Tag Archives: G20 Summit

Informal global leadership can help steady the ship – from EAF November 26, 2024

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Happy Thanksgiving Weekend – Enjoy!

This piece forst appeared at EAF – https://eastasiaforum.org/2024/11/26/informal-global-leadership-can-help-steady-the-ship/

“All evidence suggested that Brazil’s G20 Summit was going to bean exceptionally difficult summit for the United States and its departing President Joe Biden — and it proved to be so with the USPresident appearing as all too evidently a ‘lame duck’ and the shadow of Biden’s successor, Donald Trump, all too evident in leaders’ discussions.

It has been a busy period for the informal international forums(‘Informals’). The Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) met inPeru on 15–16 November, followed immediately by the G20Leaders’ Summit in Brazil on 18–19 November. If these two summits were not enough, the BRICS+ Summit ran in Kazan,Russia on 22–24 October and the East Asia Summit also met inOctober. Leaders and their ministers have had significant opportunities to engage with other heads of government and state.

The question is whether these summits advanced globalgovernance policies or handled the current international context rifewith geopolitical tensions built on the back of conflicts in the Middle East and in Europe, US–China strategic competition and the growing populist and illiberal governments challenging the liberal order? The influence of Informals — especially the G20 but tovarying degrees the G7, BRICS, APEC and the many minilaterals such as the US–Japan–South Korea and China–Japan–South Korea trilateral frameworks — may grow in the increasingly fragmented global order.

The role of Informals has evolved before. Following the eruption of the 2008 Global Financial Crisis, there was discussion among experts about whether the just created G20 Leaders’ Summit was a‘crisis committee’ or a ‘steering committee’. In either case, it was presumed to be a capable of generating collective efforts of these key countries. There was strong approval of the G20 efforts to tackle the financial crisis and most observers would agree that their collective efforts aided at the time in getting past the financial crisis.

There was a tendency, naturally, to hone in on the collective G20 leaders’ efforts in the years that followed. The G20 announced efforts to coordinate among its 19 countries and the European Union — and now the African Union — with statements of implementation and agreed coordinated efforts expressed in verylengthy leaders’ communiques or declarations. Yet there was limited implementation by national governments and the international organisations.

The hope was then that the annual gatherings of G20 leaders would allow leaders to finalise collective efforts to make globalisation work for all and to provide a setting where advances could be secured for critical global issues like institutional financial reform, debt management and climate financing. These meetings also sought to achieve collective agreement to press forward on theSustainable Development Goals unanimously approved at the United Nations in 2015. But little of any of this was concluded.

The annual leaders gatherings, especially the G20, have provided at least valuable opportunities for leaders to reach beyond the collective gathering and arrange highly helpful bilateral meetings.For example, the 2023 APEC Summit in San Francisco enabled Chinese President Xi Jinping and US President Joe Biden to meet on the margins. This bilateral meeting is widely recognised as stabilising US–China relations and reopening various lines of communication, including military-to-military communication that had been suspended following the visit to Taiwan by then speakerof the House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi.

At the 2024 Peru APEC Summit, the two leaders met again. In thefading days of his presidency, Biden hoped to advance US–China relations. While the leaders were able to publicly express the hope for further cooperation, and there was agreement to maintain human control over nuclear weapons, the shadow of incumbent US president Donald Trump’s return clearly cooled the opportunities for further advancing efforts and left Xi warning over Taiwanese independence and other ‘red lines’.

Besides serving as the setting for leaders of the two leading powers to talk, the Peru APEC meeting also provided the setting for other leaders to hold critical meetings. One clear instance was Japanese Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba and South Korean President YoonSuk-yeol. The two leaders held their second meeting in just over a month and enabled the two leaders to discuss the threat posed by recent North Korean efforts. They also pledged to continue ‘shuttle diplomacy’. Given the fraught relations between the two countries the meetings proved quite valuable.

The annual informals have created it seems numerous instances of leaders ‘huddling’ together, which has aided diplomacy. These diplomatic instances should not be underestimated, with the G20 representing two-thirds of the world’s global population and 85 percent of global GDP. Further, the G20 gathering in Brazil will have created space for various leader discussions on the eve of Trump’s return. Future gatherings at these summits may prove to be evenmore critical as opportunities to collaborate on trade, finance or climate in the face of Trumpian chaos will be difficult to come by otherwise.

While the Informals’ value for the global order it seems is largely inthe opportunity for leaders to connect and make diplomatic and security progress, the collective efforts of these gatherings cannot be completely dismissed. They may not support collective policy implementation as was once hoped but these summits do enable leaders — often the host country leaders — to amplify critical policy initiatives.

