It was a slight distraction – around noon.  My panel on G20 global governance survivability had just ended.  The next panel on international monetary policy had begun, chaired by the President of KDI, Oh-Seok Hyun.

Here we are in downtown Seoul at a conference organized jointly by the Korean Ministry of Finance and Strategy and the Korean Development Institute.  The Conference “World Economy in 2012 & Global Economic Cooperation: Issues for the Mexican G20 Ahead” had opened with ministerial comment and weight and was proceeding in a fairly calm and deliberate way.

Anyway back to President Hyun.  A note was carried to the dais by one of KDI’s many assistants and passed to the President.  President Hyun showed  momentary surprise and then it passed and he seemed to go back to chairing the panel.  I didn’t think much of it.

Then I felt the buzz of my iPhone.  Distracted, I pulled the phone from pouch and gazed at a rather startlingly news message – Kim Jong-il was dead.   Yikes.  Now that was surprising as here I was sitting in a plush conference room in downtown – Seoul – yep Seoul!  I passed on the news message to a Korean colleague who quickly scrambled out of the room to contact colleagues back at KDI. To learn more – maybe.  As it turned out they had not been alerted to the great leader’s death.  But the news was spreading fast.

So within hours the news was all over the conference and beyond.  It was passingly odd.  To be so close to North Korea (DPRK) – at this critical juncture.  So what was the reaction in Seoul.  Well, I suppose uncertainty was the most palpable sense felt.  The South – Korea – with its almost 50 million people – had for many years longed for reunification.  But that was no longer the case.  Korea had grown wary of the aggressiveness, the nuclear weaponry – of living next to ‘the crazy’ cousin – 22 million people – largely starving – but for the military and the elites – isolated from the world – and super-nationalist about the Kim ruling dynasty.

So the transition was underway – presumably – with the ‘great successor’ Kim Jong-eun – the youngest son of Kim Jong-il – moving the pieces in an elaborate dance to solidify his shaky control of the government, party and military.

Uncertainty was the watchword all around.  While Kim Jong-il had died Saturday, the announcement was held back till – as I said – around noon on Monday.  Immediately meetings around the region began.  The Korean President Lee Myung-bak reassured his people to go about their business calmly.  While the Korean military heightened vigilance, unlike 1994 (when Kim Jong-il’s father died),  the government did not place the Korean military on high alert.

So here we were in Seoul in a country that had achieved remarkable success – great economic growth and prosperity, heightened international status and a member of the G20 – waiting for events from the ‘hermit state’ – it was weird.

And I was on my way back to North America.

Image credit:  Alan Alexandroff looking toward the DPRK

[Editor’s Note:  The picture is of the ‘super’ team of experts and media that Digital20 Project from the Munk School of Global Affairs, University of Toronto and the Stanley Foundation (TSF) gathered together for the Cannes Summit.  From left to right – Don Brean, The Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto, Netila Demneri, Munk School of Global Affairs, David Shorr, TSF, ‘Yours Truly’ Munk School of Global Affairs , Hugo Dobson, Sheffield University, Sean Harder, TSF and kneeling Yves Tiberghien, University of British Columbia.  You can see more about the Digital 20 Project at its new web portal http://www.digital20project.ca]

I woke up this morning to the media harangue – I expected it actually – that the G20 was irrelevant  – and worse unhelpful in resolving the challenges of global governance.

In this instance it was Wolfgang Münchau, currently the associate editor of the FT – I kinda thought it would be my old colleague Daniel Drezner – but he just linked to Münchau in his most recent foreignpolicy.com blog post and left the rest to Wolfgang.

So here we are again with ringing accusation of G20 irrelevance – and possibly worse:

Yet last week’s summit proved almost comically irrelevant to the future of the global economy. … The actual outcome summit leaves us in a void, with no crisis resolution strategy in place.  In the previous decade, the old Group of Seven failed to prevent various financial crises.  This decade, the G20 is failing to solve them.

