British Prime Minister Gordon Brown's
reassertion last week that India should be
admitted as a full member of the Group of Eight
(G8) group of leading industrialized countries is
a continuation of his predecessor Tony Blair's
mission of expanding this forum.
Brown's
effusive praise for India as a worthy entrant to
the G8 is backed by French President Nikolas
Sarkozy, who advocates a "G13" that integrates
India, China, Brazil, South Africa and Mexico into
the select club which plays a leading role in
shaping global governance.
Interestingly,
Brown and Sarkozy always mention India's entry
into G8, comprising Canada, France, Germany,
Italy, Japan, Russia, the UK and the US, as
complementary to a permanent
seat
for New Delhi in the United Nations Security
Council (UNSC). . Brown, speaking at a
luncheon in London, called for a "global New Deal"
with India as a major partner in the G8, the
United Nations Security Council (UNSC) and the
International Monetary Fund.
"A Security
Council without India cannot be a Security Council
reflecting the reality of the day [and] a G8 that
discusses the world economy without involving
India cannot be a G8 that is discussing all the
details of what needs to be done in the world
economy," he said, according to a Times of India
report.
The effect of synchronously taking
the name of the G8 and UNSC is to generate the
impression that both are central to the collegial
management of world problems ranging from war and
peace, disarmament, trade, climate change, energy
and terrorism.
Notwithstanding its
undemocratic character, the UNSC is still the
referent for most states, including India and
China, on the justification for the use of force.
Whether or not the vast majority of UN member
states endorses military expeditions by the US is
still contingent upon their legitimization by the
UNSC. For all its representational shortcomings,
most countries and peoples in the world want a
more robust UNSC that can preserve international
law from being violated by big bullies. The sense
of much of the world is that this institution
needs to be strengthened for restraining illegal
state and non-state actions.
The G8, on
the other hand, is more controversial. In its
current avatar, it suffers huge legitimacy
deficits as a target of anti-globalization
activists. The 27th G8 Summit in Genoa, Italy, in
2001 set the trend for training the guns of the
left on the economic apartheid imposed on
developing countries by G8 members and their
multinational corporations. The G8's dictation of
terms to developing countries through neo-liberal
privatization, fiscal conservatism, debt traps,
free trade, and unregulated capital have drawn
immense flak for their neo-colonial motives.
So resounding has been the anti-G8 wave of
demonstrations and protests worldwide since Genoa
that it forced Tony Blair to seek expansion of the
forum to boost its moral claim of truly
representing the "international community". The
British and French governments' "muscular
multilateralism" agenda, in contrast to the US
tendency to take the unilateral path after 2001,
was a damage-control exercise to stave off the
rising anti-G8 chorus in international public
opinion.
Apart from re-legitimizing a
forum accused of carrying the "white man's
burden", the British and French turn to
multilateralism was also informed by the crisis
brewing with deadlock at the World Trade
Organization, where the 130-member G77 group of
developing states has stonewalled the Doha Round
unless it addresses the latter's concerns. The
emerging economies' self-confident defiance of G8
preferences on intellectual property rights,
agricultural subsidies and access to US and EU
markets is a clear intimation that South-South
cooperation and unity have entered a new dynamic
phase.
British and French proposals for a
G13 extend invitations to the selfsame five
leading developing countries that take an actively
anti-G8 stance at the WTO. The trade losses being
inflicted on the British and French economies as a
result of stalemate at the WTO are important
material propellers for seeking G8 expansion.
Unfair
concessions India and China have been
wary about joining an expanded G8 owing to fears
of being coaxed and cajoled into making unfair
concessions on the Doha Development Round or on
carbon emission caps. Both countries attended the
2007 G8 Summit in Germany as "outreach countries"
but forthrightly rejected the deal announced at
this meeting for the US to abide by environmental
targets conditional upon New Delhi and Beijing
following suit.
