Why G20 runs the risk of being relegated to another talk shop
Spain’s Mariano Rajoy Brey, Italy’s Matteo Renzi, France’s Francois Hollande, Barack Obama, David Cameron, Angela Merkel, European Council’s Herman Van Rompuy and European Commission president Jean-Claude Juncker at the G20 Summit. AFP PHOTO
As usual, it was the subtly controversial items that caught the attention of the international media at the just ended G20 summit in Brisbane, Australia.
President Vladimir Putin leaving early before even the final communiqué was a particular talking point. His explanation that he was fatigued was probably valid but it was viewed as a sorry excuse and interpreted as him behaving like an entitled juvenile, throwing tantrums after being scolded for his unwelcome overtures in Ukraine.
One would wish that the same western media would be equally mad at the Australian Prime Minister’s attempt to push the otherwise serious agenda of climate change off the discussion list.
It is well documented that Australia’s opposition to tackling climate change has a long history, dating back to the previous conservative governments.
The current PM, Tony Abbott, is on record arguing that the science of climate change was “highly contentious” and that the economics of an emissions trading scheme were “a bit dodgy”.
Even as the world seems to be in consensus that fossil fuels will need to be phased out by the turn of the century, Mr Abbot insists that coal is still the “foundation of prosperity” for “now and the foreseeable future”.
As one of the top coal producers in the world, that statement comes as no big surprise as narrow national economic interests obviously seem to override the overall wellbeing of the planet.
Asked on Sunday if he accepted that climate change was potentially one of the biggest impediments to global economic growth, Australian Treasurer Joe Hockey said: “No. No I don’t. Absolutely not. You just look at China. China is going to continue to increase emissions to 2030... Australia is doing the same amount of work on climate change as the US over a 30-year period. Frankly, what we’re focused on is growth and jobs.” First World thinking indeed!
Speaking after the event, President Barack Obama tried to down play the lack of progress as he insisted that the G20 meeting wasn’t just a “good old chinwag” but a productive summit with progress on everything from tax to trade and climate change.
However, the G20 team barely made any meaningful progress on the important agenda of climate change as well as on the issues of Ebola and Ukraine.
President Obama described his interaction with Putin as “businesslike and blunt”.
“Russia now faces a choice over which path to take. If he continues down the path he is on, violating international law, providing heavy arms to the separatists in Ukraine, violating an agreement he agreed to just a few weeks ago ... then the isolation Russia is currently experiencing will continue.” An isolation that many can see has not borne any fruits.
Which brings up the question, why are these international political bodies like G8 so ineffective in getting anything meaningful done?
My hypothesis is that it is because many of them are created as crisis response measures rather than by a genuine desire to seek collective opportunity and goodwill. It is as if we are all awake to Winston Churchill’s advice to “Never let a good crisis go to waste.”
World War 1 crisis gave birth to the League of Nations in 1920 as the solution to preclude any major global wide flare up from recurring.
For the unfortunate reason that this global body was not set on a firm strategic foundation, historians are not surprised that it bungled up barely two decades later. The world descended to war helplessly under its watch leading to the natural demise of the global body.
Its replacement, the UN, established on October 24, 1945, was set up under the same mandate but with better learning considerations from mistakes of its predecessor.
While the world has not necessarily been a bastion of peace and prosperity, there is general consensus that the body of nations has fared much better, but still more could be done.
Equivalently, the need for a forum for the world’s major industrialised countries, while having been discussed earlier, was strengthened by the 1973 oil crisis and was effected soon thereafter.
Initially, seven countries were members: Canada, US, Japan, Italy, UK, Germany and France, although later Russia was added to create the G8.
The 2008 financial crisis swayed the superpowers on the need for a wider representative body. The G20, which controls more than 85 per cent of the global GDP, was seen as a better representation of the world.
As the Guardian opined, the G20, as at 2008, appeared to be just what the world needed. It was bigger than the G8 but not so big as to make meetings unmanageable.
Moreover, it was seen as an effective global economic crisis response team and true to fact, worked harmoniously for the first few years.
However, as the global economy seems to stabilise and the Eurozone crisis having been averted, there doesn’t seem to be any sufficient crisis to act as a glue to bring the economic powers together hence the descent into chitty chatty round robin conclaves with no consensus.
For now, the rest of 170 plus countries that share the remaining 15 per cent of the global economic wealth have to contend with lofty blue print ambitions by the wealth nations as they seek to put in place measures to lift the global GDP by 2.1 per cent by 2018 and probably ruin the planet a bit more in the process.
To the rest of the world, such summits and promises remain “good old chinwag.”
