Events | 2009.10.03
Rich bullies, we need you | Paul Collier
So the G20 has seen off the G8. But let\'s not kid ourselves: only the G5 has real global clout
And then there were 20. From Pittsburgh comes the announcement that the Group of 20 – the world\'s 20 largest economies – gathered there will permanently replace the Group of Eight as the main global economic forum. There is little doubt that change was needed. The challenges of the 21st century are going to be global. The financial crisis and climate change are not just important in themselves, they are paradigmatic – and suggest the need for more collaboration, rather than conflict, between the United States and China. A world depression would have sunk all boats. If climate change continues unchecked, Florida will be lost to the ocean and the Himalayan snow and ice fields will melt: the two superpowers are going to find themselves on the same side on the key global issues.
The reality is that no G-force will be a panacea for the new global challenges. The necessary globally representative political architecture will never be built as long as national governments remain profoundly unwilling to cede sovereignty – attitudes that are getting yet more entrenched.
In a world that needs collective action but is composed of 194 governments , the overarching problem is free-riding. The burden of global leadership inevitably will fall on those few governments that are manifestly too big to free-ride. There will be only five such governments: America, China, India, Japan and the 27-in-one European Union . Over the next decade each of these governments will realise that it can be a deal-breaker: if it tries to free-ride, the other four will refuse to step up to their responsibilities. These five will be the G5, the group that runs the world.
At the other end of the spectrum, the 60 or so countries of the bottom billion will barely register. Currently, they account collectively for just 1% of world income, and so on most global issues their participation will not be sufficiently important to warrant attention. In some of these issues, as with climate change, global collective action will matter more for them than for the rest of mankind, but they will not be able to influence events.
Between the G5 and the G60 will be the countries that individually can free-ride, but which in aggregate matter a lot for most global issues: the G103. The geopolitics of the 21st century will be a struggle between the G5, who will have no alternative but to behave responsibly, and the G103. While the G5 will perforce be a genuine group, the G103 will be a sack of potatoes: since their only common interest will be to free-ride, they will not even have an incentive to co-operate among themselves.
However distasteful it may be to have the G5 running the 21st century world, it may be a considerable improvement on the 20th century. The G5 will be united only on issues where there is an unmistakable global interest, as with climate change. It is difficult to imagine such a heterogeneous group finding issues on which their joint interest is at the expense of the global interest. Rather, in benefiting themselves they will inadvertently serve the global interest, and especially that of the bottom billion.
The G5 will need to find a mixture of carrots and sticks with which to dissuade the G103 from free-riding. I suspect that carrots will usually prove too expensive: the G103 will collectively be a substantial part of the world economy, and many of them will be richer than China and India, so the appetite for generosity will be limited. So the G5 will be bullies in the global interest. The use of trade restrictions to induce compliance with low-carbon emissions will be a precursor of such strategies. This may initially look very familiar: rich countries bullying the rest. This will be because China and India may take a decade or so to face the reality that they are too big to evade their role.
The bottom billion will face a paradox. Distasteful as it will be, the G5 is likely to evolve into the best available substitute for the utopian idea of global governance. The bottom billion will lack representation, but their core needs for global collective action will be met. Periodically they will ally as the G103 to try to build a more representative global authority, but attempts to replace the G5 will face a grim reality; in practice, the only alternative to the G5 would be a toothless global organisation that could not prevent free-riding.
The 20th century architecture for geopolitics – the G8 – was today all but consigned to history. The G20 may be more fit for purpose, but let\'s not kid ourselves about what it really is: the G5 plus observers. We will need it again and again.
For more information, please visit
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/[...]/25/g8-g2-g5-global-governance
