By Jean-Pierre Lehmann, Professor of International Political Economy at IMD, Lausanne, Switzerland and Founding Director of The Evian Group
Following the first G20 “global summit” held in Washington in November, the second meeting was convened in London in early April. Apart from the additional 12 brought in to complete the G8 – China, India, Indonesia, Korea, Australia, Brazil, Mexico, Argentina, South Africa, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and the EU Commission – there were two additional European members – Spain and the Netherlands – one additional Asian country – Thailand – as well as the heads of the major IFIs (International Financial Institutions – IMF, World Bank and WTO), the Secretary General of the UN, and the heads of the African Union and ASEAN.
The very fact that these two meetings took place is in itself epoch making. Although there were still notable absences – with only one country from Africa and only one from the Middle East – this is the first meeting of heads of government in the history of the world (!!) that deserves to be called “global”. It was unfortunate that an economic crisis of cataclysmic proportions was needed for it to take place, for sure, but now that the precedent has been set, global governance will never be the same again.
While the Washington and London summits reflect a tectonic geopolitical shift in recognising the multi-polar nature of the world’s contemporary power structure, it is also nevertheless the case that it is less a break with the past than it should be and for that reason may not yet serve as a solid governance foundation for the future.
The historical dimensions and dynamics of the current global transformation are quite awesome. As brilliantly evoked in the recent CCTV (China Central Television) series The Rise of the Great Powers 大国崛起 (Dàguó Juéqǐ), one has to go back half-a-millennium to understand the depth of what is currently occurring.
Following the collapse of the Roman Empire, Europe entered into what historians called “the dark ages”, with most of “world history” passing it by. For centuries Europe remained a small and obscure rump on the west of the Eurasian continent. The drivers of history were the Arabs, the Persians, the Indians, the Mongols and the Chinese. With the rise of the Portuguese seaborne empire in the late 15th century, however, the then great tectonic shift of the inexorable rise of European power began. With the subsequent emergence of the Spanish, Dutch, British, French, Russian, and Austro-Hungarian empires, Europe came to dominate the entire world in political, military, economic, scientific and cultural power.
The phenomenal rise of Europe, which culminated in the late 19th and early 20th centuries – in 1900 Europeans corresponded to 25% of the world’s population; today it is less than half that figure – came to a crashing collapse during the first half of the 20th century. Between 1914 and 1945 Europe was perpetually at war – including cross-border wars, civil wars (as in Spain from 1936 to1939) and revolutionary wars (the biggest of which was in Russia following 1917); the estimated number of Europeans killed by war during this period is 60 million.
Europe could be said to have committed suicide. It was extremely fortunate that the US was able not only to assume global leadership, but also that after the carnage it proceeded to reconstruct and rehabilitate Europe. The post 1945 trans-Atlantic alliance gave Europe a respite and it served the world quite well at a time when most other regions were going through quite traumatic transitions – in many cases arising from the process of decolonising from erstwhile European colonial overlords.
With especially the resurgence of China and India, but also the rapid rise of many other so-called emerging economies, over the course of the last two decades, the global profile has undergone complete change. Although Europe can be expected to remain an important actor in this new arena, it will be one actor among others. Individual European countries can no longer claim centre-stage.
And it is in this context that there was a major anomaly at the London Summit. Thus, whereas there was one China, one India, one Indonesia, one Brazil, one US, one Canada, one Turkey, one Russia, etc, represented at the Summit, there were no less than seven representatives from the EU – France, Germany, Italy, the UK, the Netherlands, Spain and the Commission. This over-representation of Europe is reflected in all institutions of global governance, including the IMF, the World Bank, the UN – and even the WTO: whereas in principle there is a common European trade policy with a European trade commissioner, in addition all member-states of the EU have their separate representative offices to the WTO in Geneva!
The maintenance of these European nation-states as individual global actors in addition to the role increasingly assumed by the Commission is a reflection of the past, but a distortion of contemporary realities and an obstacle to the future development of global governance. For Europe’s sake and the world’s sake, that anomaly needs to be rectified. To paraphrase Henry Kissinger, at this time of turbulent global transformation and seismic shocks, Europe needs to have one central telephone number.
This article is also published in Chinese in the May 2009 edition of China. Enterpreneur
|