Category Archives: Global Governance G20/G7

So Many Summits!

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This weekend we open on a sustained set of Summits beginning with the G7 hosted by the UK in Carbis Bay.  Along with various states easing restrictions and beginning to open after months of Covid lockdown, we now have the in-person opening of this summit season. The G7 will be followed by a NATO gathering, then an EU-US summit and then a sort of ‘back to the future’ classic ‘cold war’ summit, this between US President Biden and Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Our colleague, Stewart Patrick at CFR identified 10 summits just before the start of this calendar year. His list included:

  • The NATO Summit
  • US-EU Summit
  • Summit for Democracy
  • UN Convention on biological diversity COP15, Kunming China
  • G7 Summit
  • WTO Ministerial Conference
  • NPT Review Conference
  • The Opening of the General Assembly of the UN
  • G20 Summit
  • UNFCCC COP26 Glasgow

Now there are even some others as well that are not on the list and have occurred already. Before this G7 we saw the newly elected US President hold a Quadrilateral Security Dialogue or Quad Summit, on March 12th, the first with leaders from India, Australia, Japan and the United States. And in April the President organized  a Leaders Summit on Climate. Over 40 leaders attended virtually including notably President Xi Jinping of China. As the State Department noted, the Climate Summit was intended “to rally the world in tackling the climate crisis and meeting the demands of science.” It was also seen as a precursor to the COP26 Glasgow meeting scheduled to be held from November 1st to 12th and right after the G20 Summit.

It is tough to keep track of all the summits planned, or already concluded. But here are some additional summits planned for this calendar year.

  • APEC
  • East Asian Summit
  • ASEAN Summit

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Measuring American Foreign Policy for ‘Competition without Catastrophe’: The Alaska US-China Summit

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With President Biden’s first official news conference last Thursday March 25th, the news conference brought the curtain down on the first meeting of top foreign policy officials from the United States and China. The public side of the Summit was a rather fiery uncooperative back and forth between the leading government officials from both China and the United States. We are led to understand, however, that the private meetings that went on into the next day were more productive. And with both encounters past, the shape of the competition between China and the United States began to take some public shape.

For some time now we have been made aware that a more confrontational  approach in US-China relations was likely. As David Sanger describes in a recent NYT article, the ‘Washington beltway’ view has crystallized around a far more competitive foreign policy with China. And the Biden foreign policy has reflected, seemingly, this rare political consensus:

For a president barely 10 weeks into office, casting the United States as confronting a global struggle with the Chinese model has some clear political benefits. One of the few issues that unites Democrats and Republicans is the need to compete head-on with Beijing.

William Galston at Brookings reviewing American public opinion toward China underscores how American public opinion has turned against China particularly after the Trump years:

All things considered, the Biden administration will enjoy substantial public support if it places competition with China at the center of its foreign policy, and it will pay little price for the blunter rhetoric its senior officials employed during the recent meetings in Alaska with their Chinese counterparts. On the other hand, most Americans have not focused on the military dimensions of this emerging relationship and are not prepared for a possible conflict over Taiwan.

Advisors to Joe Biden during the election period, and many of these same folk now as officials for President Biden, are describing and clarifying US policy toward China that they had previously written about pre-election. The dominant position as articulated by the senior policy folk such as Jake Sullivan, now National Security Advisor to the President and Kurt Campbell now the ‘Asia Tsar’ is strategic competition, or slightly more poetically, ‘competition without catastrophe’ the title of their consequential 2019 FA article. Continue reading →

Which Countries are Middle Powers – And Why are They Important to the Global Order? Part 2

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The growing geopolitical tensions in the international system, in particular  between the United States and China and also with Russia, have led to a chorus of voices urging on middle powers to greater efforts in maintaining  and even strengthening a rules-based order. Roland Paris in a major Chatham House Brief titled: “Can Middle Powers Save the Liberal World Order?” pointed at various urgent calls from international experts:

Gideon Rachman, a Financial Times columnist, has proposed a ‘middle-powers alliance’ to ‘preserve a world based around rules and rights, rather than power and force’. Two eminent American foreign-policy experts, Ivo Daalder and James Lindsay, have also called on US allies to ‘leverage their collective economic and military might to save the liberal world order’.

The urgency and calls for middle power action rose perceptively, of course, with ‘America First’  from the Trump Presidency and from the failure of the leading powers – the United States and China – to organize global governance efforts to tackle the global pandemic. Indeed the global pandemic has seemingly ‘lit a fire’ under experts and officials issuing a rising chorus of calls for greater middle power action in the face of leading power failure. An  evident instance is a recent article from  Foreign Affairs from our colleague Bruce Jones from Brookings titled:“Can middle powers lead the world out of the pandemic? Because the United States and China have shown that they can’t”.

