Today’s G20 needs to regain its mojo

The G20 is slowly expanding its interests beyond global financial and banking issues. But what could change? An obstacle is that many G7 countries, including Canada, hesitate to see the larger G20, with its substantial developing-country membership, becoming the forum for global geopolitical dialogue, one in which North and South will have equal footing. With the G20 leaders’ summit set to run Nov. 30 to Dec. 1, Argentina, this year’s chair, is probably too weary to be a bold voice in Buenos Aires, given the overhang of its own financial crisis and record $57-billion loan from the International Monetary Fund. The risk is that the G20 will start looking like recent G7 summits: a forum with a routine agenda, predictable communiqué, and a mandatory photo-op. It is now 10 years since the G20 was transformed, by Canada’s Paul Martin, from being a Western initiative, as a club for finance ministers, into a leaders’ summit called upon to mobilize the rescue operation for the 2007-08 global financial crisis, after the G7 essentially admitted it could not cope alone. Today’s G20 needs to regain its mojo. The BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa), which effectively share leadership with the G7, are no longer glittering, and we do not yet know the new Brazilian president, an aspiring South American Donald Trump. The exception is China, already the No. 2 world economy. President Xi Jinping is a self-defined global leader, mobilizing China’s economic clout and skilled labour force for the long haul. Meanwhile, Trump, with his tweets and other disruptive tricks, has no global strategy, but instead is egoistically looking inwards with his America First game plan. This year’s G20 will not be the place for innovative leadership. Argentina’s formal agenda is solid and sensible, but surprise-free, with priorities such as people-centred development and creating conditions for better jobs. There is another call for an infrastructure push, but China is already way ahead with its multi-country Belt and Road Initiative to boost connectivity and trade links. Given today’s tough climatic realities, including massive fires, storms, and drought, one might ask whether G20 leaders should be berating themselves for their folly in still ignoring the dangerous levels of atmospheric carbon that experts from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change have again warned us about. Or will those leaders be focused on keeping out of range of Trump’s tweets or watching nervously to see who blinks first in the anticipated Xi-Trump confrontation over tariff warfare? Maybe they, as Trump just did, will diplomatically look the other way when a certain prince strolls up to them in the coffee break to seek forgiveness for the killing of a journalist or starving millions, mostly children, in Yemen. With a weak chair, there’s opportunity for some G20 emerging economies to band together to remind G7 participants that the G20 agenda is equally theirs to set. While leaders such as Trump can trigger tariff wars, the G20 needs to emphasize the collateral damage done to fragile populations, including some Americans who voted Trump who may be soon unemployed again. My first draft of this article hoped for a truce, the restoration of some basic order in the global economy. That truce is essential to reach the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) target of eliminating still-rampant poverty across Africa, which is also widespread in BRICS nations such as India, Brazil, and even parts of China. Leaked communiqué details in the Nov. 21 U.K. Financial Times suggest that, instead, G20 sherpas are drafting a closing statement that papers over the gaping cracks on protectionism and exposes leaders with their heads buried in the sand on climate change. In the longer term, conflicts driven by a few self-interested global powers provide a new rationale for a strengthened, more inclusive G20. It should have a formal geopolitical mandate, one including peace-building and ensuring delivery of the UN’s Agenda 2030 and its SDGs. It would be free of the political vetoes that plague the UN Security Council. Recent global tensions have been fundamentally disruptive for developed and developing countries alike. The solution is geopolitical and unlikely to respond to the G20’s technical fixes used to counter a crisis rooted in the U.S. banking system. We are now facing a revival of the trade wars that the World Trade Organization was created to avoid. Tensions are being triggered by a U.S. president who sees no merit in a global rule-based system when he can impose his U.S.-centric agenda. He is usurping our global financial system to impose unilateral sets of political punishments on countries that have fallen out of favour with him, such as Iran and Russia, even Canada and the European Union. Canada had its recent chance for leadership in the G7 summit in Charlevoix in June, but that ended in a bizarre display of Trump-driven disruption. However, Canada still managed to put gender equity and education at the top of the global agenda. We will likely now be treading warily in Argentina, where there will be a photo-op to sign the new NAFTA. The question is whether Canada and others will be bold enough to take the lead, at least in corridor discussions, on whether action is needed to give the G20 a more broadly based and geopolitically more inclusive mandate, one covering critical global issues such as climate change, the interlinked politics and economics of migration, and the challenge of global poverty. In our search to be seen as “back” on the world stage, Canada could build partnerships with emerging countries to promote a broader G20 agenda for future years. The traditional technical interests of finance ministries might be better handled at the IMF and not by technically unskilled presidents. Some are concerned that a broader, more inclusive agenda could weaken G20 effectiveness. To counter this, Canada might propose reviving the French idea of an apolitical secretariat to assure continuity and breadth in the proposals on the G20 table, rather than what happens now, in which each year a group of new sherpas shape the agenda. Finally, we should see improved inclusiveness as not just about having a wider range of issues, but also about assuring that all types of countries have a voice in G20 deliberations, especially those that most affect their well-being. The G20 already has broader country coverage than the G7. But there is one serious hole. There is no substantive presence of the world’s most needy nations, those we call Least Developed (LDCs) and fragile (G7+). Canada and other G20 countries could consider creating a permanent poorest-country seat at the G20 table as the voice of “those left behind.” John Sinclair is a Cambridge-educated economist, formerly with the Canadian International Development Agency and the World Bank. As a senior fellow at the University of Ottawa and a McLeod Group member, he teaches and comments on global issues and international development. The Hill Times

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Today’s G20 needs to regain its mojo

As we approach this week’s summit in Buenos Aires, it’s time for a more ambitious, longer-sighted Group of 20.

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