G8

1. University of Toronto. G8 Information Centre.
University of Toronto. G8 Information Centre. • What is the G8? • Français | Russkiy | Deutsch | Italiano | Japanese | Espagnol Sea Island, Georgia, United States, June 8-10, 2004 U.S. Government 2004 G8 Summit website | Sea Island Summiteer newsletter (U.S. government) Evian, France, June 1-3, 2003 Road to Evian | Delegations & Documents | Government of France 2003 G8 summit website | Government of Switzerland 2003 G8 summit website Summits, Meetings & Documents of G7 & G8 Summits: Delegations & Documents | Ministerial Meetings | Officials-Level Meetings Scholarly Writings & Policy Analyses Analytical Studies | Data Sets | Fact Sheets | Bibliography | Latest Citations | Conferences | Publications & Papers | G8 Governance Working Papers | G8 & Global Governance Book Series | Oral History G8 Research The G8 Research Group | Professional Advisory Council | Special Advisors | G7/G8 Research Library Collection | Photos | Partner Institutions | News Releases | Annual Reports G8 Teaching G8 Online: 2003, 2002 | Speakers' Series | Teaching Program Scholarships The Catherwood Scholarship | Eligibility & Application Procedures | The Catherwood Scholars | The Robert H. Catherwood Lectures Links to Other G7/8-Related Sites Governmental | International Organizations | Nongovernmental | Media G20 Meetings & Related Documents | What is the G20? | Bibliography | What's New G8 in the News G8 Bulletin | G20 Bulletin | Financial Post Sponsors Munk Centre for International Studies | International Relations Program Trinity College | EnviReform | University of Toronto Libraries | University of Toronto | Sponsorship Making the Georgia G8 Work for America Professor John Kirton, Director, G8 Research Group Address sponsored by the Center for International Trade and Security, University of Georgia, Athens, Georgia October 3, 2003 Introduction: Why the G8 Matters for America On June 8–10, 2004, the United States will host the 30th annual Summit of the Group of Eight major market democracies. The event will bring to Sea Island, Georgia, the nine leaders of the world’s most powerful countries — the U.S., Japan, Germany, Britain, France, Italy, Canada and Russia — and of the semi-sovereign European Union as well. With the leaders will come a retinue of a few thousand officials, a few thousand journalists and several thousand security personnel. Also arriving will be tens of thousands, potentially even hundreds of thousands, civil society protestors as well. “What does this G8 gathering mean for Georgia?” is the immediate question on everyone’s minds. This one is easy to answer. It is already clear the G8 will bring unrivalled benefits to Georgia in global recognition and economic stimulus, and no real disruption or damage from any demonstrators who might get out of hand. The G8 is the globe’s great geopolitical Olympics, assembling and attracting the attention — not of the world’s leading athletes and sports fans — but of the world’s most powerful economic, financial and business decision makers. The far bigger, broader question is “Why does the Georgia G8 matter for America as a whole?” This question remains much more difficult to answer definitively at this time. For one thing, the U.S. does not formally take the chair of the G8 until January 1, 2004. Until then, the G8 remains firmly in the hands of France, which has had a difficult relationship with America of late. Even when the U.S. gets the chair, as host it has always been the slowest of the G8 powers to focus on what to do with “its” hometown summit, if only because America has so many other institutions and instruments available to exercise its influence in the world. Moreover, for the first time since America first hosted the summit in 1976, in another sumptuous resort hotel on the Atlantic seaboard, the 2004 Summit will take place in the immediate lead-up to a presidential election (see Appendix A). The U.S. G8 game plan will thus have to wait until President George Bush, Karl Rove and their colleagues determine the re-election campaign strategy. Most important, there is a battle still raging in the White House between those who say America does not need, and should thus dispense with, the G8 Summit and those who argue that as long as America has it, it should make it work for President Bush and the United States. Today I will argue that America needs the G8, and needs it far more than even its advocates in the White House acknowledge or argue for at the present time. America needs it because the G8 is emerging as the effective centre of global governance — as the one international institution able and willing to deliver what America now needs. The G8 is emerging at a time when an increasingly vulnerable America requires the far-reaching, innovative co-operation of the major open-market, democratic powers that gather with it as equals in the G8. It is thus good news that the prospects for the Georgia G8 Summit seem promising at present. It is also good news that the U.S. has a distinguished record of making the G8 work for America in the past. The current challenge — for all Americans, North Americans and their allies — is making Georgia’s G8 Summit work for America in 2004. To provide a foundation for thinking about how to make this happen, I will address five questions in turn: first, what this G8 is that is coming to Georgia; second, why, as an international institution, it works so well; third, why America needs it; fourth, whether