global Affairs that to look at these leaders summits alone, referring here particularly to the apex of such summitry today – the informal and now annual G20 Leaders Summit – misses the better part of the structure of international governance. Today a significant structure underpins and motivates summitry. I call this view the ‘Iceberg Theory of Global Governance‘. In the case of the G20 there are: the periodic meetings of the finance and central bank governors; the sherpa meetings – the personal representative of the leaders – where the agendas are put together, the meetings of the Working Groups – and there are more than a few, the meetings and reports from the traditional IFIs including, the IMF, World Bank, others, the transgovernmental regulatory organizations like the FSB, BCBS – you get the picture – a large largely unstructured structured institutional network that feeds the periodic meetings and moves the agenda forward to completion in many circumstances.
I think Rudd is rather too enamored with the old frame of global summitry. Rudd urges that the United States choose the following course:
A third possibility would be to change gears in the relationship altogether by introducing a new framework for cooperation with China that recognizes the reality of the two countries’ strategic competition, defines key areas of shared interests to work and act on, and thereby begins to narrow the yawning trust gap between the two countries. Executed properly, such a strategy would do no harm, run few risks, and deliver real results. … A crucial element of such a policy would have to be the commitment to regular summitry.
As he points out there are many informal initiatives between the two great powers, “[b]ut none of these can have a major impact on the relationship, since in dealing with China, there is no substitute for direct leader-to-leader engagement.” As a consequence Rudd urges:
The United States therefore has a profound interest in engaging Xi personally, with a summit in each capital each year, together with other working group meetings of reasonable duration, held in conjunction with meetings of the G20, the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation, and the East Asia Summit.
But the governments also need authoritative point people working on behalf of the national leaders, managing the agenda between summits and handling issues as the need arises. In other words, the United States needs someone to play the role that Henry Kissinger did in the early 1970s, and so does China.
Now Rudd suggests that for an agenda the leaders need to then take one or more issues that are currently bogged down and “work together to bring them to successful conclusions” and he suggets tackling the stalled Doha Round issues, climate-change negotiations, nuclear nonproliferation or specific outstanding items on the G20 agenda. Rudd concludes:
Progress on any of these fronts would demonstrate that with sufficient political will all around, the existing global order can be made to work to everyone’s advantage, including China’s.
Now Rudd doesn’t end there but has suggestions for the regional dimension including obviously the island disputes and a protocol to address incidents at sea; and on the bilateral matters Rudd urges that military-to-military contact be upgraded and the talks should be insulated from the ups and downs of the US-China relationship.
Now there is value in urging bilateral summits. But let’s not turn these current global summit efforts into a G2 – there is much suspicion already around the high table of an implicit bilateral power consortium. An explicit effort of this sort could only undermine collective summitry efforts. So let’s avoid China and the US dealing as a central agenda with the global agenda of the G20 or the EAS Summit. And let’s build this new summit network off of let’s say the bilateral S&ED (Strategic and Economic Dialogue). Here groups tackle bilaterally through a vast network of national officials and ministries the bilateral issues that raise tensions and conflict in US-China relations.
I have heard that President Obama, following the G20 Toronto Summit, complained that he was meeting all the same leaders from one summit to another. I hope his officials pointed out that that was exactly the point. So for both Obama and Xi, the G20 or APEC or EAS remains part of global governance structure that is needed for collective discussions and decision-making – leave the bilateral to the bilaterals.
And as for the military-to-military discussions I suspect it still a vain hope to expect these meetings to be insulated from the competitiveness and rivalry that remains an element of the great power relationship. However, I would think the building of a more structured and regularized network dedicated to the S&ED – its tasking and summit meetings – could in the long run insulate the military discussions from the displays of political displeasure.
There is clearly a case for global summitry for the US-China relationship it is just not the model Rudd suggests.
Image Credit: www.heraldsun.com.au
So a quick trip to Moscow! Moscow you say – in December? Yes indeed. Russia took over hosting of the G20 Leaders Summit on December 1, 2012 and decided to declare a kind of G20 ‘Party’ of sorts. To initiate Russia’s leadership in organizing the agenda for the G20 and to then actually host the G20 Leaders Summit in September in St. Petersburg, the Russian President and Russian officials called for a Sherpa meeting for December 11th but added additionally a B20 meeting, a Think20 meeting and a civil society. There was much ‘hustle and bustle’ of the G20 sort.
