India pulled off a spectacular success at the just concluded New Delhi G20 Summit. An extremely well-organised event attended by the top world leaders with a right touch of colour and éclat, the Indian diplomatic team had a challenging if, at times, despairing ~ task to achieve consensus on the summit document when many of the participants were not even on talking terms.
Achieving universal praise from world leaders for its organisation, its ambitious agenda and its skilful straddling of these divides is testimony to the country’s organisational capabilities, negotiating savvy, and the country’s and the Prime Minister’s international prestige. The fateful nature of this summit with serious implications for the G20’s future, the parlous state of the global economy and overall stability is reflected in the Leaders’ Declaration itself whose negotiations tested the risk-taking capability of the Indian side in bringing it to fruitful conclusion.
Upgraded to the national leadership level at the height of the 2008 global financial and economic crisis from that of the finance ministers and central bank governors of the 20 major economies after the Southeast Asian economic crisis (1997-98), this global economic coordination mechanism is beset with a widening economic divide between countries and aggravated great power tensions even as the pace of technology and global warming defy solutions except through collective global effort.
To achieve the ‘Bharat’ imprint on its evolutionary journey is certainly an impressive result. Created to achieve global macro-economic stability, the G20’s record on this score has been mixed since all its decisions have to be fleshed out by “official” multilateral organisations comprising much larger memberships.
The “cascading challenges and crises”, mentioned in the Declaration, have only worsened with the G7 leaders’ decision to bring the Ukraine conflict front- and-centre to the G20 process threatening to derail it just when the UN secretary-general has been warning about a dysfunctional UN system; the Bali Summit only made it worse.
Both at Bali and at New Delhi, leaders were forced to recognise that “geopolitical and security issues” ~ hence their resolution at such forums ~ “can have significant consequences for the global economy”; this is a departure from the G20’s earlier summits. G7 leaders’ injection of this dimension can paralyse this process when circumstances change in the future ~ as they would inevitably, given the current geopolitical volatility.
The Indian negotiators ~ and the leadership ~ had to begin with the Bali formulation on Ukraine and find common language whilst retaining its substance. As the Indian Sherpa noted, a take-it-or-leave-it stance was taken on the final draft to force the participants to countenance the prospect of the Summit’s failure. A bold decision was to not invite the Ukrainian President to address the Summit.
Because of the recognition of Indian prestige across the geopolitical divide, the Prime Minister’s personal rapport with most leaders, and the mobilisation of the key Global South leaders, namely the past presidency (Indonesia), and the next two (Brazil and South Africa), the final draft was accepted by all participants and instantaneously adopted at the Prime Minister’s initiative; this allowed all sides to claim victory on the Ukraine issue which was set in a much wider geopolitical context of the deleterious effects of conflicts in general. G7 countries also realised that most developing countries have been taking a more ambivalent position on the Ukraine conflict despite their voting record in the UN General Assembly.
Concerned about its economic fallout in their respective countries, they are far more invested in the G20’s continuation as they can influence its decisions on the vital issue of sustainable economic growth and stability. A significant expansion of the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa) at its Johannesburg Summit (August, 2023) with more countries applying for membership of this ‘Non-West’ organisation was a signal to the G7 that an excessive focus on the political and security aspects of the Ukrainian crisis was counter-productive.
That its geopolitical heft is inadequate to create a post-Cold War global political and economic order was indeed recognised by them at the launch of the G20 forum at the finance ministers’ level in 1999. The Declaration encompasses critical macro-economic issues of equity, sustainability, wider socio-economic progress, climate crisis, reformed multilateralism, international taxation, women’s empowerment and terrorism and money-laundering advancing an ambitious common programme for the radically altered circumstances in the 21st-century to work for the objective of ‘One Earth, One Family, One Future’.
A number of working groups had worked hard on these thorny issues where Indian achievements in digital infrastructure, financial inclusion, public health, renewable energy, lifestyle for sustainable developments et cetera were showcased for the wider world, both the developing and the developed.
The Prime Minister has suggested a virtual summit before the end of the Indian presidency in November, 2023, so that timebound commitments can be passed on to the incoming Brazilian presidency. These can be shaped further as India will continue to be part of the G20 Troika comprising the outgoing, the incumbent, and the incoming presidencies. Global ~ and, planetary ~ challenges remain daunting with shrinking time-horizons which are affecting global stability and social fragility.
State fragility or collapse, as currently evident, diminishes governance capabilities which in turn become challenge-multipliers. Due to the Indian initiative to give this process mass character, involving the developing countries extensively, many of these ideas do not even require adoption by the “official” multilateral institutions but can be propagated through experiencesharing and capacity-building in bilateral and plurilateral frameworks.
For several years already, the G20 process has been buffeted by geopolitical tensions as much as any other multilateral organisation. As it articulates more vigorously the voice of the Global South, the G7 is also consolidating whilst the absence of Russian and Chinese Presidents at the New Delhi Summit suggests a perception among decisionmakers in these countries that the G20 is getting increasingly dominated by the West.
They are concentrating their efforts to develop the ‘Non-West’ multilateral organisations. These widening geopolitical fault-lines do not bode too well for the health of G20’s future. The post-Cold War history demonstrates that alternative, competing organisations to the existing UN system are not their effective replacement. The West is also exploring further options in multilateral diplomacy such as the joint IBSA-US statement on the sidelines of the New Delhi Summit, to build on the “historic progress” of India’s G20 presidency. Both Russia and China are absent in the IBSA organisation which comprises India, Brazil and South Africa.
The Prime Minister’s approach to strengthen the existing UN system by making it more responsive to the challenges of the 21st century is thoughtful. This is important lest it also becomes a relic of the past leaving our troubled, volatile world and its challenges without a global governance mechanism.
(The writer is a former ambassador and his book ‘Geopolitics in the Era of Globalisation‘ was published by Routledge in 2021)