And it continues on from there.  But when Wolfgang feels called upon to then come up with a successful strategy for the challenges now facing the global economy,  what do we get:

Unless we are ready to reverse monetary integration and financial globalisation, and accept the economic and political consequences, there is no alternative but to create a new institutional framework, with new rules, both within the eurozone and at the global level.  Our policies have run out of control.

So there it is – our institutions have proved irrelevant so let’s build another set of institutions.  Oh please!

So the media continues to get it wrong.  First there was a collective effort to help protect the global economy from Greek – and presumably – Italian contagion.  Amusingly, the piece disclosing the deal that almost was – and is likely to be in the near future – comes in part from Chris Giles,  Münchau’s colleague.  It is evident from this post that the Leaders were working on a three-part economic package that would at least act as an international firewall around Greece.  It would seem that the deal failed to be announced when the German Bundesbank vetoed one of the three elements.  The G20 leaders hope that G20 finance ministers will meet again soon possibly before Christmas if the German central bank can be reassured over the element that it failed to agree to at the Cannes summit. But as a result of this disagreement, the final communique was rather vague simply saying that the finance ministers were being asked to draw up options for additional fire-fighting resources by their next meeting – see paragraph 11 of the leaders’ communique.

It is a reminder – including a reminder to ‘yours truly’ – that policy solutions  move rather more slowly than we’d like and that the politics of these countries cannot be ignored just because we are working at the international multilateral level.  I have to keep reminding myself that what we see at the G20 leaders level is a prime example of the “Iceberg Theory” of global governance.  Yes, periodically leaders come together but officials are engaged continuously including ministers, Sherpas and Sous-Sherpas, working committees of the G20, representatives from the central banks and national regulators of all stripes brought together in various international governmental institutions, IMF, WTO, World Bank, OECD, etc., international regulatory agencies –  FSB, BCBS, IOSCO and many more.  This “messy” transgovernmental pyramid is what my colleagues in international law refer to as transgovernmental regulatory networks (TRN) and my IR colleagues, especially Dan Drezner at Fletcher and Anne-Marie Slaughter at Princeton, refer to more simply as “networks”.  Tasked work from the leaders proceed a pace – maybe at too slow a pace for many – but a pace.

And if you look at the communique you see that policy is proceeding on many fronts:

• paragraph 8 and 9 on global imbalances including greater market-determined exchange rates and commitments by the surplus countries;
• paragraph 10 on strengthening global financial safety nets;
• paragraph 11 including a commitment to greater IMF resources;
• paragraph 13 that details the work of the FSB on G-SIFIs (global systematically important financial institutions);
• paragraph 14 the commitment to regulate and oversee shadow banking”;
• paragraph 17 that commits the G20 to sign the Multilateral Convention on Mutual Administrative Assistance in Tax Matters and ‘encourages’ non G20 members to join the Convention;
• paragraph 18 to endorse the recommendations of IOSCO with respect to regulation and improved supervision of commodity derivatives; and
• paragraph 19 where the leaders decided to invest and support research in agricultural productivity including the AMIS  and the Rapid Response Forum detailed in the Action Plan on Food Price Volatility and Agriculture from the G20 Ministers of Agriculture that was released in the summer.

There is more.  But the point is that the G20 is, as the international lawyers, declare is, “dialogical, norm-generating and incremental”.  This giant iceberg of global governance is messy and slow but progress is present.  It may seldom contained in dramatic leaders’ announcements in the way that journalists hope for, but the hard work goes on incrementally and progress is made.

Plane rides are always good for something.  This plane ride to Cannes – via Frankfurt – and then down to the Cote d’Azur airport in Nice – was valuable in part to catch up on some reading on global summitry.  Getting energized for the G20 Summit here in Cannes.

We’ll get to the summit probably by the next blog installment or so – and I suspect that this won’t be a pretty summit.  But first a few thoughts on a couple of interesting pieces from colleagues thinking about the G20 and global summitry more generally.

First Bruce Jones the Director of the New York University Center on International Cooperation.  Bruce just recently completed a piece  – a Policy Analysis Brief (PAB) – called “Beyond Blocs: The West, Rising Powers and Interest-Based International Cooperation” for the Stanley Foundation.  While Bruce has a fair bit to say on the G20, his analysis does extend to a more general assessment of contemporary global governance.

