World leaders are making final preparations for the two-day G20 summit, to begin in Hangzhou, China, from tomorrow. The meeting, whose formal agenda focuses on the need for an innovative, inclusive and invigorated world economy, and reforms to global governance, could become the most important G20 meeting since the 2009 gathering in London during the storm of the international financial crisis.
Presidents and prime ministers will be in attendance from the United States, China, Germany (which assumes the G20 chair in 2017), India (which takes the G20 chair in 2018), Japan, Indonesia, Australia, Russia, Brazil, United Kingdom, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, Turkey, France, Italy, Germany, Canada, South Korea, Argentina, Mexico and the European Union. Collectively, these powers account for some 90 per cent of global gross domestic product, 80 per cent of world trade and around 66 per cent of global population.
While the Chinese hosts are keen that the agenda stays laser-like on economics, to avoid sensitive geopolitical controversies, several such issues are likely to cloud the event. For instance, the recent surge in tensions in Ukraine will be discussed by a cross-section of the G20, including Russian President Vladimir Putin, German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Francois Hollande, who collectively negotiated last year’s now-stalled Minsk agreement with Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko.
Beijing is intent that this vexed issue and other geopolitical disagreements that may get raised, including the South China Sea, will remain on the sidelines and not dominate the agenda to the same degree as some other G20s. For instance, terrorism and migration became a big feature of last November’s Antalya conference in Turkey, which followed swiftly on from the attacks in Paris earlier that month. Moreover, a major theme in the previous year’s Brisbane summit in Australia was the troubles in Ukraine, which led Putin to leave the meeting early after persistent browbeating by western leaders.
For the Chinese, the most pressing agenda item is the need for invigorated, innovative and inclusive global growth to consolidate the post-2008-2009 economic recovery across much of the world. There are multiple facets to this vision and one of the most eye-catching announcements expected, to spur greener growth, is the reported move by the US and China to ratify the Paris global climate change deal just prior to or at the summit itself. The two countries collectively account for around 40 per cent of global carbon emissions and environmentalists are particularly keen to see Washington ratify the deal with Beijing ahead of November’s US presidential election. While Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton, who supports the Paris agreement, is the current favourite to win, US ratification of the deal could ‘lock-in’ her Republican opponent Donald Trump — who has criticised the Paris deal — should he pull off an upset victory. This is because the deal, once it enters into force, contains a provision that any nation wishing to withdraw must wait for four years — the length of a US presidential term.
The Chinese summit agenda is premised on the assertion that the G20 has seized the mantle from the G7 as the premier forum, since the 2008-2009 financial crisis, for international economic cooperation and global economic governance. Beijing wants to use the event to implement commitments at previous summits and sketch out a forward agenda of creative policy ideas.
To this end, there will be discussion around how a series of factors can drive greater economic growth, including enhanced innovation-driven development through breakthroughs in science and technology; domestic structural reforms; greater international cooperation; more equitable, legitimate and effective global governance; and greater interconnectivity between growth and development. And there will also be moves to improve the G20’s effectiveness and extend its influence.
This latter issue reflects the fact that the forum has failed so far to realise the full scale of the ambition that some had thrust upon it almost a decade ago when, at the height of the international financial crisis, the group was upgraded from a finance minister body to one where heads of state now meet too. That move was greeted with considerable fanfare, including from the then French president, Nicolas Sarkozy — who announced last month that he would seek to run again against Hollande in next year’s presidential election in France — when he claimed that “the G20 foreshadows the planetary governance of the 21st century”.
A key part of failure to deliver on previous high expectations is that the G20 meetings have no formal mechanisms to ensure enforcement of agreements by world leaders. Moreover, much of the business it deals with is decided before the summit, as this year with the anticipated US and Chinese ratification of the Paris climate agreement.
The fact that the agenda will include the topic of more equitable and legitimate global governance will be noted, with irony, given the concerns in some countries about the composition of the G20, which was originally selected in the late 1990s by the US, along with its G7 colleagues. While states were nominally selected according to criteria such as population, gross domestic product etc, criticism has been made of omissions such as Nigeria, sometimes called the ‘giant of Africa’, which has three times South Africa’s population.
Former Norwegian foreign minister Jonas Gahr Store has gone so far to call the G20 “one of the greatest setbacks since World War Two” in as much as it undermines the United Nations’ universal sense of multilateralism. Reflecting this, the UN General Assembly convened a rival UN Conference on the Global Economic Crisis in 2009 as an alternative forum.
Taken overall, while the G20 has not yet lived up to some of the initial expectations, it continues to be a forum prized by its members. Moreover, with China now the chair, the organisation’s international prominence is only likely to grow following the summit and the potential importance of the agenda in Hangzhou may make this the most important G20 since the forum was upgraded in 2008.
Andrew Hammond is an Associate at LSE IDEAS (the Centre for International Affairs, Diplomacy and Strategy) at the London School of Economics.