Georgia will G8 give America what it needs now; and, finally, how it can be made to work best for America next year. [back to top] 1. What Is the G8? Just what is this G8 that is coming to Georgia next June? At first glance, it is merely a weekend conversation and “photo op” among nine leaders: America’s George Bush, Japan’s Junichiro Koizumi, Germany’s Gerhard Schroeder, Britain’s Tony Blair, France’s Jacques Chirac, Italy’s Silvio Berlusconi, Canada’s new prime minister Paul Martin, Russia’s Vladimir Putin and the European Union’s Romano Prodi. But a closer look at its 30-year history shows that the G8 summit is much more than that. This once-a-year encounter was created by six crises, through three processes, in order to perform a single mission — a mission that remains central to America’s purpose in the world to this day. Take your mind back to the early 1970s. These were very bad times for the United States, and for the world. The grim mood was captured well by Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who in America’s bicentennial year wrote that “liberal democracy on the American model increasingly tends to the condition of monarchy in the 19th century; a holdover form of government, one which persists in isolated or peculiar places here and there, and may even serve well enough for special circumstances, but which has simply no relevance for the future. It is where the world was, not where it is going … increasingly, democracy is seen as an arrangement peculiar to a handful of North Atlantic countries.” [back to top] The Six Crises of the Creation It was clear why Moynihan was so pessimistic. America had been assaulted by a cascading series of six crises during the preceding five years. The first was about finance. August 15th, 1971, saw the brutal destruction of the system of fixed and adjustable exchange rates that had reigned since the International Monetary Fund (IMF) was founded at Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, in 1944 — a system that was now punishing America by forcing it to have an overvalued dollar. The second crisis was about trade. It came in 1973, when a new round of multilateral trade liberalization was launched but was immediately paralyzed by the deep north-south divisions and global recession that erupted that year. The third crisis was about energy, for these divisions and recession were the result of the October 1973 oil shock, which cut off oil supplies and raised oil prices for Americans and most of the rest of the world. The fourth crisis was about war in the Middle East. The oil shock was, in turn, the result of the October 1973 war, where a democratic Israel almost went under while virtually all North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) allies refused to allow America to deliver the supplies that Israel needed to survive. The fifth crisis was about the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. In May 1974, using American and Canadian technology, India exploded a nuclear bomb it claimed was for peaceful purposes; this ended a full decade during which horizontal nuclear proliferation had been successfully stopped. The sixth crisis was about a long, losing, land war in Asia, which ended in April 1975, when the last American helicopters lifted off from the roof of the embassy in Saigon, South Vietnam fell to the communist North and America “came home” in defeat. These cascading crises fuelled two ominous trends. Across the Atlantic, democracy became imperilled, as “Euro-communism” threatened to bring 1940s-style communist governments to power in Greece, Spain, Portugal and Italy itself. And terrorism tore through the west, as angry young men hijacked civilian airliners, killed their innocent victims and went unpunished, as many countries accepted their claim to be “freedom fighters” for the downtrodden of the world. [back to top] The Three Founding Processes What was to be done, to stave off defeat for America and for its animating ideal of democracy in the world? One group of G8 founding fathers, the “librarians” led by France’s Valéry Giscard d’Estaing and Germany’s Helmut Schmidt, as finance ministers had gathered in the White House Library for private chats about how to replace a broken Bretton Woods. They wanted to continue their discussions at a higher level, now that they had the top political job back home. A second group, the “trilateralists,” had been meeting together as business and policy leaders in North America, Europe and Japan. Now many of their members had gone into government and wanted to put their new ideas about collective management into action from the top. A third group, the “concerteers,” were led by America’s new Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger. He saw his much-loved Atlantic alliance in disarray and on the verge of defeat. So Kissinger reached back to his Ph.D. thesis on the 19th-century Concert of Europe for a different formula for how America could co-operate with its democratic allies to survive in this crisis-ridden world. [back to top] The One Core Mission Like its 19th-century precursor, Kissinger’s new, late 20th-century concert would gather together all, and only, the major powers to govern the world collectively. But unlike the original, this new version would be an all-democratic club. The centrality of the democratic principle was clear from the G8’s membership. Only — and almost all of — the democratic major powers were invited to the first summit, held at