The Stanley Foundation

The essential challenge for multilateral cooperation is a global agenda loaded with items that require heavy political lifting. With their disparate postures toward, say, nuclear proliferation or the global economic downturn, world leaders can reap little political gain “back home”—and potentially a lot of pain—from efforts to bridge those differences.

If these times call on leaders, therefore, to summon their inner statesmen, then diplomatic venues like the recent back-to-back Toronto summits of the G-8 and G-20 are perfect settings to gauge how they’re responding. In fact, the recent history of the G-20 illustrates both the hope and the difficulty.

This group of old and new powers was formed after the late-1990s Asian financial meltdown to bring finance ministers together. Then, at the height of the Wall Street credit crunch in November 2008, the Bush administration realized the need to work with a wider group than just the traditional major economies of the G-8 and hosted the first-ever summit of G-20 leaders.

The three G-20 summits of 2008-09—which yielded collective commitments to add to the International Monetary Fund’s coffers and inject stimulus into the world economy—were instrumental in preventing a great depression. As a test of statesmanship, then, this effort deserves high marks indeed. Looking ahead, it also raises a critical question about multilateral cooperation: do these actions show a new spirit of collective and mutual responsibility among leading nations, or merely that they will join together in a dire emergency?

This question of whether influential nations will cooperate in solving international problems lies at the heart of the Stanley Foundation’s programs on the evolving global system. The title of this article paraphrases a participant at our recent pre-summit conference on “Leadership and the Global Governance Agenda: Three Voices” who remarked that “we’re going to need a lot of statesmanship.” The “voices” are those of the conference’s cosponsors, the Stanley Foundation along with Canada’s Centre for International Governance Innovation and the China Institutes of Contemporary International Relations.

For my own section in the document prepared for the conference, I address the nature of countries’ shared interests in the greater good and the special role of the G groupings:

One way to reckon the shared stakes in cooperative problem solving is to look at the consequences of these challenges. Pick any major problem on the agenda and the trajectory without an infusion of international leadership and cooperation could lead to a dire foreseeable future: nuclear arms races in Northeast Asia and the Middle East, a generation of children in extreme poverty with their development stunted by malnutrition, a tipping point of irreversible climate change, mounting bitterness over the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, mounting suspicion that globalization is rigged for the benefit of the few. In sum, inertia is not a great option…

Since the purpose of the G groupings is to convene upper tier countries, they offer a window into major-power relations, certainly in terms of the prospects for collective action. With the loose structure and malleability of the G groupings, it is interesting to note how they fit into the broader ecosystem of multilateral instruments. Because they revolve around governmental policy makers at the highest levels, the Gs are also instructive regarding the basic challenge of translating political authority and leadership into effective action and problem solving.

Which brings us back to the Toronto summits. That is summits in the plural because separate meetings were held of the G-8 and G-20. By the time of their September 2009 summit in Pittsburgh, the G-20 leaders were ready to anoint the process as “the premier forum for international economic cooperation” and commit themselves to annual meetings. Giving such a prominent role to a forum that includes established and emergent powers alike would seem to solve the problem of putting, say, China, India, and Brazil on a more equal multilateral footing with traditional powers like the US, Germany, and Japan. Then why is the G-8 still meeting?

The clue is the Pittsburgh announcement of the G-20 as the premier economic forum, which keeps its focus on global economic growth and the international financial system—and leaves the G-8 as the designated “G” for the rest of the global agenda, particularly development assistance and political and security affairs. Yet this is a structural problem for multilateral cooperation, as I explained in my article in the semi-official magazine compiled for each summit by the University of Toronto’s G-8 Research Group and G-20 Research Group:

Whatever the issue or goal, in assessing the groupings’ multilateral efforts, the same basic calculus applies as in any collective endeavour: what a given group can accomplish depends on who is at the table. The major political challenges of today – fragile states, poverty reduction, and the terrorist and nuclear threats – need to be tackled in multiple dimensions. A like-minded group of western powers (plus Russia) such as the G8 is well suited to tackle these problems at some levels. But to deal with the politically sensitive dimensions, a more diverse group such as the G20 is needed.

Indeed, the G-8 mostly did what they could—launching a new multi-billion dollar initiative to achieve the UN Millennium Development Goals in the area of maternal and child health, committing to build highway and rail links across the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, and making statements on Iran and North Korea.

But even with the confines of a relatively homogeneous group of states, there were tensions. The G-8’s Global Partnership Against the Spread of Weapons and Materials of Mass Destruction provides for the cost of dismantling arms and tightening security at related facilities, having been launched in 2002 with a ten-year commitment and pledges of $20 billion. With two years remaining on its original mandate and President Obama's current push to secure all the world's vulnerable nuclear material, supporters are already pointing the way for extension and expansion of the effort (the foundation recently published a brief by a top US official responsible for cooperative threat reduction in the US Department of State, Ambassador Bonnie Jenkins). Unfortunately, the Toronto summit was not the most hospitable venue for new budgetary pledges, with Germany being especially austere.

For the Iran statement, it’s worth noting that three key players on the issue—China, Brazil, and Turkey—are part of the G-20, but not the G-8. The real center of diplomatic action on Iran is the UN Security Council, reflecting its proper role. But while the G-20 won’t (and shouldn’t) usurp the Security Council in dealing with such specific situations, the narrow membership of the G-8 makes it ill-equipped to deal with the political fissures on nonproliferation that were revealed by the Iran sanctions debate. And it is also a sign of the basic structural limitations of the G-8.

— David Shorr