Where’s the Leadership in Global Summitry Leadership?
2013/06/20
abstract
The G20 Leaders Summit is now racing toward a fifth anniversary in September at the G20 Leaders Summit in St. Petersburg. Among the cognoscenti including, officials, experts and media, there is a growing concern that the G20 Leaders Summit is failing to deliver global governance leadership that was promised at the emergence of the G20 Leaders Summit. Experts talk frequently of the global governance gap that exists in the international system – greater demands for collective action for the growing range of challenges but insufficient policy making capacity and results. It sounds nicer, I suppose, to say, “gap” rather than what it appears to many to be - global governance failure. In a new book by Ian Goldin, who has served in a variety of international institutions: “Global governance is at a crossroads and appears incapable of overcoming the current gridlock in the most significant global negotiations.”
The collective energy in evidence in the early days of the G20 Leaders summits - in Washington and London in 2008 and 2009 - appears to have faded. So has the bold declaration of Pittsburgh declaration: “Today we designated the G20 as the premier forum for our international economic cooperation.” There was, and continues to be, a general consensus that in the face of a yawning global financial crisis, the G20s success in avoiding financial and economic disaster has faltered in the summit efforts to make the crucial transition from “crisis committee” to a “steering committee”. Energetic success has been followed by evident cooling ardor in the collective efforts of G20 Leaders. As our colleague Arthur Stein of UCLA reminds us:
The fact that they [international organizations] were created to improve outcomes for states provides no assurance that they accomplish their objectives. ... There may indeed be failures of autonomous independent behavior, and the possibility for improved coordinated and collaborative behavior. But creating intern
I. The Evolution of Summitry Architecture
The global system has moved through a series of global summit changes in the last years and decades. In the late 19th century through to the World War I, great power politics was conducted in a manner described by the post war political successors as the “Old Diplomacy” – periodic meetings by the great powers including leader meetings. Such gatherings were informal and without any structured support. Agreements were signed; alignments and alliances including secret military ones were formed. Over the decades in Europe the classic diplomacy and architecture became increasingly rigid and consolidated into two competing blocs. The whole system came apart with the outbreak of war.
Following the war American leadership, particularly President Wilson, insisted on a more institutionalized collective security system including the League of Nations with open covenants openly arrived at by the great powers would govern. Periodic summits continued – but the emergence of totalitarian regimes ultimately spelled the doom of these early institutional efforts. The League of Nations passed into history.
Notwithstanding the growing divide in the inter war period, leaders like British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain anxiously used leader summits, especially over Czechoslovakia with the new totalitarian leaders to avoid conflict. But such informal summitry proved unsuccessful.
As World War II drew to a close, victors’ summits were arranged including Yalta and Potsdam. Even greater efforts were made by the great powers to build permanent institutional political and economic global governance institutions including the Bretton Woods and United Nations systems. For the latter, not only were the great powers given pride of place, and veto, in the newly created Security Council but a universal model of representation was created in the United Nations General Assembly. The emergence of the Cold War, however, split the great powers into camps and froze the global architecture in place. Nevertheless the Bretton Woods institutions, the World Bank, the IMF and the related General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, later the WTO, continued to operate in their own fashion in the face of Cold War alignments, as did the UN and its many organizations created around economic and development matters including trade, investment, health, etc.
Episodic summits including, though rarely leaders summits, did in these years attempt to organize the blocs but also to bridge across the east-west divide when possible. There were the cold war alliance meetings of NATO and the Warsaw Pact. Many of the summit conferences called were designed to try and end conflict as Vietnam but there were also economic summits and Leader Summits as well, 1955 in Geneva, and 1961 in Austria. But the institutionalized global governance set in motion after the Second World War proved ultimately inadequate. As a result informal Leaders summits reappeared in 1975 with the emergence of the G7 Leaders Summit. Here like-minded established western leaders plus Japan sought to chart global economic policy. What distinguishes this form of summitry and then the G20 Leaders Summit from the formal institutionalization of Bretton Woods and the UN, is that these gatherings including leaders’ summits became regularized though in both these cases of the G7 and the G20 they failed to become administratively institutionalized.
