The resolute insistence of the United States and its allies that the Group of 20 (G20) admonish Russia for its invasion of Ukraine contributed to the failure of the Bali Summit last year. By pushing a political issue onto the agenda of an economic and financial forum, the Group of 7 (G7) are on the verge of destabilising the New Delhi G20 Summit.
As Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov reminded a New Delhi audience last week, the G20 had never opened itself up to discussing global security and geo-political issues when the US and its NATO allies pursued war across Asia and Africa over the past quarter century. While it is understandable that European political leadership is under public pressure to use every global platform to denounce Russia, such anti-war sentiment in the Global South never dissuaded the West from securing its geopolitical interests. Are European lives more important than Asian and African ones?
Such hypocrisy is understandable since geopolitics is bereft of morality. But recent G7 actions raise the question whether it is willing to see the Delhi Summit implode under political pressure to toe the US line. The G20 finance and foreign ministers’ meetings, held recently in Bengaluru and New Delhi, show that the G20 are divided into three groups — the G7, the Global South represented by the four successive chairs (Indonesia, India, Brazil and South Africa), and China and Russia.
Caught in an East-West conflict, India has tried to walk the tightrope, declaring it will be the “voice of the Global South”. Prime Minister Narendra Modi has defined an ambitious agenda to advance the developmental interests of the South. The G7 have shown little interest in advancing this agenda, apart from mouthing the usual phrases. The chairman’s statements issued by both Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman and Foreign Minister S Jaishankar suggest that PM Modi will also have to rest content with a chairman’s statement in September, with no G20 consensus on any material and substantial issues.
The pointers are ominous. Recent G7 activism suggests a circling of wagons syndrome within the developed economies. It may be recalled that the G20 was created in 1999 as a gathering of finance ministers of globally consequential economies in the aftermath of the Asian financial crisis of 1997-98. Till 2008 it met only at the finance ministers’ level. When the trans-Atlantic financial crisis hit the US and Europe, in September 2008, President Nicholas Sarkozy of France and US President George Bush met at Camp David and decided that an urgent meeting of “economically consequential nations” should be convened at the heads of government level to quickly deal with the crisis and stabilise the trans-Atlantic economies.
Both Bush and Sarkozy realised that the US and Europe would require support from China to be able to stabilise the global financial system and sustain global economic growth. One option available to them was to expand the G8 by inviting China in and creating a G9. The original G7 (Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, UK and US) became G8 in 1997 with the inclusion of Boris Yeltsin’s Russia. When President Putin turned out to be less accommodative than Yeltsin and began rebuilding Russian power, Moscow’s re-possession of Crimea in 2014 became the trigger to evict Russia from G8.
Both Presidents Sarkozy and Bush decided that rather than invite only China, the G8 be expanded into a G20 by simply elevating the status of a finance ministers’ group to a heads of government level. This pleased India, Indonesia, Brazil, South Africa and other developing countries since they would all be involved in conversations with major powers on matters of vital national and international interest pertaining to economic development and international finance.
The first three G20 summits, held in 2008-09 in Washington DC, London and Pittsburgh (US), met with impressive success with the heads of government agreeing to a series of policy and institutional initiatives that stabilised the global economy, the global banking and financial system and the euro. The key to the success of these summits was, of course, the intense coordination between the US and China. US Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson has written in detail about the long and many hours he spent with his Chinese counterpart to deal with the crisis. 2009 was yet another milestone in the “Great Coupling” of the US and China, and marked the point of departure with China subsequently accelerating its pace of rapid growth.
Much water has flown under all rivers since then and the G20 have had little to show for all their subsequent gatherings. Not only have US-China and US-Russia relations deteriorated, but the new arrivals from the Global South have begun to assert themselves, seeking to shape the G20 agenda. Prime Minister Modi rediscovered Jawaharlal Nehru and chose to echo the “Voice of the Global South”.
Having politicised the G20 with their anti-Russia campaign, the G7 also seem wary of the Global South agenda. It is unlikely that the Global South would secure any significant gains from the New Delhi summit, without at least New Delhi falling in line with the G7 on its stance on Russia. Even as India goes gaga over hosting the G20 summit, there is every danger that the fancy red carpets on display at celebratory events would be pulled from under the feet of the Global South.
Perhaps the G7 may yet be willing to address issues of interest to developing economies, like external debt, climate finance and access to technology and markets, if they in turn denounce Russia and China. India can choose to either live with a summit without results, but much talk, or fall in line with the G7. Either way, the G20 faces the real threat of its declining relevance to global economic governance. India can still act to avoid such an outcome with some creative diplomacy that emphasises the importance of the G20 to the management of the global economy. Or, it could rest content, using the summit to project the personality of the host leader and nation. Red carpets, bright lights and photo-ops are all.
The writer is a policy analyst