Arguably, the
intransigence of India and China on trade and
environment has rattled the US, which is not
seconding Britain and France on the project of
creating a G13. The US silence on India's
permanent membership of the UNSC is likewise a
product of anxiety about more independent-minded
states spoiling the US-dominated agenda of the
UNSC's five permanent members (the US, UK, Russia,
China and France). The voting for the post of UN
Secretary General in 2006 showed a similar
ordering of choices, with the US going for South
Korea’s Ban Ki Moon over India’s Shashi Tharoor.
The calculation in all these instances is that
India is not sufficiently pliable and can be a fly
in the ointment for Washington’s unquestioned sway
on global institutions.
US and Japanese
resistance to the Franco-British plan of co-opting
China, India and others implies that G8 expansion
is, for the moment, frozen, just like the
expansion of the UNSC. Yet history shows that the
G8 (originally G7) was formed to tide over a
crisis of the world capitalist system after the
oil shock of 1973. As the G8 nations confront
another recession today, it is clear to the
farsighted among them that the only solution to
getting out of the rut lies in roping in the
emerging players led by India and China.
If a Barack Obama administration comes to
the saddle in the US in 2009, one might well see
Washington embracing a multilateral foreign
policy. Japanese objections to G8 expansion could
be overcome if the US drops its unilateralist
posture, although it remains to be seen if Tokyo
would be willing to share the same high table with
Beijing.
What are the options for the five
"outreach countries" led by China and India, as a
gradual consensus among G8 members appears likely
to evolve on creating a G13? The classic leftist
argument is that joining the G8 would taint the
emerging economies and compromise their leadership
of the G77 and the Global South. However, ever
since Britain, France and Germany launched the
outreach process, India and China have shown that
they can disagree with the G8 if asked to sell out
on the interests of developing countries.
Leftist apprehensions that entry of
emerging economies into the G8 will mean a
collapse of momentum for South-South cooperation
are over-pessimistic. Socialists underestimate the
chutzpah of India, China and others to say "No"
even after they become insiders of a G10 or G13.
Neither New Delhi nor Beijing is keen on entering
the precincts of a rich man's club to be a mute
"Yes Man".
Indian Prime Minister Manmohan
Singh openly bristled during the 2007 G8 Summit in
Heiligendamm when he was allowed into the anteroom
of the venue but could not set foot into the
sanctum sanctorum of the dining hall. He quickly
denounced any expansion process in which "we are
not active participants". While Brown and Sarkozy
dream of taming emerging economies and making them
more amenable by offering them prestigious seats
at the G8, the invitees have the self-confidence
to undermine these designs.
A second
reason why India, China and other growing nations
should keep their options open about entering an
expanded G8 is the prevailing multi-polarity in
the international system. Unlike the bipolar era,
lines and trenches are not going to be sharply
drawn between two inveterately opposed camps in
the future. Being bellwethers of G77 and new
members of a G10 or G13 will not be a
contradiction in a multi-polar environment. Russia
is already showing the way by simultaneously
holding a G8 seat and acting as a prominent driver
of the anti-Western Shanghai Cooperation
Organization.
Alliances rather than
cleavage As multiple centers of power
thrive, we will witness cross-cutting alliances
and memberships of international institutions
rather than clear-cut cleavages. There is good
payback for a major developing country like India
or China to be acknowledged and taken seriously by
the richest nations. Their very presence at a G10
or G13 summit can alter the nature of the world
economy and polity, which have thus far been
unkind to the 88% of the planet’s inhabitants
living in the Global South.
Having said
that, India, China and others need not lobby
actively for the divided G8 to reach consensus on
expansion. The G8 is not as justifiable a prize as
a permanent seat at the UNSC. There is no merit in
over-legitimizing the G8 by being seen as vying to
be members of a gang of bloodsucking capitalists
which gets terrible press. By virtue of their
rapid economic growth and political unity at the
WTO, emerging economies are in an envious position
of sitting back and being wooed to join an
expanded G8 as equals.
The crisis of G8’s
credibility is not India’s or China’s headache but
that of its current member states. If the advanced
industrial countries of the G8, especially the US,
fail to collectively realize the folly of leaving
out emerging economies, the loss is theirs, not of
India or China.
Sreeram Chaulia
is a researcher on international affairs at the
Maxwell School of Citizenship in Syracuse, New
York.
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