4 days Ago By Firstpost
As the G20 summit starts Monday [November 18] in Rio de Janeiro, the intra-G20 equations have seen the industrialised Group of Seven (G7) nations making way for a greater role for the emerging economies. Indeed, since 2022, post-pandemic efforts at global redemption have coincided with the sequence of Indonesia, India, Brazil now, and South Africa next year holding the annual presidency of the G20. Here, along with the Ukraine and Gaza wars complicating their consensus building, this period has seen emerging economies making G20 deliberations overcast by Global South perspectives as their new meeting point.
In making the G20 agenda much more holistic, emerging economies have sought to focus on the needs and concerns of developing and least developed countries. These include challenges of debt, inequality, terrorism, healthcare, sustainable development, wars, the climate crisis, reforming Bretton Woods institutions, and global governance in general. No doubt, the G7 advanced industrialised nations, also part of the G20, share several of these concerns, yet variations in their priorities and perspectives have become increasingly the centre of attention and contention, making consensus building complicated.
Further, the inclusion of the African Union—comprising 55 nations in addition to the already existing European Union of 27 nations—has made the G20 into a ‘Mini-United Nations’ and added to newer fault lines. To the least, this expanded membership has expanded their agenda that now includes everything that one can imagine. This ‘all-in’ style of their inclusive approach to managing their fault lines has resulted in inordinately voluminous reports with little time to implement any of these.
As a result, G20 meetings get complicated as members continue to dig their heels deeper with their divergences on issues that continue to persist; so does the language of their deliberations and final communiques. Often these are the same delegates meeting at different, often exotic, sites. All this adds to the difficulties of host nations to make each of these gatherings look exciting as well as effective beyond consensus building on an inordinately large number of ever-expanding priorities.
Even deeper malice lies in the G20, which was originally conceived as an apex body for regulating global financial governance but has come to be increasingly preoccupied with geopolitics. In this backdrop, the drift from being G7-led to becoming led by emerging economies has exacerbated their choices. Indeed, their 2022 Bali summit can be identified as marking that inflection point till when the G7 had held a major sway on the G20 decision-making ever since its inception in 1999.
Put simply, it is the G7 that became G8 (by including Russia in 1998-2014), and, along with the beginning of G20 summits from 1999, the G7 had also begun its outreach summits from 2021. In this backdrop, the Indonesian presidency of 2022 had coincided with the Ukraine war from February 2022. This had seen several Western member nations of the G20 slapping severe sanctions on another G20 member, Russia.
There was confusion about Russian delegates, including President Vladimir Putin, participating in G20 meetings. Building consensus on this burning issue for the Bali summit was distracting from real priorities. The final communique, however, managed to mention that “most (not all or many or select number of) members strongly condemned war in Ukraine” but without mentioning Russia.
This Bali consensus on the Ukraine war was very helpful for the New Delhi summit of 2023. The Ukraine war was still raging, but other than the Bali consensus, India had also had time to outline its approach to the Ukraine crisis at several other multilateral gatherings. India also had G20 Troika leadership facilitating consensus building.
Of course, the fact that New Delhi has had rather close relations with Moscow and had defied Western pressures to stop buying increased quantities of Russian oil, had sharpened intra-G20 fault lines. In this, India had strategised reviving the G20 focus on its original mandate of ensuring financial stability and managed to build consensus on Ukraine by presenting it in terms of its economic consequences of shortages of food, fuel, fertilisers, finance, creating disruptions in supply chains, macro-financial stability, and inflation but without condemning Russia. The mood in New Delhi had also lightened given that the African Union had joined as the 21st member of the G20, shifting the focus and building convergences on the novel idea of the ‘Global South’ and its needs and perspectives.
India’s three ‘Voice of Global South Summits’ have since made ‘Global South’ a new catalyst facilitating this drift from G7 to emerging economies as well as for intra-G20 consensus building. Also, drifting the focus from Ukraine, India’s presidency of G20 is remembered for the addition of the African Union, making it the G21 summit. Moreover, within four weeks of the New Delhi summit, the Hamas attack on Israel was to open another major contention point.
And now, closer to Rio de Janeiro hosting this G20 summit, Donald Trump getting elected as US president has further complicated these two wars’ termination trajectories, thus adding to the challenges of Brazil’s presidency. On the positive side, however, the G20 works on a very potent Troika leadership involving the last and the next presiding nation working in tandem in all planning and several annual meetings that preceded the G20 summit. So, just like Indonesia and Brazil were working closely with New Delhi in 2023, India and South Africa have been working hand in hand with Brazil this year.
Collectively, they are likely to sustain focus on ‘Global South’ perspectives and manage geopolitics-driven fault lines disrupting their consensus building. As Rio de Janeiro braces to manage fault lines of geopolitics of this deepening tectonic drift from G7 to emerging economies, recent trends have since consolidated their leverages. Recent years have seen emerging economies giving up on G7 nations delivering to the Global South from their existential challenge by providing their promised finance and technologies.
In some way, they have begun to discard their old rhetorical argument of per capita emissions or naming the G7 nations as responsible for much of the global miseries, inequity, and disruptions causing the existential crisis. They no longer completely resort to polemics that advanced nations must pay for their original sins of mindless material pursuits, resulting first in their rampant colonisation and then their global leadership for rapid urbanisation and industrialisation sprees. Even on urgent issues of the Ukraine and Gaza wars, while the G7 have prioritised nation’s right to defence in case of Ukraine and Israel, the emerging economies have focused on people’s miseries, death, and destruction on the ground and how to ensure an early respite as resolutions are awaited.
This increasing trust in self-help with bridge building between North and South and East and West is likely to see emerging economies making G20 incrementally take the driving seat of the G20 that today represents the world’s 97 countries. The author is professor of International Relations at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the author.
They do not necessarily reflect Firstpost’s views..
