The Problem with the G8 Summit

How can it be successful when it excludes some of the most important countries from discussions that affect them?

At both press conferences that Prime Minister Stephen Harper gave last week as host to the G8 and G20 summits – the G8 in idyllic Muskoka country, and the G20 in nearby cosmopolitan Toronto – the first question reporters asked him was: What need is there for a G8 when all the members of it are part of the broader G20 as well?

In other words, wouldn’t it have been better – instead of slicing and dicing the world community – to hold one larger and longer summit for everyone, allowing enough time for sets and subsets of leaders to meet and conduct business, while contributing to a more unified international community and projecting a vision of Canada as a host to the world?

Harper’s response was a categorical no. He defended keeping the summits separate, in two nearby, but starkly different locations, as if to emphasize their separateness and to justify keeping them that way. Referring to the need for the G8 and casting it in a light distinctly different from that of the G20, he said, “There is nothing that can substitute for the wide-ranging, frank, and intimate discussion that occurs between old allies and long-time friends.”

Meanwhile, Chinese president Hu Jintao, not included in the G8, was already in Toronto, begging the question of why even China isn’t included in such discussions of global political and security issues – while being the world’s second-largest economy, and its largest creditor and most populous nation.

In Harper’s thinking, the members of the G8 (a club dominated by western countries) are “likeminded” and have a “commonality of purpose” that cannot be expected of the G20. The G8 remains propped up as a forum for the discussion of “development, democracy, peace, and security,” while the role of the G20, ironically, is seen as being far more limited: to cut deficits and bring solid growth back to western economies – which are currently undergoing a fragile recovery from two years of almost unprecedented sluggishness and, except for Canada, sovereign debt crises on both sides of the Atlantic.

And therein lies the problem. Powerful countries such as China, India, Turkey, Brazil, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia, and a handful of others not in the G20, including Iran, are being told that they are not likeminded with western countries and thus systematically excluded from old boys’ clubs, personified by G8 summits. At the same time, such excluded countries are being told to tighten their belts and help bail western countries out of their self-inflicted economic wounds. From an Asian, Latin American, or “Second World” perspective, this seems like being told, “I like your money but not you.”

You cannot treat people or countries that way and expect them to cooperate – especially when they are speaking from a position of newfound strength. “Do as I say not as I do” is no longer a viable way of running the world.

The exclusionary and arbitrary thinking that underlies this type of summitry represents an ongoing attachment to the western imperial project, at a time when Asian and Latin American countries have for the first time turned into globally significant players with independent agendas that question and oppose such “West vs. the rest” suppositions, especially when they are cloaked in the rhetoric of freedom, development, and human rights.

How could this type of summitry be successful when some of the world’s most important countries are overtly kept out of security and political discussions pertaining to their own regions of the world?

The Canadian summits were entitled “Recovery and New Beginnings.” In advance of the meetings, the Harper government had promised that the theme of “reform” – both of western private banks and of the World Bank and the IMF – would be among the key items on the agenda. “Transparency” was billed as a central goal.

Yet nothing resembling a reform or transparency agenda was actually tabled. On the contrary, a spirited defence of the status quo was offered by Canada’s Conservative government, hearkening back to simplistic and smug “end of history” and “clash of civilizations” theses that had come into vogue in the late 1980s and early 1990s, and, astonishingly, still govern our current leaders’ thinking.

Given the massive change that the world’s economic and political and cultural landscape has witnessed in the past two decades, this can only mean that as far as contemporary international relations are concerned, Canada’s current political leaders are frozen in time, and thus viewed with scepticism, if not outright suspicion, by the world’s emergent powers. They are seen as anachronistic and out of step with most of humanity, still wedded to the colonial mindset in a decidedly post-colonial world.

A real commitment to reform and transparency would have thrown some light on why the World Bank Group of organizations, ostensibly committed to poverty reduction, remain some of the world’s untransparent institutions. What do the leaders of such organizations mean exactly when they refer to “private sector development”? And whose private sectors are they developing? Canada, which has led the way in “tied aid” – forcing aid recipients to buy from Canadian companies – had promised to “untie” some of its aid. But that promise, too, came and went like the supposed reform and transparency agenda.

World Bank president Robert Zoellick, who attended the G20 summit in Toronto, is a good representative of people who still set much of the global agenda. As a veteran of the George W. Bush administration and of Goldman Sachs, he should be asked how exactly the latest detours of his career have positioned him to lead the fight against world poverty. Or is their “development” agenda more about maintaining the stranglehold of select multinationals in the name of development? These are the types of questions that always seem to go unanswered in these types of meetings.

To be fair, the Harper government should be applauded for committing an extra $1 billion for maternal and infant health in Africa – to be paid over five years. Compare that, however, to the same amount that was spent (or blown) on security over three days of summitry in Muskoka and Toronto. The likeminded “old friends” to whom the Canadian prime minister was cozying up have spent more than a thousand times that amount, some $1 trillion, in Iraq and Afghanistan over the past decade, bringing “peace, development, and security” to their hapless peoples.

This was the second in a two-part series by Alidad Mafinezam on the Canadian G8 and G20 summits. The first part can be read here.