Bruce focuses on managing the global order.  And he asks the question: “Can we do better?” For Bruce the concern is that it remains unclear whether the powers will be able to manage – let’s even say improve – the management of the global order , or will the liberal order that has served global governance well – led to decades of economic growth and also the avoidance of war  may be eroded by the competition among the powers as new rising powers emerge.

I think that Bruce’s answer is in the affirmative:

If we can resist both the “we’re all in this together” optimism of the global financial crisis and the pervasive pessimism of 2011 -[including the rising US-China tensions] – the evidence suggests that there is still room for a strategy to forge a more peaceful and prosperous international order.  The balance between cooperative and conflictual dynamics is not yet set.

Bruce is at his best in analyzing the presumed blocs most particularly the West and the Rest.  It is evident – and well analyzed by Bruce – that the current system is not yet deeply cleaved between the traditional G8 and the Rest including the large emerging market states – the BRICS. On different issues the coalitions that have formed have found the US with say Russia, India and China on questions of combating Al Qaeda and other forms of terrorism – and at loggerheads with the Europeans over the question of the application of international legal and human rights standards.  Yet on humanitarian intervention the United States have been on opposite sides to China, India and Brazil and with some if not all the Europeans.

Indeed Bruce suggests that there is a continuum of issues from those where there is strong capability  of collaboration – say anti-terrorism to cooperative/competitive issues such as economic and finance to contentious issues such as regional security or security of supply for energy and human rights and rights-based intervention.  The obvious point I suppose is that the powers should stay for now at the end of the continuum where cooperation is more likely.

The other point that Bruce makes is that the US especially needs to avoid trying to simplify the system by identifying those that are friends and those that are foes. As Bruce argues: “The minute we start forming rigidly aligned blocs or devising strategic arrangements to contain China, our options are dramatically narrow.

Thus for Bruce the package is clear:

1. keep it complex;
2. focus along the continuum of agenda items toward the cooperative and away from the contentious;
3. put a premium on building patterns of cooperation and tools for effective governance in the realm of the global economy and global finance;
4. complement these with cooperation on shared security issues such as transnational threats; and
5. build ever closer bilateral relations with some of the large emerging market powers such India and Brazil.

Avoiding distinct global alignments is the key for Bruce but I wonder whether that is good enough to enhancing a peaceful and prosperous international order.  I suspect that the working around the China relationship will not be good enough and that China remains the key to advancing the international order.  And if China is the key then the agenda and the nature of the collaborative behavior will need to be different that what Bruce has suggested.

I was surfing information today when I came across a small but very interesting piece – this in the NYT by Graham Bowley titled, “Clamping Down on High-Speed Stock Trade” (October 9, 2011).

The problem – computerized high-frequency traders – and the capacity for these traders to make market swings  in global markets much worse.  Regulators it seems are playing catch up.

What is the impact, according to Graham Bowley:

High-frequency trading took off in the middle of the last decade when regulatory reforms encouraged exchanges to switch from floor-based trading to electronic.  As computers took over, daily turnover of stocks rose to 8 billion shares in the United States from 6 billion in 2007, according to BATS Global Markets. The trading, done by independent firms or on special desks inside big Wall Street banks, now accounts for two of every three stock market trades in America.

Now several academic studies have shown that high-frequency trading tends to reduce price volatility on normal trading days.  Well then no problem.  No, unfortunately it doesn’t seem t work as well when you have abnormal nail-biting stock trading days and some traders employ questionable practices.  In particular one practice called layering is a technique that involves issuing and then cancelling orders that the traders  never intended to execute.  Pension funds and ordinary investors have argued that such practice makes trading by longer term investors more difficult and has raised questions of fairness by many.

The great fear among regulators – now taking greater notice – of these high-frequency traers and their practices is:

Perhaps regulators’ biggest worry is over the unknown dynamics of the computerized stock market world that the firms are part of – and the risk that that at any moment it could spin out of control.  Some regulators fear that the sudden market dive on May 6, 2010, when prices dropped by 700 points in minutes recovered just as abruptly, was a warning of the potential problems to come.  Just last week, the briader market fell throughout Tuesday’s session before shooting up 4 percent in the last hour, raising questions on what was really behind it.