This has proven the case for the Brazil G20 Summit whereBrazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva used his G20 presidency to highlight the need for a global wealth tax on billionaires in a larger effort to support middle- and low-income countries. And the Declaration did at least create the Global Alliance against Hunger and Poverty. The Alliance is an initiative of Brazil that aims to create instruments to combat hunger and inequality at a global level. The Brazilian wealth tax on billionaires proposal could have raised hundreds of billions of dollars but such a commitment failed to make the Rio de Janeiro Declaration.Nevertheless, the collective expression in the Declaration and the Alliance that was created did hopefully provide a marker for the future.

The way Informals bring leaders together and foster collective diplomatic action will be increasingly important for upholding therules-based order, protecting international peace and spurring policy progress in an increasingly fragmented global order —especially with Trump’s return on the horizon.

Alan Alexandroff is Director of the Global Summitry Project and Co-Chair of the China-West Dialogue (CWD). When he teaches, he does so at the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy at the University of Toronto.

 

Image Credit – G20

 

Indonesia’s G20 Win: behind-the-scenes gatherings and unity in a time when global governance needs it most – and now to India

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Dominating our smartphone screens, televisions, and front pages were photos of Justin Trudeau, Xi Jinping, Joe Biden, and Giorgia Meloni in traditional Indonesian attire, participating in a ceremonial mangrove tree planting event and gathering late night to discuss the missiles that killed two Poles, contemplating potential next steps using NATO’s Article 4. These leaders are – whether they want to be or not – celebrities. They are simultaneously praised and critiqued depending on who is watching them. Yet, what is not seen by mainstream audiences, perhaps even those more politically astute, is the intricate machine of behind-the-scenes work taking place throughout 257 meetings between December 2021 and December 2022 under Indonesia’s presidency of the G20 Summit.

In 2011, the Director of the Global Summitry Project, Alan Alexandroff, wrote about the notion of the G20 not being solely about its leaders, but rather surrounding the Leaders’ Summit an array of complementary “personal representatives, ministers, other officials, IFIs, IOs, [and] global regulators that make the G[20] system work – or not”. Whether the G20 is successful (a subjective term, in any case), is a different conversation.

Alexandroff’s Iceberg Theory of Global Governance positions the G20 Leaders’ Summit at its tip, but the vast bulk of the iceberg is situated below the surface, and often goes unnoticed by the majority of observers and experts.

This underwater all-encompassing mass is formed by numerous assemblies: from Ministerial meetings regarding health, environment and climate, women’s empowerment, trade investment and industry, the energy transition, development, labor, research and innovation, and tourism; to Finance Ministers and Central Bank Governor meetings, Finance-Health Deputies meetings, joint Sherpa and Finance Deputies meetings, individual Sherpa meetings, Foreign Ministers meetings, G20 Digital Ministers meetings, and Education Ministers meetings; and lastly, engagement group gatherings (including the U20, B20 on climate/energy, integrity, compliance, and business leaders; the T20, with numerous recommendations from think tanks around the world, the Y20, with priority areas on digital transformation and youth empowerment, and the L20 Employment Summit).

It would be hard to contest that the G20 indeed has been a platform that has developed and advanced key collaborative actions toward policies and priorities, from the Leader Declaration identifying the Pandemic Fund, the Financial Intermediary Funds for Pandemic Prevention, which employs the World Bank and World Health Organization.

The incoming G20 Troika – Indonesia, India and Brazil – will mark a unique shift in global governance deliberations. It will be led by three Global South countries with emerging large market economies hosting the year-long activities. The hosting will pass from India in 2023, Brazil in 2024, and South Africa in 2025.

We anticipate this three-year spread of Global South presidencies will tackle issues that have been brushed to the side or missed in other G20 Summits. This is certainly a significant step in the effort to construct a multilateral network to seek mutually beneficial responses to growing challenges impacting all countries.

The Financial Times released an article following Indonesia’s Leaders’ Summit, deeming its outcomes “remarkable”. Russia, represented by its Minister of Foreign Affairs, Sergei Lavrov, seemed isolated on the world stage as China put forth a more neutral stance in its support towards Moscow. Xi commented that his administration “resolutely opposes attempt[s] to politicize food and energy issues or use them as tools and weapons”.

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Scepticism Again Abounded Prior to the Opening of a G20 Leaders’ Summit – But Then …

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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.