Alan Beattie, veteran G20 watcher from the Financial Times, has regaled us once again with reasons to dismiss G20 summits before they begin. On November 14th, a day before the Indonesian G20 summit begins in Bali, we are treated to the conclusion by him that the G20 is a “gabfest” and that “it is what it always has been, which is largely pointless”!
To prove his point, Alan Beattie links us to his March 13, 2009, article , published a month before the London G20 summit, which was arguably the most important economic summit ever. Entitled “the gap of twenty”, he wrote back then rather definitively that “there should be little doubt…that the divisions seen on display have already dissipated the G20’s ability to spread confidence”.
The Indonesian G20 Summit has in fact demonstrated that without the G20 there would be no global leadership platform which could bring together a finite number of major actors in global affairs from an eclectic array of regions and regime types to address the war in Ukraine, US-China relations, and global systemic challenges.
What Alan Beattie gets wrong in both 2009 and now more recently just prior to the Bali Summit is to fail to see that “domestic constituencies “do indeed drive the “domestic calculus”. The dynamics of global summitry are intended to push the frontiers of public discourses in order to mainstream ambition as good governance rather than to be an exercise in fancy pants diplomacy. The term “gabfest” trivializes the efforts by global leaders and their officials, advisers and experts to provide societies with the vocabulary for understanding global risks and with vision for global solutions.
What has gone on all year before the Leaders’ Bali gathering is the tedious developments of policy proposals that will work and the quest for pushing feasibility frontiers to the maximum that domestic and financial constraints will bear.
The G20 process is essential for global survival and for guiding global systems toward sustainability instead of disaster. The Indonesian Summit has underlined this critical point.
Image Credit: SMA Negeri 1 Singaraja
By Guest Blogger Colin Bradford who is lead-co-chair of the China-West Dialogue (CWD), co-chair of the Vision20, global fellow of the Berlin Global Solutions Initiative (GSI), and non-resident senior fellow of the Brookings Institution.