The Hokkaido Summit, as I imagine and sense other G7/8 annual summits – now 34 and counting – have been, was an intensive, word-strewn affair. Take a look at the University of Toronto’s G8 Research Group website. The site is filled with Hokkaido’s outpouring of Reports and Statements by G7/8 officials. Even the evaluation of the Summit, entitled, “A Summit of Substantial Success: The Performance of the 2008 G8“, by G8 Research Group leader, Professor John Kirton of the University of Toronto comes to some 45 pages and that doesn’t include appendices that adds another 45 pages. John is taken with Japanese summitry and what he sees as consistent success in leading the summit, which it has done 5 Continue reading
Category Archives: Global Governance for G20/G8
Keeping the League Alive
The Russian and Chinese vetoes of the US-sponsored sanctions resolution on Friday July 11th (along with South Africa’s negative vote) has done much to keep the question of a ‘league of democracy’ alive in global governance circles. Thomas Carothers of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace (CEIP) has written recently a useful examination of the League of Democracies concept in the most recent issue of Foreign Policy. His article entitled, “A League of Their Own,” reviews the origins, history and even the influence of the concept of the League of Democracies.
Born in the academic byways, the concept discussed by John Ikenberry and Dean Anne-Marie Slaughter in their Continue reading
The Oriental Pearl TV Tower
There is no more dramatic symbol of China’s ‘peaceful rise’ than the Oriental Pearl TV Tower in Pudong Park in Lujiazui Shanghai. Standing on Waitan (the Bund), the quay along the Huang Po River that divides Pudong from Puxi, a few nights ago took me back to my last trip to Shanghai 19 years ago. Standing there those years earlier, no Tower, no city in Pudong, no lights – nothing. Today the gleaming height of the Tower (at least until 10 pm) along with the gleaming surrounding towers startle you at the overwhelming Pudong presence.
So from nothing to an overwhelming presence. The Tower symbolizes China’s appearance on the world stage. It Continue reading
Two to Tango
In a recent blog post, “To Enlarge; or not to Enlarge – That is a Question“, I looked at current G7/8 members, their views of G7/8 enlargement and the Heiligendamm process.
The G7/8 discussion begins with two questions: Does the G8 constitute a Great power club with adequate authority and influence to act as a significant institution of global management? If not what membership and enlargement does the G8 need to address the legitimacy/effectiveness dimensions of this international organization?
The second question is does the Heiligendamm Process – this structured dialogue – provide an enlargement path for Continue reading
G8 Outreach and the Absence of Hothouse International Institutions
Alan’s post on Monday focused on the views of G8 members about the possibility of expanding their membership. This post was drafted before Alan’s and focuses instead on the G-8’s outreach efforts.
I’ve described in previous posts the different bases for constructing international groupings and how the BRIC and IBSA originated but have not expanded so far.
There is still another way to construct an international grouping, and that is through the workings of external actors. Institutions can be constructed in an artificial hothouse environment, at the instigation of others. The Organisation for European Economic Co-operation (OEEC) came into being in April 1948 and emerged from Secretary of State Marshall’s desire to have a coordinated vision for postwar reconstruction and an integrated request for aid. Similarly, Continue reading
To Enlarge; or not to Enlarge – That is a Question
So is the challenge to legitimacy and the inability of the G7/8 today to solve key global problems – global finance, and climate change but two key problems – leading the Great powers to welcome enlargement? No. That’s not it exactly. The current enlargement plans – if that is what the HP process is (more on that in a moment) – appears to have been built on earlier enlargement efforts of the G7/8. In fact the G7/8 as great power organization, is itself a product of enlargement, since its initiation in 1975 was 5 and today is somewhat imperfectly the G8.
But enlargement models have periodically arisen. Thus, much praise has accompanied the emergence – at the Finance ministerial level – of the G20 created after the Asian financial crisis. In this forum China, Brazil, Mexico, South Africa Continue reading
More than you ever wanted to know!
For information on the G7/8 there is one must stop. It is the G8 Research Group. This Group is led by University of Toronto’s political science professor, director and co-founder of the G8 Research Group. It is a major if not the major global source on G7/8. Indeed, at the website you can find documents and analysis on every annual meeting, plus obligations undertaken by the member countries – The United States, Canada, United Kingdom, France, Germany, Italy, (the EU is also present), Japan Russia. It is a treasure trove. And John Kirton, well he’s a walking encyclopedia. All you need do is ask him anything about any of the Leaders’ Summits, and in a flash John will tell you exactly what was decided in any of Continue reading
The Creation of Clubs: The BRIC
In a previous post, I distinguished three bases for grouping countries. In this blog, I discuss the BRIC and its possible expansion to BRICSAM in that context.
The Creation of Clubs
States form international institutions self-consciously to achieve some objective(s). The institutions can be organized along areal or functional lines. They can be universal and include all members of some specified set or they can be clubs of subsets. Creating any institution then requires some agreement on purpose, membership, and procedure.
Most groupings emerge from the vision of political leaders and their political needs. The BRIC case was somewhat different.
Origins of the term in objective analysis
The term BRIC was coined in 2001 by Jim O’Neill, head of global economic research at Goldman Sachs. It was a Continue reading
Objective, Subjective, and Socially Constructed Groupings in International Politics
BRICSAM is being proffered as a new grouping of states. Alan has written a set of excellent blogs asking whether the BRICSAM states have comparable wealth and power positions and whether all the countries fit in the same category or class. What began as a Goldman Sachs grouping of BRICs was expanded by CIGI with the addition of SAM (South Africa, Mexico and somewhat more problematically ASEAN (in some form)).
The exercise raises the question of how groupings of states emerge and how categories of states develop in international politics.
Objective Grouping
Some groupings emerge from some objective criterion. States can be assigned as elements to a set by some observable attribute: the set of nuclear powers, the set of oil producers, the set of democracies, the set of Latin America states, the Continue reading
The Rise and Fall and Rise of Declinism
The conversation about BRICSAM takes place against the backdrop of assessments about the international system. And the problem is that there is an ever-present cottage industry extrapolating from short terms dynamics to make sweeping generalizations about the course of the history, and it is typically wrong. Put differently, we are experiencing yet another wave of declinism.
In the late 1950s, the fear was that US was being overtaken by the Soviet Union. Sputnik signaled the inadequacy of American science and high Soviet growth rates (contrasted with anemic US growth and three Eisenhower recessions) would eventually mean that Soviet GNP would exceed that of the US.
Beginning in 1970 with Herman Kahn’s The emerging Japanese superstate, Americans were subjected to two decades Continue reading