Regulators are now on it thinking about international regulation.  And in fact the International Organization of Securities Commission (IOSC) is preparing a report for G20 Finance Ministers on possible market abuse from technological development.  Another stroke for global financial regulation.

I took some real ‘heat’ last week at the Shanghai Conference on Asian and Pacific G20 Leadership when I suggested that Eurozone sovereign debt crisis was a distraction for the G20.

More recently one of my ‘policy buddies’, Thomas Wright, recently of the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, took me to task as well  Here is part of what he said in an e-mail:

The EU will not (and probably cannot) solve this crisis. What would work (transfer union) is not politically viable and what is politically viable (muddling through) will not work. This is not going to change. If anything it will get worse. Either the world acts in a massive and coordinated way to engineer a bailout or the crisis probably brings everyone down with it, including the US economy. More and more economists (incl Eichengreen, Rajan) have been making this point recently and calling for IMF/ G20 intervention.

Well I’m not yet prepared to cede ground on this.  First, what is the problem.  At its simplest Graham Bowley and Liz Alderman of the FT put it succinctly : “The problem – too much debt and not enough growth to ease the burden – could take years to resolve.”  The worst consequences that might arise from failure according to the two are not pretty:

If governments can’t agree on how to rescue Greece from its debilitating government debt, some fear the worst could happen – a collapse of the financial system akin to 2008 that would ricochet around the world, dooming Europe but also the United States and emerging countries to a prolonged downturn, or worse.

The major thrust of those encouraging G20 intervention and involvement in the sovereign debt crisis in the EU is the threat of contagion in terms described above.  And there is no question that the G20 countries including especially the United States should at least continue to press the leading powers in Europe – read this as Germany and France – to ‘suck it up’ and do the right thing.  These and other EU governments need to backstop both the European Central Bank to add the necessary reserves and to recapitalize German and French banks and they probably need to do this as well – establish an orderly default process for Greece.

Now why do I identify this major economic crisis as a distraction for the G20.  In part I argue this because there are growing signs  that the current host of the G20, France, and its President is in fact distracted in a major league way.  There is growing concern that the French are dropping the ball on agenda setting for the G20.  There are worries that the possible G20 deliverables are being delayed for the Mexican Leaders Summit in June 2012.  This raises doubts, especially among the global media, that the G20 is performing at all up to the steering committee function that observers keep looking for in the G20 Leaders Summit.  As Dan Drezner suggested in a blog post from the Shanghai Conference: “One of the takeaways from my conversations so far in Shanghai has been a sense of disappointment about what the next G-20 summit in Cannes will accomplish.”

As evidenced by this sovereign debt crisis, the G20 Leaders Summit is suspended between crisis and permanent steering committee.  And while this is unfortunate and untimely clearly the G20 is presented with a crisis and at the same time the G20 is struggling to make progress on the Strong Sustainable and  Balanced Growth Framework – which is a medium term policy issue.  The G20 cannot focus laser-like on medium term policy tasks – in the face of the turbulence and volatility of the global economy.  Nor can it be said that the leadership has rushed to resolve the sovereign debt problem.

Now this takes me back to the crisis and why this is a distraction rather than a priority for the G20.  Yes, President Sarkozy and his people are off trying to ‘plug holes in the dyke’ in the Eurozone.  But it is more than that.  And Tom Wright put his finger on it – the Europeans are unable to solve this crisis because what is needed is politically unpalatable to Germans, French and Finns.  But surely that failure doesn’t lead to the G20 to step in.  The G20 can’t pull Europe’s ‘bacon out of the fire’.

The G20 has much to recommend itself as a coordinating body for global governance.  But it is not to step in for Europe’s feeble institutions and growing popular unhappiness in the more efficient and productive parts of the EU for the crisis at the periphery.  The G20 needs to continue to cajole the Europeans to tackle the problem and the leadership needs to turn back to critical economic reform problems that appear to be going unaddressed.

