Tag Archives: Global South

Threatening a ‘Single International Community’

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Who would think that the threat to the global order could emanate from global summitry leadership. But that appears to be a real possibility. Let me explain.

For some time now at CWD and the Global Summitry project (GSP) we have identified that sustaining global order requires the maintenance, even strengthening of a ‘single international community’. Stability cannot be sustained without such a community. Fragmentation hinders collaboration. But that single international community is being challenged today. The current wars in Europe and in the Middle East undermine a single international community.  Rising geopolitical tensions between the leading powers, China and the United States, especially, erode it. Fragmentation then undermines stability of the order and diminishes, or eliminates,  opportunities for advancing global governance.  As described in the WPR Daily Review:

These tensions were underlined recently by statements from the President of Brazil, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, better known as Lula, now the host for this year’s G20. In an opinion piece he published in the Washington Post in January Lula described the impact of geopolitics and nationalism on global governance efforts:

The world is experiencing a contradictory moment today. Global challenges require commitment and cooperation among nations. We have never been so connected. At the same time, we are finding it increasingly difficult to dialogue, respect differences and carry out joint actions. Societies are taken over by individualism and nations are distancing themselves from each other, making it difficult to promote peace and face complex problems: the climate crisis; food and energy insecurity; geopolitical tensions and wars; the growth of hate speech and xenophobia.

Such a statement seems to suggest that Lula really gets it. Only a single international community can maintain a stable global order. But that may not be true. In fact Lula’s recent statements may be undermining such a goal. Why such statements are unclear. Some have suggested that he is determined to promote a different global order no longer dominated by the US and the West more broadly. Others focus on his imperatives in current domestic politics. Whatever. Nevertheless his recent comments over the War in Gaza may make it difficult to promote collective efforts in this critical Informal – the G20. One need only reference Lula’s view of Israel’s action in Gaza expressed by him in remarks at the African Union Summit Conference in Addis Ababa and reported in the NYTimes:

What is happening in the Gaza Strip with the Palestinian people has no parallel in other historical moments,” Lula told reporters during the 37th African Union Summit in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. But, he then added, “it did exist when Hitler decided to kill the Jews.

And now as a result of these remarks his global summitry leadership efforts – and here I am focusing on his G20 efforts as the President – are being called into question. Rather than trying to knit the order together he apparently seems willing to fracture it.

Such a rupture of the international community is possible notwithstanding a promising start as G20 host. Indeed at the time of the transfer of hosting to Brazil, Lula set out important developmental priorities in a speech at the closing of the India G20 Summit. There he declared:

We are living in a world where wealth is concentrated. In which millions of people still go hungry. In which governance institutions still reflect the reality of the middle of the last century.

We will only be able to tackle all these problems if we address inequality.

Income inequality; inequality in access to healthcare, education and food; gender, race and representation inequality is behind all these anomalies.

If we want to make a difference, we must place the reduction of inequalities at the center of the international agenda.

Thus, Brazil’s G20 presidency will have three priorities:

(i) social inclusion and the fight against hunger;

(ii) energy transition and sustainable development in its three aspects (social, economic and environmental); and

(iii) reform of global governance institutions

All these priorities are contained in Brazil’s G20 presidency motto: “Building a fair world and a sustainable planet”

In advancing these priorities Lula announced  that Brazil would establish two G20 Task Forces (TF) for the Brazil hosting year. These TFs will unite the Finance and Sherpa tracks in a concerted effort to advance global governance policy. The two are: the Global Alliance against Hunger and Poverty, and  the Global Mobilization against Climate Change.

And in addition in the Concept Note Brazil also committed to the  following:

Seeking to close this gap, Brazil plans to launch a G20 Initiative on Bioeconomy with the objective of deepening the international debate on the subject and of identifying potential avenues for cooperation in the area. The Initiative would be structured into three axes: (i) research, development, and innovation for bioeconomy; (ii) sustainable use of biodiversity for bioeconomy; and (iii) bioeconomy as an enabler for sustainable development. As a final result,  the Initiative would be expected to produce a set of “High Level Principles on Bioeconomy.

All these priorities and institutional efforts require concerted collective action. Yet today all these promises seem to be in question over Lula’s statements on the current geopolitical crises, notwithstanding Lula’s injunction in his speech at the closing of the India G20 Summit that:

Thirdly, we cannot allow geopolitical issues to hijack G20 bodies’ discussion agendas. A divided G20 does not interest us. We can only tackle present day challenges through joint action.