Rambouillet, France, in November 1975. It was also clear from the concluding communiqué at Rambouillet. It boldly began: “We came together because of shared beliefs and shared responsibilities. We are each responsible for the government of an open, democratic society, dedicated to individual liberty and social advancement. Our success will strengthen, indeed is essential to, democratic societies everywhere.” Making the world democracy is what the G8 is all about. [back to top] The Summit Achievements How well has it done in achieving this ambitious mission? During its first 29 years, the annual summit has sometimes succeeded spectacularly, and sometimes failed miserably, in bringing its proud and powerful members together to pursue this quest (see Appendix B). But over these three decades, some basic trends stand out. The summit has dealt with an ever broadening agenda, encompassing economic, global-transnational and political-security issues, and expanding from issues of common interest only to the G8 to those of the full global community, and to those long considered the core of domestic political life. The G8 has pioneered far-reaching new principles, including the need to intervene in the internal affairs of sovereign states to preserve democracy and liberty and to have globalization promote social cohesion and the natural environment, and even the need for preventive, if not quite pre-emptive, action in order to ensure that weapons of mass destruction stay out of terrorists’ hands. The G8 has produced ever more specific, collective, publicly encoded commitments, with the 14 at Rambouillet in 1975, and the seven at San Juan, Puerto Rico, in 1976, exploding to 206 at Evian, France, in June 2003. Compliance with these commitments has almost always been in the positive range, with the level of compliance rising during the post–cold war years. The G8 has generated a system of supporting ministerial and official-level institutions, to the point where a majority of cabinet secretaries in its member countries now have a G8 institution of their own (see Appendix C). And the G8 summit has come to serve as the great global fundraiser, mobilizing US$26 billion for Russia in 1992, US$43 billion for Russia in 1993 and billions to relieve the debt of the poorest in the late 1990s. It added another US$1 billion for debt relief of the poorest, plus US$20 billion to safely eliminate weapons of mass destruction, plus US$12 billion a year for global poverty reduction, all at Kananaskis in 2002. Above all, the G8 has fulfilled its mission, by producing the big breakthroughs in world politics in the past 30 years. The most important is what can be called “the second Russian revolution” — the surprisingly successful end of the cold war, through a largely, peaceful process, with the democratic world victorious, the Soviet empire ended and the remnant Russia transformed into a democratic polity that is now a full member of the G8 club. Another was the liberation of Kosovo, starting on March 24, 1999, when the G7 decided to intervene in the internal affairs of a sovereign Yugoslavia by initiating a war that successfully prevented an emerging genocide, produced a democratic Serbia and put Slobodan Milosevic on trial for war crimes in the Hague. [back to top] 2. Why Does It Work So Well? Why has the G8 summit system worked so effectively, especially in a world where the heavy, hard law international organizations of the United Nations are the kind that many think are necessary for effective global governance in the world? One cause is the G8’s collective predominance, which gives it the weight to shape global order as a whole. Another is its effective internal equality, which induces each member to co-operate with the others to make its own individual weight felt in the world. Another cause is its constricted participation, which makes it easier and faster to arrive at ambitious, timely, well-tailored agreements to respond to a fast-moving world. And another cause is common principles — of democracy, liberty and social advancement, in a sharp contrast to the deeply divided Permanent Five (P5) veto powers of the United Nations Security Council (UNSC). Yet another is political control by democratically and popularly elected leaders, who personally deliver and dominate an institution in which they are free to do what the world needs at any time. [back to top] 3. Why Does America Need It? Does America still need the G8? After all, we are a long way from the dismal days, just “before defeat” in the 1970s, when the group sprung to life at Rambouillet. With the G8, America has now won the cold war, unleashed a process of rapid globalization and become what many see as the only remaining superpower, or even the “hyper hegemon” in the world. Yet those six crises of the early 1970s are still with us, if not in acute form, at least close enough at hand to require constant co-operation among the democratic major powers of the world. In the field of finance, the G7 (the G8 without Russia) has recently forced the IMF to bail out Argentina once again, and has prompted markets to adjust exchange rates to help Americans find badly needed jobs. In trade, after the September 2003 failure of the World Trade Organization (WTO) in Cancun, it will be up to the G8 to revive the Doha development round, or find a trade-liberalizing alternative, so that America can get the access it needs to find markets in — and get jobs from — the big, important countries in the world. In