DEVELOPMENT: New Political Push Proposed

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Ramesh Jaura

BERLIN, Jun 10 2006 (IPS) - The world needs to make globalisation work, and a global forum of 20 heads of government from important industrial and developing countries would be best suited to do so, says Paul Martin, Canada’s prime minister until six months ago.

Martin is proposing a political upgrade of the Group of 20 (G20) countries formed of finance ministers and central bank governors.

The G20 that Martin is talking about is not the G20 plus group of countries that came into being at the World Trade Organisation (WTO) ministers meeting in Cancun in September 2003.

This G20 comprises Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, France, Germany, India, Indonesia, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Russia, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, South Korea, Turkey, the United Kingdom and the United States.

The European Union is also a member, represented by the rotating Council presidency and the European Central Bank.

“We need a body that can form the consensus required to deal on a timely basis with issues of all kinds that have global repercussions,” Martin told IPS on the fringes of an international conference Jun. 8-9 in Dresden in eastern Germany.

“The time has passed where the G8 can take the world for granted,” he said.

Martin was speaking in the run-up to the annual summit meeting of the world’s seven major western industrial nations – Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United States – and Russia Jul. 15-17 in St Petersburg, Russia.

Martin was in Dresden to address a conference on ‘Multilateralism in Transition’ organised by the Development and Peace Foundation set up 20 years ago by German Nobel peace laureate Willy Brandt. Brandt was Chancellor of West Germany 1969-74 and leader of the Social Democratic Party 1964-1987.

The global forum of Leaders 20 (L20) Martin has in mind will not be a new edition of the North-South summit that took place at Cancun, Mexico, in October 1981 at the suggestion of the Brandt Commission, as the Independent Commission for International Developmental Issues that Brandt headed after 1977 came to be called.

Brandt regretted then that the Cancun summit “fell far short of our expectations.” And yet the fact that it took place was historic by itself, he said.

Though it might forego using the phrase ‘North-South’, L20 will seek to bring out the interests of the countries of the South, Martin said.

The L20 will comprise industrial and developing countries that represent about 90 percent of the world’s economic output, 75 percent of all trade, 67 percent of the world’s population and a majority of the world’s poor.

“It will be national governments acting at the highest level – chancellors, presidents and prime ministers,” Martin said. “The problem is that many of today’s international meetings are not designed to facilitate the kinds of informal political debates that must occur between political leaders; they are designed to accommodate pre-cooked set pieces speeches.”

Martin was Canada’s prime minister between December 2003 and January this year. From 1993 to 2002 he served as his country’s finance minister. Both as prime minister and finance minister he participated in some ten G7 and G8 meetings with and without Russia.

“What the L20 must do, and what the G8 and G20 when at their best have succeeded in doing, is to allow ministers and leaders to break free of the briefing book syndrome, allowing them to think outside of the box,” Martin said.

It was at his initiative that the G20 (Group of Twenty) was established in 1999.

Martin does not rule out a review of the list of G20 members if it is transformed into L20: Egypt, Malaysia and Nigeria may also be brought in.

He is quietly hoping that India and China which have expressed support for a global forum such as the L20 will stay on board – China might in the near future play host to the first L20 summit.

Such a possibility was not ruled out by Dr Zongze Ruan, vice-president of the China Institute of International Studies in Beijing, who also participated in the conference.

Last year China hosted the G20 annual meeting. This year is Australia’s turn, and next year it will be South Africa’s.

The goal Martin envisages for L20 is similar to that which has been established with the G20 finance ministers and the G8 at their private dinners: “an environment that promotes the exchange of views rather than pre-cooked briefs and speeches.”

Elucidating the modus operandi of the L20, Martin said: “We should learn from the strengths and weaknesses of the G8. For instance, there should be no communiqués. They simply suck all the air out of a meeting before it even starts. If the leaders want to speak out, let them do so and let the host provide an overview or read-out.”

The G8 stalwart rejects a “focus on announceables”. The purpose of the L20, he says, is not to engender a talkfest.. “The focus should be on rounding off globalisation’s hard edges through informal discussion.”

This, he believes will lead to more deliverables in the long run than would the process of short-term bargaining between sherpas, no matter how necessary the latter may be.

Except perhaps in the initial push to get the L20 up and running, there will be no secretariat, which would simply get in the way of strong direction from national capitals. “The goal is political accountability, not bureaucratic process.”

Martin said he believes the success of G20 “has paved the way for the L20.”

Andrew Cooper, associate director of the Centre for International Governance Intervention in Waterloo, Canada, said: “The L20 becomes in essence, a meeting place for the different civilisations of the world, not just taking into account the different histories and development trajectories of the actors at the table, but searching for common ground between them.”

Whither the G8? Should it fade away by expanding its membership into the L20? “The answer, I believe, is no. The G8 has a role to play on its own, and while one may wish it would do more, it would be sorely missed,” says Martin.

The G8 has its roots in the 1973 oil crisis and subsequent global recession. In 1975, French President Valéry Giscard d’Estaing invited the heads of state of six major industrialised democracies to a summit in Rambouillet, and proposed regular meetings.

The participants agreed to an annual meeting organised under a rotating presidency, forming what was dubbed the Group of Six (G6) consisting of Britain, France, West Germany, Italy, Japan and the United States.

At the subsequent annual summit in Puerto Rico, it became the Group of Seven (G7) when Canada joined at the behest of U.S. president Gerald Ford in 1976. The European Union has attended meetings since it was first invited by Britain in 1977.

In 1991, following the end of the Cold War, Russia began meeting with the G7 after the main summit. This group became known as the P8 (Political 8), or colloquially the “G7 plus 1”, starting with the 1994 Naples summit.

Russia was allowed to participate more fully beginning in the 1998 Birmingham summit, marking the creation of the Group of Eight.