In Part 1 of this Post series we attempted to identify which states experts were referring to when they issued the call for middle power action. We ended up with a variety of categories. There were the traditional states, Canada, Australia and maybe South Korea and Singapore. There were states that fell within the top 20 economic powers  – way too many states but lots of familiar powers. And then there were all those states , identified by Jeffrey Robertson in his insightful article: “Middle-power definitions: confusion reigns supreme” in the Australian Journal of International Affairs (2017. 71(4): 355-370, with an interest in and “capacity (material resources, diplomatic influence, creativity, etc.)resources, diplomatic influence, creativity, etc.) to work proactively in concert with similar states to contribute to the development and strengthening of institutions for the governance of the global commons.” And in fact there seemed to be a bit of a marriage between middle powers and multilateralism in the newly created “Alliance for Multilateralism” created by the foreign ministers of France and Germany that umbrellaed at its creation some 40 states.

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Which Countries are Middle Powers – And Why are They Important to the Global Order? Part 1

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I had a debate very recently with my China-West Dialogue (CWD) colleague, Colin Bradford. In a memo we were working on for CWD, he described the two major trade agreements, CPTPP and RCEP. He then added:

 

These two trade agreements show that middle powers are able to take multilateral actions on their own that make an impact.(*)  

But which countries do we see achieving that? And behind that, why have analysts and policy makers become significantly more interested these middle powers in the Trump era recently past?

Counting the Middle Powers

The debate begins with the ‘Who’. Though Colin and I were generally agreed on the content of the article, we went around in circles over which countries we could, and should, identify as middle powers. Now, I was more than ready to forgive Colin his vague characterization of middle powers and then broad inclusion of the same – after all he is an economist – but soon thereafter I stumbled over a rather recent article by Bruce Jones, also of Brookings. and a well known international relations analyst. The article found in FA and titled, “Can Middle Powers Lead the World Out of the Pandemic? Because the United States and China Have Shown They Can’t” tackled the question of the current middle power membership. Given the subject matter of the article, Bruce was called upon to identify in some manner, the states that captured the current set of middle powers:

The concept of “middle powers” is imprecise and somewhat inchoate, but it generally refers to countries that are among the top 20 or so economies in the world, lack large-scale military power (or choose not to play a leading role in defense), and are energetic in diplomatic or multilateral affairs. These countries were seeking to fill part of the international leadership void even before the crisis, particularly when it came to buttressing the rickety multilateral system.

So, there we were. I had no difficulty acknowledging that the term was “imprecise and inchoate” but as for the rest of the features identified by Bruce, well, not so sure. Increasingly, I came to suspect that this was likely to be one of those classic international relations definitions – unclear and contested.

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The Link Between Domestic Politics and Global Governance

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Colin Bradford is the Guest Blogger for this Post. He is a senior non-resident fellow at Brookings in Washington. He is a also a Principal of the Vision20 and a Co-Chair of the China-West Dialogue all with Yves Tiberghien, Professor of Political Science, University of British Columbia and Alan S Alexandroff Director the Global Summitry Project of Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy, University of Toronto and the Blog Master here at RisingBRICSAM

The underlying political driver of the current tensions in the global order is the actual or potential failure of economies to deliver social outcomes that are politically sustainable.  This is not just a phenomenon that brought about Brexit and Boris Johnson in the UK or Trump in the US – now apparently unelected.  This has been, and is, the drama of developing economies for decades. The failure to deliver social outcomes that are politically sustainable is  the source of social unrest now in Eastern Europe, the fear of the Communist Party of China, and the discontent of Europeans with the strictures of the EU.  It is global and deep seated; sweeping and systemic.

Populist nationalism is on the rise and authoritarianism is increasing as a result. The easy road for politicians to take today is to appeal to national strength and rally their publics around the flag.  The hard road to take is seize on this moment of hyper-interconnectivity revealed by the COVID 19 crisis and realize that strong multilateral cooperation and coordination is essential for global health and economic recovery in the short run and systemic transformation in the medium and long run.

The urgent necessity is for governments, societies and firms to realize that there is no going back to normal, that systemic crises require systemic change and that social priorities and people-centered policies are vital to restoring confidence in markets and governance.

But to systemically transform the social order reinforcement, resonance and support from the global system of international institutions is the new global governance priority.  Multilateralism needs to be revived to create innovative responses to these new domestic social priorities.  Strengthening the WHO, the ILO, the OECD and the multilateral regional development banks is necessary so that they can become the drivers of the international system as front-line innovators, taking on the dominant norm setting roles that the IMF, World Bank and WTO assumed during the Bretton Woods era.