Lula needs to heed his own words or he will find that his G20 leadership is undermined by his own words. Such words put at risk his determined collective priorities in the G20. They divide the international community putting at risk ‘a single international community’.

Image Credit : Brazil

This Post was first published at my Substack Alan’s Newsletter

https://open.substack.com/pub/globalsummitryproject/p/threatening-a-single-international?r=bj&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true

The Shanghai Cooperation Organization: “Symbolically significant”, for now

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The Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) leader-led summit was held in Samarkand in this September. It brought global attention to the group first established by Beijing at the start of the 21st century. Not only was it Xi Jinping’s first trip outside the country since January 2020, with the ongoing war in Ukraine, but the meeting was also an opportunity for a sit down between Xi and Putin on the margins of the summit. That meeting was the immediate point of interest for the global media. In Samarkand, India’s PM Modi was openly critical of Russia as he tried to carve out a leadership position for the South Asian republic. While commentators noted that PM Modi did not hold a bilateral with President Xi indicating that the warmth of 2018’s Wuhan Summit between the two has not yet been rekindled.  Iran participated for the first time with the group now representing 40 percent of the world’s population and nearly a third of global GDP and all of which, barring India, are decidedly illiberal regimes.

While the SCO has more than two decades of existence, the summit is of interest not just because of the high-level leader diplomacy but on the peculiar qualities of a multilateral institution that is often neglected by Western scholars and analysts.

The SCO was established in 2001 by the People’s Republic of China (PRC) with the intention of providing stability to the former Soviet Central Asian spaces with a particular focus on cooperation to combat what the members called the ‘three evils’ of terrorism, separatism and religious extremism. This initial motivation reflected China’s broader concerns about counterterrorism and Islamic extremism in the early 2000s as well as long term anxieties Beijing has had about the threat to the Communist Party of China (CPC) rule at the peripheries of the China.

The initial work of the SCO focused on coordinating the members’ security policies and sharing information, as well as conducting regular military exercises. The group added narcotic trafficking to its counterterrorism agenda and began to talk about economic collaboration and had periodic rhetorical flourishes about global governance and international order. From its initial membership of: Russia, China, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan, the SCO has expanded to include India and Pakistan in 2017and now Iran.

While the SCOs public diplomacy has been wide ranging, the group was, and remains at its heart, interested primarily on matters of international and transnational security. Yet as many analysts point out, Beijing and the members often appear disinterested in many quite obvious regional security matters, the most immediate example of which is the deadly clash between Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan taking place barely 200 km from the current Summit which elicited neither comment nor action from individual leaders or the group as a whole.

Multilateral institutions often serve both symbolic and substantive functions. With the former, symbolic functions provide the opportunity to signal intent, represent collaboration and more broadly to perform statecraft. But substantive functions can provide the means to advance actual policy coordination and, in their more advanced forms, bind members into strict policy commitments, most famously exemplified by the EU and WTO. Most initiatives provide a blend of performance and policy as well as offering a platform at which ad hoc diplomacy can take place, such as the China-Russia meeting this year.

The SCO today is, however, a grouping that is long on symbolism and short on substance. At first glance it appears to be a good example of institutional balancing, that is when states use international institutions to balance against the influence of major powers. In this case the intention is to use the SCO to ensure that the US and its allies’ influence on the geopolitical dynamics in the Eurasian heartland is blunted. From this perspective bringing India into the fold was intended to hedge against Delhi’s growing alignment with Washington.

More broadly, it also represents a desire for a more multipolar and multimodal international order in which the North Atlantic powers have less influence; and liberal values are diluted as well.

While the symbolism is strong, and in the current moment it has particular salience given the Ukraine war illustrating starkly the clash between authoritarianism and democratic systems, there is little sign of the SCO making any meaningful progress on the substantive side of the ledger. One might be tempted to view the SCO as a nascent Central Asian NATO, yet the preferences of the key SCO powers remain low on concrete commitments as well as exhibiting not inconsiderable tensions between various members. At least for now, it is unlikely that the SCO will take any steps to move beyond the symbolic.