Time flies in China – the exception being travel by car anywhere in China – indeed anywhere in Asia pretty much.

In any case time to leave Dalu and return to Canada.  But meanwhile I’ve had meetings with colleagues from the academy and think tanks in Beijing and here in Shanghai and most importantly I joined the Shanghai Conference hosted here by the Shanghai Institutes of International Studies (SIIS) in partnership with the Stanley Foundation (TSF) and my own Munk School of Global Affairs.

This just past Conference was not the first.  Indeed a year ago we worked to bring together experts from all the G20 Asian countries to examine the prospects for collaboration among the G20 Asian countries.  This year we worked to bring together experts from the Asian G20 countries plus now the Pacific G20 countries – the United States, Canada and Mexico. Mexico’s presence in particular was  valuable as Mexico will host the G20 Leaders Summit in June 2012.

This Shanghai meeting was telling.  One, we had historical memory. David Shorr our colleague from TSF was quick to note that there appeared to be maturation in the thinking of experts. A year ago experts from the region were grappling with the emergence of the G20 Leaders Summit. Was this new informal leaders summit legitimate – representative?  What was the place of this summit as opposed to the G8 or the UN or the many regional organizations?  These legitimacy questions were largely absent from this most recent gathering.  Instead there was a serious examination of the transition of the Summit from crisis gathering to permanent summit.  There was serious evaluation of the success in meting the key policy objectives, global financial reform, SSBG – Strong Sustainable and Balanced Growth, or macroeconomic imbalances in the global economy, and several other economic reforms including development and food security and food price volatility.

What were some of the bottom line conclusions? Though these several phrases hardly captures the full discussion and assessment they do help reflect G20 Summit evaluation.  First there was a strong sense among experts that the G20 risked serious underperformance.  There was a near consensus that experts feared little in the way of ‘deliverables’ or even ‘announceables’.  I must admit that I added to that view.  I argued that the G20 currently suffered from a major ‘case of distraction’ both for the French Presidency but also for European G8 members.  The distraction was evident – the European sovereign debt crisis.  This sense of distraction needs some clarification.  The continuing crisis in the Eurozone occupied growing attention for France and indeed all of Europe.  While contagion in the global economy was a real threat from possible disorderly Greek default and continuing and indeed growing volatility in financial markets, my assertion was that the crisis still represented a distraction for the G20. The key source of resolution lay with the primary European actors – France and Germany.  There lack of willingness to take critical decisions and calls for support by the IMF and the G20 kept drawing G20 attention to a serious crisis that principally needed to be addressed by Germany, France and the European Central Bank.

The attention to the sovereign debt crisis seemed to have drained energy from the macroeconomic imbalances focus of the G20.  Now our colleague Dan Drezner who joined us from the Fletcher School – and who has been highly critical – of the results of G20 coordination efforts – concluded that the macroeconomic coordination efforts were ‘Mission Impossible’.  Past macroeconomic coordination efforts had largely come ‘a cropper’ and in some cases had made matters worse than better.  But still he urged that the G20 should in fact do more if not necessarily in the global imbalances policy arena.  Later he even quietly admitted that he was impressed with the Mutual Assistance Process (MAP) efforts but still unclear about the outcomes of the coordinated policy effort.

When examining the coordination efforts of Asian G20 countries, experts still noted the dramatically limited collaboration among the G20 countries in Asia. But the fear of blocs had diminished from a year earlier and our colleague Lee Dong-hwi from IFANS in Korea urged Asian G20 countries to step up their collaboration.  As he put it, Asian countries could usefully increase ‘caucusing but without caucuses.’  In the face of global imbalances and in the light of economic circumstances here in Asia, there was growing support for caucusing without fear of generating blocs.

The Conference realized that there was a growing fear that without deliverables and in the face of the continuing global economic crisis, the G20 needed to show progress or risk being labeled irrelevant.  While many experts looked to move the G20 Leaders Summit to a more crisis prevention stance that the leaders had to balance with the need to show policy progress in a growing crisis atmosphere.  Such balancing was difficult but unavoidable.

Image Credit:  copyright Alan S Alexandroff