Well I must say, I have a fair bit of catching up to do. Much in the way of travel and international legal action, but not much action on the blog front. Well that is at an end.
And we are approaching as well, if you hadn’t noticed, a milestone event in international relations – the 100th anniversary of the commencement of the “War to End All Wars” – the First World War. If you haven’t noticed, there has been a notable uptick in the number of books on the approach to war and the initiation of World War 1 – August 4, 1914. So I shall be delving into various of these books and articles on this crucial twentieth century event.
But first back to my travels. I had the good fortune to examine Global Summitry issues with colleagues from around the world from two rather unique and valuable vantage points.
The first was a Conference held at the Shanghai Institutes for International Studies and held in Shanghai on September 26-27th, 2013. This Conference – a partnership of SIIS, the Stanley Foundation from the US and the Munk School of Global Affairs of the University of Toronto – was the fourth in a series of annual meetings of Asia Pacific experts and this year we examined the state of the G20 at five years.
The discussions over one day plus covered a great deal of ground. Matters that were examined included the following:
• A discussion of major power relationships within the G20;
• Progress in reforming finance and macro‐economic Institutions and policy;
•Progress in reforming global financial regulation and progress in reforming monetary policy;
•A discussion of trade and investment policy from a G20 perspective;
•The possible broadening and the value in broadening the G20 agenda;
• An examination of what G20 Leaders may want; and
•What agenda might bring the greatest success to the Brisbane G20 Leaders Summit
The G20 Summit is now five years into being a leaders summit. But there are general concerns that the G20 is failing to meet the global leadership challenges that the Leaders Summit was intended to address back in 2008. The urgency has gone out of the discussions and national interests have reasserted themselves. While the Summit appeared to work as a crisis committee the “air” has gone out of the G20 as it attempts to transition to a steering committee focused on mid-term global governance issues. For many of these experts, a view from below the “water line of the Global Governance Iceberg” is barely acknowledged. Or, and this is more surprising, there is criticism of the new organizations put in place. For instance an expert with past experience at a finance department suggested that the Financial Stability Board – viewed by many as one of the success stories of the G20 – argued that the FSB was unaccountable to national authorities and that the standard setting tasks have been ill-attended by national authorities.
There was a partial consensus, and the subject is taken up as well in Pretoria – that the Emerging Market Powers (EM powers)are largely marginalized in the G20 and that the agenda setting reflects the concerns of the G7 and not the wider concerns in the G20. The question here, in part, is whether the G7 dominate or the EM powers back away from leadership.
While there was criticism of the Leaders tackling Syria at the dinner and at the margins of the formal meetings, there was a general recognition that leaders will discuss what they must and a crisis issue such as Syria will not be ignored by Leaders. But experts remain divided on whether the G20 agenda should be enlarged. While the experts remain divided on the question of peace and security, there was a view widely expressed that Australia should drive forward on climate change and not just remain fixed on fuel subsidies since the issue remains far too difficult domestically for a number of countries including Russia, India, Indonesia and China. In addition, and partly reflective of doubts over success at the Bali Ministerial, there has to be a new trade and investment agenda especially in light of the possible competitiveness of the Mega – PTAs – most notably the Trans Pacific Partnership and the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership. The late but significant efforts of the new WTO Director General Roberto Azevado still seem to be unable to dislodge the WTO Doha Round from failure. It would seem that G20 Leaders must take the lead.
Image Credit: en.wikipedia.org and china.uqam.ca