The fact that social priorities are primordial domestic priorities does not mean the international institutions have no role to play.  To the contrary, key roles of international institutions are essential now through peer reviews, sharing best practice, and widening the array of policy options for national governments to engage in selective borrowing for internal application based on national criteria, culture and practice.   The funding international institutions provide provokes dialogues with governments and societies about priorities and challenges which enable countries to take advantage of global knowledge frontiers embodied in the experience of international institutions. Returning to knowledge-based policy making in national practice, which is sorely needed now, can be facilitated by these interactions between global institutions and national governments.

New forms of multilateralism and a new global order need to support transformation in the social order. This force field also operates in reverse.  Social transformation would strengthen societies as a whole such that the new social order would support the global order by: reducing ‘my-country-first’ nationalism, unilateralism, and dampen geopolitical tensions. The social order and the global order would be in constructive symbiosis instead, as currently, in rather destructive dynamics of a bipolar competitive era.

The new nexus between economics, society and the global order would create positive synergies toward better futures and greater systemic sustainability.

Image Credit: TechCrunch

What Comes Next for the Global Order?

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Much hurried prediction, or more correctly, should I say speculation has been expressed by IR experts over the  impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on the current global order. One of IR’s leading lights, Richard Haass, President of CFR has been ‘front and center’  in painting a post Covid global order. It’s not very pretty, nor much of an order. In an April article in Foreign Affairs  he describes the future global order in quite ‘downbeat’ terms:

Yet the world that will emerge from the crisis will be recognizable. Waning American leadership, faltering global cooperation, great-power discord: all of these characterized the international environment before the appearance of COVID-19, and the pandemic has brought them into sharper-than-ever relief. They are likely to be even more prominent features of the world that follows.

He suggest further that even were Biden to be elected the effort to  bring a more traditional global governance system would be stymied:

Even if a foreign policy “traditionalist” such as former Vice President Joseph Biden wins the November presidential election, resistance from Congress and the public will prevent the full-scale return of an expansive U.S. role in the world. And no other country, not China or anyone else, has both the desire and the ability to fill the void the United States has created.

Given this rather grim near future I was caught by the Foreign Policy article by Oona Hathaway and her Yale Law School colleague, Scott Shapiro:

The crisis offers the opportunity to transform the global order from one dominated by a single state, or a small number of them, to a more equal system of global governance. It’s time to stop waiting for a hegemon to come to the rescue and instead try to address more of our global problems through independently organized global clubs.

So, no more hegemon – no US; no China. Instead moving forward and in a position to tackle global governance challenges will be ‘global clubs’.  The characteristics of such club membership – that is excluding members who fail to adhere to the agreed rules – make such clubs reasonable, in fact highly useful  where great power leadership has receded. As the authors suggest:

The idea of decentralizing global governance to shifting alliances of like-minded nations is not entirely new. Much of international law already operates on precisely this principle of shared interests and decentralized enforcement. But unmooring global governance from reliance on a hegemonic actor, and from the global institutions we’ve known since the end of World War II, could become reality in part because of the conditions created by the pandemic.

As they conclude: 

The club rules are enforced not by a hegemon but by members directly by denying the benefits of membership to bad actors. One advantage of such decentralized governance is that any state can start a club. It doesn’t take a hegemon; it just takes a good idea.

These global clubs certainly bring a shift in global governance leadership and policymaking. Their global club thinking may be just the ‘tonic’ needed for what we’ve identified – that is the Vision20 principals, Colin Bradford, Yves Tiberghien and myself – as ‘effective multilateralism. We have described effective multilateralism, at least with  respect to the G20 leaders as “the elective, targeted, and purposeful actions with varied coalitions. We believe encouraging effective multilateralism is a vital tool in meeting the challenges the G20 and the international system face.” 

What Hathaway and Shapiro have offered possibly is a logic for organizing such coalitions. While we have witnessed various multilateralism initiatives, note the ‘Alliance for Multilateralism‘ offered up initially by the foreign ministers of France and Germany. What we haven’t seen is action.

Now is the time.

Image Credit: picture-alliance/AP/photo/T. Camus

Trying to Understand Xi’s China: Kerry Brown in Episode 28: ‘Shaking the Global Order: Foreign Policy in the Age of Trump.

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Most international relations specialists would concur, the most consequential relationship, now, and for the foreseeable future, in the Global Order is that between China and the West. Yes, I do not say the U.S. Instead it is the much vaguer term, the West. That does not mean that many do not see this as primarily a U.S.-China rivalry. But for others this not a retelling of the Cold War.

For instance the Vision 20 principals: Colin Bradford, Brookings, Yves Tiberghien, University of British Columbia and myself, here at the Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy, University of Toronto recently  launched the CWD Project, or the China and the West Dialogue Project.