It is tempting, therefore, to write off the SCO as another example of shallow diplomacy in which grand statements of intent and photo opportunities are confused for actual statecraft. That is certainly true right now, but in the building of the foundations for collaboration among  influential and illiberal states in a geopolitically crucial zone of world politics, the members in general, and China in particular, have established a solid platform from which members may ultimately make good on their very real ambitions to transform the principles and practice of the regional order and possibly the international order.

Image Credit: YouTube

The Twin Threats to Global Governance and Global Summitry

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It is a challenging G20 Summit. For any host. No less so for Indonesia, the first Global South leader in a follow on series of Global South hosts.

This year in November the G20 Summit is scheduled for Bali to then be followed in 2023 by India. India will then be followed in 2024 by Brazil and presumably, though not yet announced South Africa in 2025. So, what’s the problem? Well, in principle nothing. But these Global South hosts are only slowly becoming accustomed to leadership roles where advancing the global governance agenda is called for in the leadership role.

The second dilemma is the dramatic impact of renewed geopolitics. The growing tensions and rivalry between China and the US now dominate relations between these two leading powers. These bilateral tensions have been amped significantly higher by the Russian aggression against Ukraine.  War in Europe, as we haven’t seen in decades now sharpens differences between China and the United States. These difficult bilateral relations have now been further strained by Taiwan tensions following US House Speaker Pelosi’s visit to the island state. These strains are reflected in the undermining of collaborative global governance relations between the two, and more broadly the apparent hobbling of multilateral relations.

So, two threats to advancing critical global governance policy at the global summitry level. These threats are particularly enhanced where domestic politics dominates and global leadership emerges rather more as an afterthought.  And it would seem that is exactly what our Host faces. First, the dominance of domestic politics. This feature of Indonesian leadership politics is precisely what is identified by Shafiah Mushibat in his recent post at EAF titled: “Indonesia steps innocently onto the international stage”:

In Indonesian politics, the domestic audience and interests still trump the global audience and global common interests. This is not unusual, and it’s reasonable, considering that foreign policy involves actions and activities by governments that aim to defend and promote national interests. But Indonesia is quickly discovering that marrying its international roles, responsibilities and expectations that go with them to national interests that please domestic audiences is not altogether easy.

Mushibat concludes that the Indonesian President has chosen to emphasize the domestic politics of Indonesia’s leadership of the G20. He writes:

Approaching the G20 presidency, the Indonesian government initiated many activities to promote its role domestically. This included raising awareness of the G20’s ‘benefits’, such as the direct economic benefits of hosting the summit. In a November 2021 speech, Widodo pressed the country to make the most of its strategic position in the G20 presidency and ‘prioritise national interests’. Explaining how the G20 presidency will benefit the country has been a main part of the government’s effort to ensure domestic support for all the efforts.

And as to the second and growing threat – the destructive impact of geopolitical tensions – they are real:

Indonesia has been lauded as representing the voices of developing nations and emerging economies outside of the G20, but its presidency faces major challenges — mainly because of the geopolitical implications from the Russia–Ukraine war. While the G20 has performed important functions for member states and the world at large, it struggles with balancing the pursuit of its members’ national interests with a genuine commitment to the global common good. As the world grapples with economic and health recovery from COVID-19 and the impact of the Russia–Ukraine war on food and energy supplies, the global common good and how to achieve it is the vital interest.

The corrosive impact of Russia’s war in Ukraine on global cooperation cannot be underestimated. It has ramped up Biden Administration efforts to build alliances and partnerships. Included in that circle of partnership efforts is the G7 where the United States has emphasized the ‘like mindedness’ and democratic character of the G7. With all the emphasis on the G7 there seems to be little room for a Biden collaborative focus on the G20. Working the G20 with China in particular with all its Ministerials, Working Parties and Task Forces is a key but apparently a key not willing to be turned by the Biden Administration.  The G20, of course, includes Russia and much of the US G20 public discussion has urged the exclusion of Russia from the Summit. Rather than a focus on advancing collaborative efforts the public statements have been on Russia’s exclusion and questioning China, at least in public, on its positioning with respect to Russia.

Meanwhile Widodo has tried to smooth the difficult Russian presence by inviting the Zelenskyy, the President of Ukraine to attend at Bali as well. But the critical focus has to be on the Biden Administration to ‘grab’ the G20 ring, avoid the Russian distraction, and focus on critical multilateral global governance initiatives.

Image Credit: East Asia Forum