And of course lot’s of thinking! This from all the gatherings including the G20 business, civil society groups now identified as the C20 and experts from the G20 think tanks. I couldn’t resist, therefore, picturing all that thinking. So there I am on the official Russian website – presumably thinking quite a bit.
Now the Russian President in his first remarks as G20 Host struck this very broad consultative cord – which G20 leader hasn’t – but here is President Putin:
Russia is ready for the broadest possible cooperation on reaching the G20’s objectives. In order to make the G20’s work more effective and transparent and increase trust in what it is doing, we will hold the broadest consultations with all interested parties, with countries not part of the G20, and also with international, expert and trade union organisations, and business community, civil society and youth representatives. Practice shows that global measures are only effective when they are based on the views and take into account the interests of different groups.
All right so broad consultation it is. But where are the Russians hoping to take the agenda for the G20 leaders summit? In his remarks President Putin identified Russia’s G20 priorities:
With these priorities, so the President claims, G20 policy progress will occur with further efforts on:
And the President identified two additional issues on the financial agenda:
In a column from Sergey Strokan a Russian journalist posted by Russia’s RT titled, “Uphill battle: Russia at the helm of G20“, Strokan reports:
The key issue Russia’s G20 presidency needs to address is the restoration of investor confidence, adds Russia’s Finance Minister Anton Siluanov. In a situation, when economic growth in the locomotives of the world economy, including China, is still slowing down and the southern countries of the EU are in recession, global investor confidence is crucial for meeting the main global challenge of jump-starting economic growth, says Mr. Siluanov.
It appears the Russian Presidency hopes to hold – beyond the usual Sherpa and Finance Ministers and Central Bankers gatherings, a meeting of Finance and Labor Ministers as well as a meeting of Energy Ministers.
What can we make then of all of this? First, as usual there is far too much G20-speak; for the ordinary citizen from the G20 and beyond, this appears like a lot of ‘gobble y-guck’. It is hardly transparent to them. Even to the G20-types there is much vagueness and a lack of clarity over the specific policy objectives – probably to satisfy large and disparate interests in the G20. Then there appears to remain a conundrum at the heart of G20 policy – a key clash by G20 countries that appeared at the Toronto Summit – and remains to this day. That is which lever should G20 countries pull – the austerity and fiscal consolidation lever, or the stimulus lever. Now it is likely that the answer lies in timing and reflected in the specific conditions of various country budgets, job creation, debt accumulation and most critically economic growth. But the fiction remains of an overarching G20 policy agenda.
It would also appear that Russia can’t help but poke at the traditional economies with calls for monetary reform. What is urgently needed is a more serious discussion over currency manipulation whether China’s or the United States or now with a new Prime Minister in Japan. This is a tough issue but currency reform starts here.
And then there is hollowness of the consultation process. While it is valuable to encourage the various interests – business, think tanks, youth and labor – it lies rather uncomfortably with a government that still retains legislation that requires foreign-funded NGOs to declare themselves as “foreign agents”. It is dispiriting to witness this Janus-like behavior and the willingness of NGOs largely to ignore, this oppressive domestic behavior in the face of what appears a seat at the table – if a small one and far from the core table.
So the picture remains clouded but let’s see if the Russian presidency takes it upon itself to order transparency and accountability in the G20 agenda and policy process. There is time yet.
Image Credit: Official Russian Website of the G20.
As I was catching up on my global governance reading – yes, this is what I do at the beach – I came across a study by by two Brookings scholars – Homi Kharas and Domenico Lombardi on the G20 Leaders Summit. Homi Kharas is a senior fellow and the deputy director for the Global Economy and Development Program at Brookings and Domenico Lombardi is a senior fellow and in the same Brookings program. The piece “The Group of Twenty: Origins, Prospects Challenges for Global Governance” is worth reading and provides excellent detail on the work of previous G20 ministerials and the the more current G20 leader summits. The study appears to have emerged in August though it also seems to have been written prior to the Los Cabos G20 Leaders Summit. No matter.
