Category Archives: Global Governance for G20/G8

The Curious Calculus of Donald Trump – A ‘First Glance’

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What a weekend of summitry! Look at that intense discussion among leaders.  A deeply troubled alliance; and a deeply fractious G7 meeting in Canada.  

There is much one could comment on but let me just frame one encounter.  First, it this Trump statement – his call for readmitting Russia to the G7, returning it to the G8 is Trump at his most incendiary.  If nothing else he is the master of controlling the news cycle. 

Leave aside the fact that such a readmittance would have to be agreed to by all the members.  It was evident that the statement by Trump took everyone by surprise.

And leave aside that in his initial statement where he failed to raise the Russian annexation of Crimea  and Russia’s current involvement in the Ukraine, though later he suggested it was a long time ago.

Leave all these matters aside. The call by Trump for Russian readmittance is really a most odd reflection on the architecture of global summitry. It has me baffled.  Here is Trump’s original comment:

Whether you like it or not, and it may not be politically correct, we have a world to run and in the G7, which used to be the G8, they threw Russia out. They should let Russia come back in because we should have Russia at the negotiating table.  

Yes, Russia has been ousted by the G7. But there is a G20. And, indeed Russia is a member of the G20, last I looked.  And if Trump is truly convinced that these countries – the G7 –  have a ‘world to run’ well, might I suggest Trump consider China before he worries about giving his pal Putin a pass on the Crimea and the Ukraine and invites Russia back in. 

Image Credit: Jesco Denzel/German Federal Government, via Reuters

An Addendum to the Hamburg G20

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So, I was struck almost immediately by the headline in the Atlantic blog on the Hamburg G20.  It turns out that the post was by my good friend Tom Wright from Brookings. The headline – “The G20 is Obsolete”. Just as I thought but so soon after Hamburg!

Tom’s defense – when I caught him – he didn’t write the headline, which I suspect is perfectly true – but really. At least a protest!

My only immediate reposte -“you had better hope not” that is at least with respect to the conclusion.  Now, Tom generally edges to the realist side when examining the liberal internationalist order, but I was surprised by the vehemence.  Take this line:  

But the divisions in the G20 run far deeper than frustration with Trump: The body itself is a vestige of a world that no long exists.

Whoa.  That’s strong!

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Description and Evaluation of It All: Launching a Global Summitry Archive

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Here at Rising BRICSAM for some time now we’ve been concerned with Global Summitry, and summitry more generally. While Rising BRICSAM was born some years ago concerned with the emergence of new energetic emerging market actors – the BRICs, then the BRICS, and more – Rising BRICSAM has remained focused on all the ‘Influentials’ in global governance. As part of that focus we have sought to describe, examine and evaluate the effectiveness of the variety of states, institutions and now non-state actors (NSAs) that form the architecture of global order governance.

Under the umbrella of the Global Summitry Project (GSP) we have over the years launched a number of initiatives: the Global Summitry Reports (GSRs), Spotlight, China Perspectives and our most ambitious project the Oxford University Press journal, Global Summitry: Politics, Economics and Law in International Governance.

The Global Summitry Archive

And it is with great pleasure now that GSP announces the launch of the Global Summitry Archive (the Archive). This Archive aims to collect, preserve and make publicly available all information and the websites related to global summits.

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The ‘Tweeting’ Elephant in the Room

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He wasn’t there.  But his presence seemed nowhere, and everywhere, nonetheless. Just a month ago the presidency of the G20 passed from China to Germany in Berlin.  And with the transfer Chancellor Angela Merkel identified her priorities for what is going to be a truncated German hosting of the G20.  The presidency will end with the a Leaders Summit in Hamburg on July 7th-8th. Summarizing Merkel’s priorities my colleague Stewart Patrick at CFR suggested the following as her particular interests: 

Chancellor Angela Merkel, this year’s host, has emerged as the world’s most important defender of globalization. She has chosen “shaping an interconnected world” as the theme of this year’s summit. Her priorities include fostering economic resilience, advancing sustainable development, empowering women, implementing the Paris climate agreement, and advancing peace and development in Africa.

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Lacking Global Leadership

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Nova Délhi - Índia, 29/03/2012. Presidenta Dilma Rousseff posa para foto junto com os Chefes de Estado do BRICS. Foto: Roberto Stuckert Filho/PR.

Nova Délhi – Índia, 29/03/2012. Presidenta Dilma Rousseff posa para foto junto com os Chefes de Estado do BRICS. Foto: Roberto Stuckert Filho/PR.

[Editorial Note:  This piece was originally posted at the RisingPowersProject at the inauguration of this new site.]

So the Hangzhou G20 Summit has come and gone and now the eighth BRICS leadership conference hosted again by India, but this year in Goa as opposed to the previous India BRICS Summit in New Delhi is just about upon us. This BRICS Leaders’ Summit will take place on October 15th and 16th.

So where are we in determining the the state of global order leadership and the Liberal Order that has been so prominent since the end of the Cold War? A sweep of editorials and reviews of China’s G20 in Hangzhou has been notably downbeat.  At this site ‘Rising Powers in Global Governance’, my colleague, Jonathan Luckhurst described the Hangzhou reviews this way: “The Group of Twenty (G20) has received poor reviews in recent years, so expert reactions to the Hangzhou G20 Summit of September 4-5, 2016 were hardly surprising.”

