Assessing the G8

The recently concluded G8 summit in Hokkaido in Japan saw the same promises being dished out again. More aid, more funds were announced without accounting much for the previous declarations. But still G8 remains one of the two most important non-institutional forums in the world today, the other being World Economic Forum. Irrespective of ones ideological position, one has to agree that G8 is a crucial international body of negotiations and decision making.

Origins:

The G8 began in 1973 in context of a serious international monetary crisis. It began with USA, West Germany and UK constituting the core group, in the later couple of years Japan (1973), France (1975) and Italy (1975) joined in. USA pushed for Canada’s entry in 1976 so that it did not remain a Europe-dominated club. Robert Putnam and Nicholas Bayne (under the G8 group at University of Toronto-which is dedicated G8 research facility) have identified three main factors in the international system that provided for the formation of G7/8 (Russia joined it as a full member in 2002 making it G8). These are:

• declining hegemony of the USA and need to have combined management of the world economy by North America, Europe and Japan
• growth of interdependence among the post-industrial democracies
• growing unease about the increasing role played by bureaucracies in tackling world problems, and the need to reassert the primacy or importance of the political leadership.

The G8 summits are held once every year and the members take turns to host the summits. If we look at the issues discussed at the summit since 1976 to 2008, we can identify a wide range. Beginning with management of the world economy, international trade and monetary system; and moving to trans-national issues like drug trafficking, terrorism, crime etc and global humanitarian issues like poverty and environment – all these issue have defined the G8 agenda across the various summits.

The current status

The G8 now has evolved a sophisticated and one can even say an ‘institutionalised’ method of functioning, prompting John Kriton to say that G8 represents ‘prospectively the effective centre of global governance.’ G8 summits see lot of pre-summit and post-summit hectic activity in terms of publications, meetings (at ministerial or secretarial level). The fact that G8 comprises of the most eight most powerful countries of the world, it practically sets the agenda for other multilateral platforms- from WTO to Climate Change Conferences.

Thus it can be seen that the idea behind G8, especially one of ‘global governance’-draws from ‘liberal institutionalist’ position in international relations theory. G8 has also been criticised from the neo-marxist position, Stephen Gill saw it as ‘as a nexus of G7/8 countries at the apex seeking have a neo-liberal management of the world economy. It has also been argued that one major role of G8 has been to maintain ‘group hegemony.’ So when the US hegemony began to decline in 1970s, it sought to continue its influence by replacing ‘individual hegemony’ with ‘group hegemony’. Many critics of G8 see it as ‘vehicle of furthering US interests.’

Over the last few summits there G8 has made serious efforts to involve new countries- the BRIC countries comprising of Brazil, Russia (it is already a member of G8), India and China, of which China and India were considered as the most important players. Other countries that are vying for place at G8 summits are Mexico, South Africa and the ASEAN group. It should be noted that all these countries have been often categorised as ‘emerging economies’ (though differing in degree). Whatever new terminology that G8 may use to describe this new involvement (outreach summit or G8+5), it is very clear that G8 is not going to expand. Moreover, the significance of G8 as the core of global decision making has reduced over the past few years. Countries have believed more in bilateral negotiations or multilateral negotiations (outside any group framework). The recently concluded G8 summit in Japan could not make much headway in addressing issues of climate change, tackling the crisis in Zimbabwe and Sudan and also could not make any breakthrough on the stalled Doha round.

The G8 has always been seen as an ultra-elite group, it has always shown reluctance to involve new countries. Russia for long had to remain an associated member before gaining full membership in 2002. Barring UK, no other summit host in the last three years has shown enthusiasm to involve the ‘outreach’ countries in the discussion process. These countries are normally met over a small ‘breakfast meeting’ and have no involvement in final declaration of the summit. G8 also does not have a transparent rule making and implementation process. There is no mechanism to monitor the progress done on previous declarations.

G8 may now no longer command the power that it commanded earlier and this is a natural outcome shifts in the centres of global economy. It is still a gathering that influences world politics, but it needs to reassess its role to become more active to resolve the current problems. The biggest strength of G8 is that it is not confined to any single issue or area, it can discuss anything it wants. So, rather than being lost in vague declarations, it would be pertinent for G8 to evolve as body to generate activity and direction in resolving disputes.