What remains interesting are the conclusions the two authors draw on this relatively new “high table” of global governance The fact is experts continue to struggle to comprehend fully the influence of this new global summitry institution and to determine moreover its effectiveness. It would seem that the two authors see the G20 as more “effective” than the predecessor G8 but they continue to dwell on its shortcomings especially with respect to representation and legitimacy. I would also suggest that the authors still struggle to understand where the G20 has most effectively moved the yardsticks of global governance.
So how do they see this new global summitry “beast”:
As we look back, however, there is a sense that, although the G-20 was quite effective as a crisis manager, its effectiveness as an enduring facilitating framework for international cooperation has proved mixed at best. … The G-20 does not operate on the basis of setting specific goals, financial commitments or timelines in the same fashion as the G-8. That is because it has organized itself as a process-oriented forum [emphasis added] for first helping to build a consensus and then providing the required political momentum to ensure implementation. … In fact, those decisions are being made through an engagement with other forums and treaty-based institutions where there are established governance procedures for representation and voice. … For the time being, the G-20 appears to be the “best available option” for global economic governance. It is not designed to achieve institutional legitimacy per se, and thus it has chosen to work with other bodies that have a more inclusive and universal representation. It is not an implementing body, but it encourages others to rise to the challenge of addressing the issues that its agenda advances. … Leaders who now participate in it are finding ways to demonstrate to their own electorates that they are making a difference in the conduct of global affairs through the stance they take at its summit meetings. This link between global and domestic dialogues, and the building of popular support to address global challenges, may yet become the greatest value that the G-20 adds.
I see their first point as significant. Most observers would argue that no matter what else one says about the G20, the early coordinated success of leaders’ efforts to avoid a complete global financial meltdown marks a highpoint in the effectiveness of the organization.
So the G20 is an effective crisis manager. But it may not be true at all. While the G20 effectively steered the global economy away from the abyss, thereafter it has proven itself to be a rather feeble crisis manager. In fact the insistent intrusion of the eurozone crisis has significantly distracted and sapped the Leaders Summit. Ambiguity surrounding its role in the crisis and the German determination to enforce austerity has motivated the eurozone and then the G20 to “kick the can down the road” as many experts have commented on. G20 Leaders have found themselves unable to “move the yardsticks” on this crisis but – and more importantly – the Leaders have found themselves unable to redirect the agenda firmly toward to big item crisis prevention matters. Both the French and Mexican agendas have largely been jettisoned. So the G20 is has foundered between the Scylla of crisis management and the Charybdis of crisis prevention. And it appears that is where we sit today.
As for the debate over institutionalization. Well as I have pointed out in the past – I am not attracted to to the formal treaty-based structural forms of global governance. And even if I was – it ain’t going to happen. But for experts and officials closer in to the reality of the Bretton Woods and UN system of institutions, the allure is just too great. And that is certainly where the authors are, looking for integration with a reformed IMF, etc., etc. But even though irresistibly drawn to formal institutions they go part way by pointing to the engagement with these formal treaty bound institutions. But in fact the tasking by the G20 with the Bretton Woods institutions such as the IMF and the transgovernmental regulatory networks – FSB, IOSCO, BCBS, etc., is not only engagement but creation of a new structural architecture of formal and informal institutions. It is all of one piece gents as I’ve argued in the “Iceberg Theory” of global governance.
Messy but effective possibly – as long as the G20 shifts from crisis to prevention. And on that score we are not there yet. So put your measuring instruments aside.
Image Credit: TrendingAddict.com – Washington G20 Leaders Summit 2008
There continues to be a raging debate – all right so in global governance and global summitry there is hardly likely to be a raging anything – but there continues to be a serious difference of opinion among officials and experts over the success of the G20 Leaders Summit. Some have argued that the G20 proved effective, at least in the immediate context of the financial crisis in 2008 – especially after the turbulence from the Lehman Brothers’s bankruptcy. Others, while admitting the immediate success have suggested that as this critical crisis receded, so did the effectiveness of the G20. Thus, the G20 Leaders has become unwilling to accept the economic and financial coordination identified by various international organizations and regulatory bodies.
Well I suspect there is no immediate way to resolve the debate – to determine definitively – the overarching success or failure – the final measure of effectiveness for global governance – of the G20 Leaders Summit.
