MOSCOW (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 04th June, 2020) The Group of Seven (G7), with its current composition and set of principles, can no longer be a driver for the rest of the world, as the Western model of globalization has exposed its limits, suffering yet another setback during the coronavirus pandemic, experts told Sputnik, reflecting on US President Donald Trump's plans to expand the upcoming summit.
On Saturday, Trump said that the United States is postponing the G7 meeting, originally planned for June, until September and plans to invite the leaders of Russia, India, Australia and South Korea to refresh "this very outdated group of countries." According to the US president, he does not feel that the G7 "properly represents what's going on in the world."
Experts believe that Trump obviously hopes to change the situation when he looked like the black sheep of the family at the previous G7 summits.
"This proposal was clearly a response to the deep hostility Trump is facing from countries like Canada, France and Germany. By extending the G-7 format, he hopes to dilute this hostility. He probably thinks too to balance Chinese influence and to make the return of Russia unavoidable," French economist Jacques Sapir, director of the school for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences and director of the CEMI - Robert de Sorbon centre, told Sputnik.
According to Sapir, the American president realizes that the G7 has "lost a large part of its legitimacy," but still wants to avoid the rise of the G20 format "because this one is diluting too much US influence."
CRSIS WITHIN CLUB OF FRIENDLY NATIONS
The failure of the G7 format, however, has quite objective reasons, namely the crisis of the western model of globalization, Sapir asserts.
"[G7] had set itself the objective of being the control tower of globalization, the platform from which we could drive globalization ... The world has tremendously changed since the 1980's and the 1990's. Of course these changes reverberated on the G-7. The return to the 'old', cold war, format exacerbated the problem," the French expert said.
According to the researcher, the first visible crisis came when Russia was disinvited from the club in 2014 due to the Ukraine crisis and Crimea. The expulsion, however, did not help.
Sapir recalls that the G7 divide was clearly exposed in June 2018, when parallel meetings of the G7 in Canada and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) in China became respective examples of discord and unity.
Back then, Trump left the meeting early and revoked his endorsement of the joint communique due to the statements made by Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, which the US president saw as dishonest and inconsistent with the latter's behavior during their meetings. The SCO summit, in contrast, showed unity, while gathering for the first time with the participation of India and Pakistan as full-fledged members.
The host of the 2019 G7 summit, French Emmanuel Macron did his best to demonstrate an atmosphere of unity. But it only took a few weeks to see the reappearance of major differences, whether on a digital tax on large tech companies or NATO, the expert noted.
"Crises that now occur regularly at each G-7 summit and the repeated failures of these meetings clearly tell us one simple thing: the G-7 can no longer, either by its current format, or by its principles of constitution, to be the platform which drives and directs the world economy. Besides, it no longer has legitimacy," Sapir argued.
According to the French expert, the problem is that the Western model of the world order has broken, with nation states trying to replace it.
"The failure of the G-7 signals the exhaustion of the 'Western model', in fact of the Anglo-Saxon model, of globalization, while the success of the SCO meeting clearly indicates that the time of the Nations (and not just any) came back. This confirms a trend that has been notable since the late 2000s. It is therefore clear that the process of de-globalization is now underway irreversibly," Sapir said.
Paul Poast, assistant professor in the department of political science at the University of Chicago, agrees that the club has lost its original purpose and has not acquired a new one.
"My own view is that the G7 has evolved to the point where it's not even clear what purpose the gathering still holds. Back in the 1970s when it started, it was an attempt to facilitate economic cooperation between key members of the 'Western alliance'. Since the end of the Cold War, it's become a more comprehensive 'talk shop,'" Poast told Sputnik.
While it is important for world leaders to communicate, he went on, "this particular forum has probably outlived its usefulness," as other venues, such as the G20 and the UN Security Council have proven to be "more meaningful from a global standpoint."
Inviting some other countries to G7 summits may look like "a step in the right direction, but "the more voices in the room, the harder it becomes to reach agreement on key issues," Poast recalled. The formal reinstatement of Russia, he went on, is almost ruled out due to the clear opposition of the UK and Canada.
The fact that experts come with quite diverging lists of possible candidate countries also indicates that the accord on some formal expansion is a mission impossible.
"I would recommend inviting a major player from Africa and Latin America as well. South Africa or Nigeria from Africa are relevant players and from Latin America one could think of inviting Chile or Mexico," Amalendu Misra, a senior lecturer in the department of politics, philosophy and religion at Lancaster University, told Sputnik.
The White House has already said that at the upcoming summit, Washington would want its allies to talk about how to deal with China.
According to experts, the consequences of the coronavirus crisis, which has also dealt a great blow to globalization, will take center stage.
"The most obvious topic is how to manage economic consequences, both short-term and long-term, of the Covid-19 pandemic. On the short-term, the Covid-19 pandemic has created massive a GDP contraction ... This pandemic had also long-term consequences. It made us realize that the principles of economic sovereignty, whether this sovereignty is pharmaceutical, food or even industrial, are central to the stability of our societies. However, these notions of economic sovereignty are actually contradictory to globalization. Thus, through a crisis that one could think of as fleeting, it is the whole balance between globalization and sovereignty that is called into question," Sapir said.
According to the expert, highly industrialized regions and those most integrated into globalization have been worst hit by the pandemic, with the crisis exposing "the institutional limits of globalization," at least of its current model.
GERMANY AS TRUMP'S NEXT TARGET?
The postponement of the G7 summit notably came after German Chancellor Angela Merkel rejected Trump's invitation to attend the summit in person in June, despite the US president rallying behind that idea and saying that such a meeting would be "a great sign" of normalization and the US reopening.
According to Sapir, Merkel's refusal is not just a precaution caused by general recommendations to abstain from traveling amid the pandemic, but a signal of unabating disagreements between the two leaders.
"Quite clearly the threat of the coronavirus is just a pretext here. But what is at stake is not just EU-US solidarity. Germany has been targeted by the Trump administration as no less a problem than China. This possibly is the first shot of major a US-Germany trade conflict to come," the expert said.