In the end, however, the global financial crisis of 2007/8 revealed that the G7 and G8 membership was inadequate to deal with the global financial crisis. G7 Leaders relying on the earlier institutionalization of the G20 finance ministers and central bankers created a leadership summit including the newly rising states, other energetic middle powers and a few others – the G20 Leaders Summit.
II.The United States – and a “Messy Multilateralist”[1]View of Global Summitry
At the time of its creation, the emergence of the G20 Leaders Summit seemed to signal a new global governance architecture that advanced global summitry by bringing together the major economic and political powers, and though self identified, nevertheless formed a critical leaders forum of established, rising and developing powers. Why and what then are the current serious problems alluded to at the beginning of this piece?
The difficulties referenced above arise in part because global governance policy making is very difficult. While there was great enthusiasm surrounding the G20 Leaders Summit creation, making progress is hard work. US officials have voiced how difficult it is to achieve global governance progress. As a result in part of this difficult negotiating, the United States though still committed to the G20, has nonetheless been more than willing to shop challenges to various institutional settings. This in turn has weakened the central and preeminent role of the G20 Leaders Summit. Additionally, the United States has remained preoccupied by its dominant leadership position. Though US leaders have talked about the need to widen leadership responsibility, there is little indication of a concerted effort to construct new collective leadership methods. US politicians and many officials insist on the continuing crucial US leadership, finding it difficult to construct shared leadership.
III.The Rising Powers Fail to Assume Global Summitry Leadership
If US leadership has proven to be a stumbling block to greater shared global governance leadership, then leadership of the rising powers’ also seems like a serious constraint on global summitry policy making as well. The hope expressed at the time of the creation of the G20 Leaders Summit was that the China’s, Brazil’s, India’s, and so forth, would “step up to the plate” and assume greater leadership responsibility. But Harvard’s Dani Rodrik expresses pointedly a view repeated by other observers that the Rising Powers are failing to take greater summitry leadership:
Yet these countries have so far played a rather unimaginative and timid role in international forums such as the G-20 or the World Trade Organization. When they have asserted themselves, it has been largely in pursuit of narrow national interests. Do they really have nothing new to offer?[2]
On a range of critical challenges whether macroeconomic imbalances, monetary reform, climate change rising powers have been content to limit the scope of policy making calling on the established powers to take the lead.
IV. The Russian G20 Summit
There is nothing on its face that suggests that the Russian priorities are anything other than sensible for the St. Petersburg G20 Summit. Early on the Russian President and then Russian officials have made clear what Russia sees as its priorities as host for the upcoming Summit:
· Growth through quality jobs and investment;
· Growth through trust and transparency;
· Growth through effective regulation.
And from these 3 overarching priorities the Russians have identified 8 areas of primary public attention:
· The G20 Framework for Strong, Sustainable and Balanced Growth and Financing for Investment;
· Jobs and Employment;
· International financial architectural reform;
· Strengthened financial regulation;
· Enhancing multilateral trade;
· Development for all;
· Energy Sustainability; and
· Fighting corruption
But there remains limited content to these labels. While some progress may result, as it has in the past, from this broad landscape of initiatives, meeting the serious global governance challenges in all these areas seems still far out of reach.
[1] The term was coined by Richard Haass, President of the Council on Foreign Relations in an opinion piece in the Financial Times in early 2010. Richard Haas, “The Case for Messy Multilateralism,” Financial Times, January 5, 2010.
[2] Dani Rodrik, “What the World Needs from the BRICS,” Project Syndicate, April 10, 2013, http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/the-brics-and-global-economic-leadership-by-dani- rodrik.
Alan S Alexandroff