energy, as Bush highlighted when he first ran for the presidency, America needs the G8 to help solve its energy security problem, now made more acute by the virtual shutdown of supplies in Iraq and by production cuts and prices recently announced by the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC). In the Middle East, war has become chronic, with the President’s Road Map to Peace on the ropes in Palestine, the suicide bombers back in Israel, and the body bags coming home from Iraq, this time containing Americans. The problem with the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction is now being solved, expensively, in Russia and Iraq, but still exists poignantly in neighbouring Ukraine and Iran and in North Korea as well. In Asia, a long, possibly losing land war is looming in Afghanistan, where the allies control little more than the capital city and where their “search and destroy” missions have failed to find an Osama Bin Laden and Mullah Omar still on the loose. The two broader challenges caused by these crises also remain. The democratic revolution, begun so strongly at the start of the 1990s has now stalled. It still needs to be defended in Venezuela, and extended to Afghanistan, to most of the Middle East and to much of the East Asian mainland as well. And the long, costly war against terrorism continues, not just in distant theatre but also inside America, in Lackawana, New York, and now in Guantanamo Bay as well. Can America conquer these many challenges all by itself, or does it require the active assistance from its major G8 partners? In the domain of raw military power, America may soon start to need, rather than merely want, the combat capabilities of its G8 partners, in Afghanistan and Iraq, and in potentially patrolling a line between Israel and Palestine. The need is growing as ever more American national guards and reservists are called up and sent to the deadly front lines. Beyond the military challenges lies the task of mobilizing the money needed to secure the democratic reconstruction of Afghanistan, Iraq and, possibly, Palestine. Who has the money to do it, and how should the burden be shared? Today, in a global economy with a gross domestic product (GDP) currently valued at about US$32 trillion, the G7 together commands a convincing two-thirds majority of US$21 billion. America alone, at US$11 trillion dollars, has only a minority one-third share. The simple arithmetic suggests that if America acts in partnership with its collectively equal G7 partners, it dominates and wins. If it acts alone, it is bound to lose. Not surprisingly, Bush has chosen, as have presidents Bill Clinton and George H. Bush before him during the past decade, to act together through the G8 as the great global fundraiser to mobilize the money needed to deliver the big victories in the world. In the coming weeks, American, G8 and other officials will be attending pledging conferences to mobilize as much as a quarter of a trillion new dollars needed to secure the democratic reconstruction of Afghanistan, Iraq and Palestine. It would be nice if the whole world would bear that burden equally and raise the money through the UN. But that happy outcome will not happen. One solution is for American taxpayers to do it all alone — to pay three times as much as they otherwise would. The superior solution is for America to share the burden equally with its G8 partners, to raise enough to get the job done and to cut the American taxpayers’ bill in half. Whether it be the military or the money challenges America now confronts, one thing is clear. The sense of victory that Americans felt during the 1990s and for a brief moment in Iraq last spring is now fading fast. It is being replaced by a feeling of vulnerability, for all Americans at home after September 11th, and for Americans today in Iraq. “America the victorious” is gone. “America the vulnerable” has arrived. [back to top] 4. Will Georgia’s G8 Give America What It Needs Now? Can Georgia’s G8 help America move from vulnerability to victory again, just as the G7 did from its 1975 start to its 1990 triumph in the cold war? Even at this early stage, the prospects are promising that the Sea Island Summit will produce what America now needs. First, summits succeed when all members know that they are equally in this great game of global governance together. Today’s trends in overall capabilities are currently bringing this shared sense of equality strongly home to all. The leaders, their citizens and summit scholars count these capabilities by examining the overall GDP growth rates of each country and then seeing what this GDP is actually worth in the real world, at market-driven flexible exchange rates. Already, several consequential G8 powers, led by second-ranked Japan, are challenging the United States for the status of G8 growth leaders for the 2003–4 summit year. More importantly, every single G8 partner has a currency soaring in value against the plummeting dollar of the United States. In short, a strong, swift equalization in overall capabilities is already underway. Joining it is an even more dramatic equalization of vulnerability. It is reflected in the post–September 11th fact that the largest G8 member, the United States, has suffered the largest number of civilian deaths from terrorism on its soil, while the smallest G8 member, Canada, has suffered the least — indeed ---to read more just follow the link----

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