But I think there is a possibility of some assessment in the near future. The possible metric that we may use to gauge the G20 Leaders capability to coordinate action and to avoid, or at least ameliorate a possible crisis comes in the area of food prices. The assessment available is, or will be, the G20 action(s)/or not, to avoid a recurrence of food price spikes that led in 2008 to riots in a number of developing countries.
Since that time global summitry has been busy addressing – at least rhetorically – the question of food price volatility. Former President Sarkozy was particularly engaged in food security though he leaned toward the influence of derivatives on commodity prices as much or more of a direct factor on food supply and demand.
First at the Seoul Summit the G20 Leaders identified a food security pillar in the Seoul Consensus. Then the ministers of Agriculture gathered in June 2011 in Paris and produced an “Action Plan on Food Price Volatility and Agriculture”. And even more recently at the Los Cabos Summit the agriculture vice-ministers annexed a Report (Report May 18, 2012) to the Los Cabos Declaration (see paragraphs 55 through 62) describing the progress made on previous food security commitments.
Now comes the drought in North America that poses an immediate threat to the supply of commodities and the real prospect of significant prices increases. Apparently it would seem that Mexican, French and US officials are urging their colleagues to hold a conference call in the week of August 27th to discuss the possibility of calling a meeting of the Rapid Response Forum (RRF). The RRF is a creature of AMIS or the Agricultural Market Information System (AMIS) that was launched in September 2011. The main objective of AMIS is to encourage major players on agri-food markets to share data and enhance information systems. That would seem more than reasonable but a number of nations particularly China have been unwilling to do so and private agri-business – major players in the food distribution chain – are reluctant to play as well.
Now the RRF is a body designed to “promote early discussion among decision-level officials about abnormal international market conditions.” What could this body discuss? Well it might well encourage producing states to avoid placing food export bans on key commodities. It was the Russian embargo that exacerbated prices in the already volatile commodity markets in 2008. And major producers – the US for instance that uses approximately 40 percent of the corn crop to make biofuels – could consider lifting the mandates on bio-fuel production.
Well you’ll not be surprised that a number of experts have already “pooh poohed” the likelihood of action by G20 countries. As trade expert Simon Evenett was quoted as saying:
Beyond words, expect little from the G20 on rising food prices. … With a string of broken promises on protectionism, no serious enforcement, monitoring well after the horse has bolted, and a tendency to pull their punches, any G20 promises on food trade won’t be taken seriously – by the G20 themselves or by anyone else.
Well here is a useful test of the G20s capacity to coordinate action in the face of what appears to be a real prospect of price increase in such critical commodities as corn, wheat and soybeans.
Image Credit: OMAFRA report authored by John Chippa July 13, 2012
The ASEAN meetings last week – and especially the debate – or non-debate as it turned out over territorial challenges in the South China Sea, raised again the question of the US-China relations. Secretary Clinton expressed publicly again the US position that the territorial disputes among ASEAN members and China needed to be addressed in a “multilateral setting” while China was equally firm that the matter should not even be on the agenda for the ASEAN Ministerial. Though discussed openly by various ASEAN members, the ASEAN ministers were not able to issue a joint communique at the conclusion of the meeting – the first time in 45 years that such a failure had occurred.
The US-China relationship is the key to stability or instability in the region – and indeed beyond. As I was thinking about this key bilateral relationship I eyed – and was impressed with – an analysis of China’s strategic concerns in the NYT by Minghao Zhao on July 12 (“The Predicaments of Chinese Power”). Aside from the evident quality of the article, I was struck by the fact that Minghao Zhao is a research fellow at the China Center for Contemporary World Studies apparently a think-tank of the International Department of the Central Committee of the CPC. So the NYT is not a usual place for a researcher of his sort to place an op-ed piece. I will get to this article and the implications for China’s strategic policy but I thought I’d start with the US position.