Our first collective effort, assisted mightily by Professor Kevin Gallagher, Director, Global Development Policy Center, Boston University, is to hold a first preliminary workshop on March 20th at Boston University. That first preliminary workshop is designed to examine the relationship the changing Global Order. We see this an inquiry into the complex set of relationships with Europe, North America, China and other actors in Asia. A number of former officials, China experts and international relations experts will gather to examine the current relationships and the way forward.

Among the China experts we are so very pleased to welcome to the CWD is Professor Kerry Brown. His insights into China policy making and politics are well known. I was therefore pleased to welcome him here to the Global Summitry’s podcast series to talk about China’s political  leaders and the policies to the West. Come listen to Episode 28 in the series, ‘Shaking the Global Order: Foreign Policy in the Age of Trump’.

Kerry has served in both the public and the academic sectors. From 1998 to 2005, he worked at the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office, as First Secretary at the British Embassy in Beijing, and then as Head of the Indonesia, Philippine and East Timor Section. Kerry Brown is currently Professor of Chinese Studies and Director of the Lau China Institute, Kings College London. Before that 2012-2015 Kerry was Professor of Chinese Politics and Director of the China Studies Centre at the University of Sydney, Australia.

Kerry has written a great deal about Chinese politics and its foreign policy. Recent works include: “China’s World: What does China want?”; “China’s Dream: The culture of Chinese Communism and the secret sources of its power”; and “The world according to Xi: Everything you need to know about the new China”.

 

 

Australia Burning – The Bush Fires and the Politics of Climate Change in Australia

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‘Australia Burning’ is a podcast with my colleague Steven Slaughter from Deakin University in Melbourne Australia.

The recent horrific Australian bush fires appear be largely out – at least for the moment. These bush fires reflect both a sad tale of land burned, and enormous loss of unique wildlife. It also appears to reveal a federal government policy of the current Australian government resistant to dramatic change and a willingness to combat the growing threat of climate change.

As quoted in Damien Cave’s recent piece in the NYTimes (February 15, 2020), Lynette Wallworth, an Australian filmmaker, told a crowd of international executives and politicians in Davos, Switzerland, last month. “What was feared and what was warned is no longer in our future, a topic for debate — it is here.” And Cave added: “Politics have been a focal point — one of frustration for most Australians. The conservative government is still playing down the role of climate change, despite polls showing public anger hitting feverish levels. And yet what’s emerging alongside public protest may prove more potent.”

In the face of these tragic bush fires I sat down with my podcast guest, Steven Slaughter to discuss the fires but more the politics of climate change in Australia. Steven is an associate professor of international relations at Deakin University in Melbourne Australia. He has broad research interests that go beyond international relations to include: international political theory, political and democratic theory and global political economy. He is currently actively working on projects relating to the application of republican thought to contemporary global governance, and the role that the G20 plays with respect to questions of authority, legitimacy and accountability in global governance.

This podcast is Episode 18 of the ‘Now’ series, ‘Australia Burning‘. Come join us as we discuss the politics of climate change in Australia.

Between Chaos and Leadership – The Instance of the G7 Gathering in Biarritz, France

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As leaders now exit from the G7 meeting in Biarritz France, it is worth reflecting on the state of the Liberal Order. Or, maybe more appropriately, and at least for the moment, its state of ‘Disorder’.

It has been a chaotic preceding week, even by Donald Trump standards, I think. Trump sharply raised his attack on various allies –  most particularly last week, Denmark. Attacks on allies have become rather routine, though exceedingly troubling. But this particular episode was to see the least – startling. In this case Trump suggested that the United Sates might want to purchase Greenland. When President Trump was met by a strong statement of rejection by Denmark’s Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen, that called the President’s suggestion, “absurd”, the President called her statement ‘nasty’ and then turned around and postponed a state visit to one of America’s closest and most faithful allies. It led my colleague Thomas Wright of Brookings to conclude in an article in The Atlantic :

The cancellation of Trump’s visit to Denmark is part of a disturbing pattern. Trump regularly beats up on and abuses America’s closest democratic allies while being sycophantic to autocrats.

Then there was the continuing trade war with China. Just before Trump was to leave for Europe and the G7, China announced that it was prepared to  raise tariffs on $US75 billion worth of American-made goods, including crude oil, cars and farm products, if Mr. Trump was to carry through with plans to tax an additional $300 billion worth of imports from China. In an angry tweet  in response, President Trump declared: “Our great American companies are hereby ordered to immediately start looking for an alternative to China, including bringing our companies HOME and making your products in the USA.” Ordered! Yikes! After that Trump was ‘all over the map’ defending past statements such as ordering American companies to leave, then regretting the ratcheting up of tariffs only to have his officials suggest that he only wished he could raise the tariffs even higher. It could make one’s head spin.

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