THE GROUP of Eight major industrialised economies, meeting at their summit in the Italian town of L’Aquila, are no longer as dominant as before. But they continue to have an influential role in setting and brokering international agendas even as they seek to manage a transition towards a more globally representative system of leadership.
Their meetings yesterday with Brazil, China, India, Mexico and South Africa on climate change and world trade, and today with African states on development aid and agriculture, demonstrate that these vital issues can be framed and brought forward in this setting, even if firm agreements are difficult to reach and must be pursued elsewhere.
The global economic crisis forms an essential backdrop to their deliberations. The United States, Japan, Russia, Germany, France, Britain, Italy and Canada have a combined population of 880 million and a combined gross domestic product of $32 trillion. But their economies are now much more closely interdependent among themselves and with the rest of the world than before. Some of the resultant tensions have been plain to see at this summit. It has divided more cautious states like Germany and Canada – anxious to escape from excessive borrowing, stimulus and inflationary dangers - from those like the US, Britain and France which see such measures as essential to stave off economic depression. The agreed texts reflect these varying interests and policies, acknowledging that exit strategies “will vary from country to country depending on domestic economic conditions and public finances”.
A similar tension affects strategies towards climate change. While it was comparatively easy to reach agreement between the G8 and the wider group on an 80 per cent cut in carbon emissions by 2050, securing a commitment on a more near term deal by 2020 proved impossible at this summit. The major developing states are determined they should not bear the major burden of adjusting to the environmental cost imposed on the whole world by the last 200 years of industrialisation which made members of the G8 into the richest states.
Nor are they willing to play around with the dates for cuts already agreed in the Kyoto negotiations. Efforts by the US to shift them to a more recent year, together with President Obama’s frank acknowledgment of his political difficulties in getting congressional approval for steeper emission reductions there, contribute to a lack of trust between these negotiating groups. This means the bargaining must continue intensively between now and the climate change summit at Copenhagen next December.
It is wrong to judge this or other G8 summits only by the specific agreements reached, since most of their substance must be concluded in other more representative forums. The G8 system is part of a wider global process, now in evident transition. On this occasion it has given Mr Obama the opportunity to register a fresh US approach towards central international issues. The agreement to reconvene the world trade talks and to intensify climate change bargaining are welcome shifts.