Published daily by the Lowy Institute. The G20 is caught among all four, and how the forum responds raises questions about whether it is facing its own existential crisis.
With a chaotic US election and presidential transition as well as a deepening Covid pandemic grabbing global headlines, it would be easy to miss that the G20 Saudi Arabia is well underway. There are two reasons for this. The first is that the G20 is facing its first real crisis since the forum was established to tackle the gobal financial crisis, and this has tested its continued relevance and effectiveness. Since the global financial crisis, the mandate of the G20 has broadened, and its civic engagement ballooned.
Engagement groups are increasingly attempting to tackle challenges beyond global economic cooperation. A broadened mandate without structured mechanisms is always going to be a challenge, despite the agility that goes with having minimal bureaucracy.
The world of Zoom diplomacy, though, may have helped the G20 overcome some of its increasingly problematic shortcomings — one of them being that meetings themselves had become the purpose of the forum, rather than the platform or mechanism to propose and debate policy. With the world thrust into navigating online meetings, the focus and frequency of meetings increased. No longer required to secure funding and travel, barriers to attendance were reduced and agendas sharpened.
This includes Australia. That the G20 went virtual meant that Saudi Arabia faced an even greater challenge in overcoming its own controversies and demonstrating to the world that its liberalisation was more than a public relations exercise. Not in the five years of my attending G20 meetings in Turkey, China, Argentina and Japan had delegates faced a significant and important campaign to boycott or protest the G20 presidency.
There are no formal votes at the meetings and its agreements aren't legally binding. Nevertheless, it's been said that if it didn't exist , it would need to be invented anyway. Often, big demonstrations take place around the summit. In Ian Tomlinson, a newspaper seller , was killed in G20 protests in London after being caught up in protests on his way home. Thousands of demonstrators marched in Buenos Aires to protest the G20's economic policies last year.
This year, protests against Hong Kong's extradition bill have been planned ahead of the summit. Is Putin right? Is liberalism really dead? Trump-Xi showdown to dominate G20 summit. Trump hits out at 'unacceptable' India tariffs. Image source, Getty Images. What is the G20? Trump-Xi showdown to dominate G20 summit Trump hits out at 'unacceptable' India tariffs.
Now, they always attend. What does the group discuss? Trump realDonaldTrump June 27, The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. View original tweet on Twitter. Karishma Vaswani: Who really pays in a tariff war? In the case of the Osaka summit, the Japanese government introduced the goal of universal health care.
No one doubts that universal health care is a worthy cause. But nor has the G20 actually done anything to help individual member states expand the provision of health care. Worse, the time spent paying lip service to this new objective could have been used to discuss outstanding issues such as antimicrobial resistance AMR , which was added to the G20 agenda in Meanwhile, the market for new antibiotics is deteriorating rapidly. What the world needs now is action, not empty words.
This article was originally published by Project Syndicate. Does the G20 Still Matter?
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