Now the Obama Administration has signaled – since at least the Honolulu APEC Leaders Summit last year – that with the winding down of US efforts first in Iraq and now Afghanistan – that the United States was back in Asia. The United States was rebalancing (various terms have been used – the most notable “pivot”) its strategic efforts from the Middle East to Asia. As an example of this rhetorical shift, assess these words from President Obama before the Australian Parliament on November 17, 2011:
For the United States, this reflects a broader shift. After a decade in which we fought two wars that cost us dearly, in blood and treasure, the United States is turning our attention to the vast potential of the Asia Pacific region. In just a few weeks, after nearly nine years, the last American troops will leave Iraq and our war there will be over. In Afghanistan, we’ve begun a transition — a responsible transition — so Afghans can take responsibility for their future and so coalition forces can begin to draw down. And with partners like Australia, we’ve struck major blows against al Qaeda and put that terrorist organization on the path to defeat, including delivering justice to Osama bin Laden.
This rebalancing has become know as America’s Asian or Pacific “pivot” – though it is interesting that in the various speeches and press conferences that Obama gave at the time around November 2011 he never referenced the term “pivot”. But the media has picked it up from others including Secretary of State Hillary Clinton who used it in her “America’s Pacific Century” article in November 2011. At the conclusion she wrote:
This kind of pivot is not easy, but we have paved the way for it over the past two-and–a-half years, and we are committed to seeing it through as among the most important diplomatic efforts of our time.
More recently Robert Merry, the editor of the well-known National Interest, writing a book review for the New York Times’s David Sanger’s newest book Confront and Conceal (in last week’s, July 15, 2012) New York Times “Book Review” Section provided a cogent assessment of Sanger’s – and I suspect his own – “temperature-taking” of the US-China relationship:
With regard to China, Sanger sees a possible “Thucydides trap” (Sanger earlier made clear that he is taking the term from Graham Allison the former Dean of the Kennedy School) – a reference to the the Greek historian’s narrative of the clash born of Sparta’s fear of Athens’s growing military might. “We are seeing similar themes today,” he writes, adding that what some perceive as mounting nationalistic fervor in China could lead Beijing to underestimate the American response to Chinese adventures in the South China Sea.
So let’s focus briefly on the “Thucydides trap” and the “pivot” in US strategic policy. As to the Thucydides Trap, Sanger has the best assessment. In his NYT January 22, 2011 piece “Superpower and Upstart: Sometimes It Ends Well” this what Sanger wrote:
Or ask Thucydides the Athenian historian whose tome on the Peloponnesian War has ruined many a college freshman’s weekend. The line they had to remember for the test was his conclusion: “What made war inevitable was the growth of Athenian power and the fear which this caused in Sparta.” … Both Mr Hu and President Obama seemed desperate to avoid what Graham Allison of Harvard University has labeled “the Thucydides Trap” – that deadly combination of calculation and emotion that, over the years, can turn healthy rivalry into antagonism or worse.
The so-called pivot has raised concerns that in fact the US actions may feed the Thucydides trap. Part of the issue is of course that in the face of a growing fiscal crisis with budgetary cuts likely to be enacted after the election – no matter who wins – that this presentation of a US pivot to Asia is overreach. While Chinese behavior might be constrained and even constructive in the near future, this would only be likely if Chinese leaders were persuaded that the US had a coherent Asia strategy that is viewed as credible and widely accepted. That is hardly yet the case. Indeed many in China have commented on what appears the growing crisis in the US and the decline in the US. This rather pessimistic view of US leadership and the pivot in policy leads the perception that the Obama administration is long on rhetoric but no strategic policy is likely to be forthcoming. In fact the rhetoric has fed the view by many in China that US policy remains committed to dominance and a continuing effort to pospone the day of China’s successful rise. As Ken Lieberthal in his insightful piece in Foreign Policy argued, the pivot impacted in the following way:
In sum, the president’s Asia-wide strategy and some of the rhetoric accompanying it played directly into the perception of many Chinese that all American actions are a conspiracy to hold down or actually disrupt China’s rise.
If, and it is a big if still, were China’s leaders to conclude that US policy in Asia was a direct challenge to China’s rise and designed only to contain China, then it does seem to set up that poisonous brew that can indeed turn “healthy rivalry” into growing antagonism and even confrontation in Asia. This would be very bad.
So where is Chinese leadership on its relationship with the United States? I’ll be back with that shortly.
Image Credit: circleofblue.org – President Hu and President Obama 2011