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Collaborative Leadership Stumbles; A Dangerous Political Fuse Has Been Lit

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How Hwee Young:AFP:Getty Images Ratification

Well all the columns and opinions have been written, I assume,  over the Chinese G20 Summit. Other than congratulating the Chinese leadership for having pulled it off – and there is something to be said for that – the general conclusion to be drawn from these many pieces was that little was achieved with the major concern – coordinated economic growth by all the G20. The communique was a classic instance of bureaucratic ‘gobbledegook’.   While the yardsticks were moved on a number of issues, no bold announcement by the G20 Leaders was made.  As my colleague, Colin Bradford declared in his Brookings blogpost, “2016: The year for leadership that wasn’t for the China G-20”

2016 may have been the year that teed up the need for new direction, fresh initiatives, and strong leadership, but the contrary interests of G-20 member countries seem to have missed this opportunity at Hangzhou. Whereas some of the keywords for an ambitious transformative approach are in the Hangzhou G-20 communiqué, there is evidence of avoiding commitments, ducking the big ideas, and mouthing the right words but dodging the verbs and adjectives that contained ambition.

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At the Crossroads? – The Hangzhou G20 Summit and After

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Turkish G20 Summit n_91171_1

With the annual G20 fast approaching (September 4th-5th in Hangzhou China) it is worthwhile reflecting on the progress, or lack of it, that the G20 Leaders gathering has accomplished since the successful efforts to avoid the catastrophic consequences of the Great Recession.

For a number of G20 cycles now, observers have recognized that the G20, notwithstanding the urging of many experts and former officials, has failed to make the transition to a steering committee. Meanwhile, G20 process has become heavily freighted with endless recommendations, statements and communiques from a growing variety of expert and non-expert corners.  The question is not whether the G20 finally will be a success because of the hosting by China’s leaders.  The Chinese Leaders know how to run a summit.  They have approached this Summit with great effort and seriousness and should be commended for their efforts. But really,  it will not be Chinese leadership that is likely to reveal G20 progress or not.

The Editors at the EastAsianForum in a very recent post,  “Making the Hangzhou G20 summit relevant” have once again put their collective finger on the issue:

But the fundamental purpose of the G20 is to set the strategic direction. The worry is that the G20 is drifting away from this role and becoming more like an international think tank than the steering committee for the global economy that it was set up to be. The G20’s deliverables are increasingly bureaucratic, focused on commissioning reports, holding meetings, developing strategy papers, publishing high level principles and high level policy documents.

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A Reform Agenda for China’s G20 Summit

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Chengdu FM July 2016 copy

Coordination and harmonization are keys to collective action in global governance.  The jury remains out as to exactly what China’s hosting can accomplish with respect to either.

ANU’s Adam Triggs recently wrote that there were only three practical things that any G20 Leaders’ summit can accomplish:

… it can share information and best practice policies between countries; it can reform global governance by either reforming existing institutions like the IMF or creating new ones; or it can undertake what Oxford University’s David Vines calls ‘concerted unilateralism’, where countries implement policies (fiscal, monetary or structural) to suit their own economies, but do so collectively.

As a number of us suggested in our V20 Hangzhou gathering at Zhejiang daxue in the spring, Leaders also can, and should extend, their efforts beyond what is described above. Indeed in our collective view there is nothing more critical than having G20 Leaders direct their message to their own publics.  They need to signal their publics as to what is critical in their G20 efforts.  As our Blue Report to the Chinese leadership urged:

Together, G20 leaders can make clear and powerful statements which can signal the path of economic progress to all actors around the world. … Leaders at G20 Summits can strengthen their connection with their publics by devoting more attention to the content and the modes of communications from the summit platform.  … Key ideas could be summarized and Leaders could speak in more direct ways to their publics.  … G20 Leaders understand that globalization requires fair and updated rules that can elicit trust, a sense of fairness, and certainty.

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China and a People-Centred G20

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YvesT-Vision20_Photos_Hangzhou- - 39 copy

So it is evident there is much anger out in ‘election land’ and among the many electorates these days. The distemper is widespread.  The ‘oddest’ of campaigns of course is the Presidential race  – just 98 days away – in the United States.  A campaign driven in part by the Republican nominee who has abused his opponents and his putative friends – all in the name of ‘no more political correctness’. We are reminded constantly that rising inequality and plodding economic growth across the established powers and increasingly among the rising powers has led to growing frustration and anger from those in the 99 percent. Whether you are looking at global GDP, global trade, or global investment, all these measures of possible global prosperity look anemic. At a minimum these measures signal that the global economy has in fact not really recovered from the Great Recession.

Gideon Rachman of the FT suggested very recently that there is a strong link between those supporting Donald Trump in the US and those who voted in favor of leaving the EU in the UK referendum. As Rachman concludes in assessing these Brexit voters:”The second [parallel] is the way in which the Trump and Brexit campaigns have become vehicles for protest votes about economic insecurity. The third is the chasm between elite opinion and that of the white working class.” While it is of course much harder to identify frustration and alienation from governments in authoritarian societies, it is not hard to believe that there is much anger lying ‘just below the surface’ in states with authoritarian regimes and high degrees of inequality such as in China and Russia and in more democratic developing ones such as Brazil and South Africa.

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Who Governs the Global Order

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G7 Japan JEON HEON-KYUN:POOL, AP

So the G7 met in Japan this past week.  And the media did in fact pay some attention to it.  But the attention was largely for the wrong reasons.  This caucus/club was often in the past dismissed by those not invited to the party.  Countries and experts alike referred to the G7 as the ‘Rich Man’s Club’.  The emergence of the G20 – at the time of the global financial crisis – redirected attention to this Informal as opposed to the G7.  There was criticism of course.  Media, experts and representatives of those countries not included reflected on the lack of legitimacy, failing to be universal, self-identification, etc.  But the G20 was never attacked for being a narrow interest as the G7 had been.  The G20 was the first, and remains the most notable global summit platform of established and emerging powers. Indeed at the time of the G20’s creation, there was much discussion of the likely passing of the G7 summit. Obviously that didn’t happen.

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