New Delhi: The leaders of Group of Seven or G7 countries — France, Italy, Canada, the US, Japan, Germany and the UK — are set to meet for this year’s annual summit in Biarritz, France, from 24-26 August.
French President Emmanuel Macron has also invited non-member countries — India, Australia, Spain, South Africa, Senegal and Rwanda — to be a part of the summit.
Considering the challenges to the world order, Macron said he would put forward an ambitious agenda before the G7 leaders. However, there are several structural constraints in today’s multilateralism that would make it unlikely for the member-countries to bring about reforms.
Here is a look at these structural impediments, Macron’s ambitious agenda and what previous G7 summits had achieved.
Macron’s plan of action
Arguing for a deviation from the past, Macron said G7 should get rid of the tradition of issuing joint final communiqués. “No one reads the communiqués, let’s be honest. And in recent times you read the communiqués only to detect disagreements,” he said.
“This system is a perversity because it bureaucratises the thing. None of the leaders discusses them in advance. These are the quarrels of bureaucrats and the deep state,” Macron added.
The French President went on to say that he would prefer if the G7 leaders had more substantive and intimate discussions, instead of spending long hours trying to agree upon a bland communiqué.
“The role of leaders is to veer away from their historic positions, to take liberties, to decide, and to give instructions to their administrations,” he said.
Besides such structural reforms, the French President also talked about how the world is currently plagued by three problems — a “crisis of democracy”, capitalism and inequality.
What past G7 summits indicate
If the last two G7 summits are anything to go by, Macron is unlikely to see implementation of any of his proposals.
In the 2018 summit held in Charlevoix, Canada, the G7 member-states managed to produce a watered-down version of a joint communiqué after a lot of deliberations.
Just minutes after his departure from Canada, Trump had cited trade tensions with Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau for retracting his endorsement to the joint statement.
Other G7 leaders were also reported to have had testy meetings with Trump. Germany’s Angela Merkel even described the US President’s behaviour as “sobering and a bit depressing”.
A year before that — at the 2017 summit held in Sicily, Italy — Trump had undermined the summit even before it began.
Prior to his arrival in Italy, Trump had chided North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) member-countries, some of which are also G7 members, for not paying their share to the treaty.
At the Sicily summit, Trump had even refused to commit to the 2015 Paris climate agreement and hinted at the possibility of withdrawing from it, which he did soon after.
The final joint communiqué had an unusual feature — a footnote saying the US would not join with the other six countries in reaffirming their Paris commitments.
Given how the past two G7 communiqués have become classic examples of a failure of multilateralism, Macron’s dislike for such joint statements is totally understood.
If the two G7 summits since Trump’s election are any indicators, the group is likely to see similar fate this year also.
Trump not the real problem
On the face of it, Trump seems to be the stumbling block to successful deliberations at G7 summits. But that is far from the truth.
Political scientist Ian Bremmer points out in his book, Every Nation for Itself, a much deeper identity problem with the G7.
In 1975, G6 was established. It became the G7 after Canada became a part of it a year later. The group had two goals — to protect and spread free-market democracy, and contain Soviet Union’s communism.
With the end of the Cold War in 1989, the second objective of the G7 also ended.
This goal was so prominent that Russia was allowed to join G7 (turning it into G8) to accommodate the former Soviet Union into the new global order. Russia was, however, pushed out of the G8 in 2014 after it occupied Crimea from Ukraine.
Bremmer argues that by the time the G7 was established, divergence of interests had already begun to emerge between the US and other G7 countries. What kept them together was a common interest in ensuring a free market-centric global economy and the threat from the USSR.
Additionally, while the G7 was a platform for the US and other member-countries to formulate a common global agenda, it was essentially an American club. American economic and military power underpinned the importance of the G7.
Since then, two things have fundamentally changed.
Back in 1975, other G7 powers had begun to challenge American dominance at the international level, but the US still dominated the global order. Today, with the rise of China and others, the US is relatively less in control of global outcomes.
For a superpower to create a global order of its liking, it needs to bear certain costs such as being open to absorbing excess global supply of goods and provide the necessary security.
The US is no longer ready to absorb those costs and this was the case even during former US President Barack Obama’s tenure.
Mundane statements every year
The US, however, still continues to be the sole superpower. But unlike before, the US is now using its power to undermine the very process of multilateralism.
“Multilateral institutions are platforms for the major powers to tussle for influence, and for other states to try to influence the biggest beasts,” writes Richard Gowan, senior fellow at the Tokyo-based United Nations University.
Competition makes cooperation harder. Moreover, with rising competition comes a lot of divergent interests, says Gowan. Though multilateralism continues, it comes at the cost of being more and more flexible.
Increasingly, all the G7 summits reflect this reality. Year after year, they try and aim for the lowest common denominator as a means to just keep the process alive. The end results are mundane statements, stressing the value of democracy, freedom of navigation and a rule-based world order, while substantive policy suggestions are left out.
With such structural constraints, it is unlikely that Macron’s idea that leaders “veer away from their historic positions, to take liberties, to decide” will come to fruition.
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