How many Gs are there in global governance after the crisis?

The perspectives of the marginal majority of the worlds states

ANTHONY PAYNE * The G20 is without question the new game in town in respect of global governance. A heads of government forum that burst into being as a product of the global nancial crisis of late 2008, it has to date met three times: in Washington DC in November 2008, in London in April 2009 and in Pittsburgh in September 2009. It was not originally designed with a view to becoming the key body at the apex of the structure of global governance, but was thrust into this role by former US President George W. Bush amid deteriorating nancial conditions so alarming that they engendered moments of real panic among key British and American decision-makers. Most of the commentary on the G20 in the past year or so has accordingly focused on its immediate handling of the nancial crisis, rather than reecting on its capacity and legitimacy as the means of organizing the governance of the global system after the crisis. This line of analysis tends in any case to presume that what we are faced with is (merely) a nancial crisis, not actually something much deeperperhaps a crisis also of politics, representation, legitimacy and democracy, conceivably indeed a crisis of global governance itself. It is, however, precisely within this broader perspective that we need to begin to think through the signicance of the G20s emergence. Others have already examined its origins as a grouping of nance ministers, discussed its brief history as the putative summit of summits and explored its potentially awkward relationship with the G8, the central unit of the global governance system since the mid-1970s. In this article I seek to address, and implicitly question, the claim now frequently made by and on behalf of the G20 that, because of its enlarged membership beyond the G8, it has become the appropriate body by which to seek to manage global affairs in the early twenty-rst century. Its website, for example, boldly proclaims that G20 member countries represent around 90 per cent of global gross national product, 80 per cent of world trade (including EU intra-trade) as well as two-thirds of the worlds population. The page then goes on to assert that the G20s economic weight and broad membership gives it a high degree of legitimacy and inuence over the management of the global economy and nancial system.1
* 1

I should like to acknowledge the research assistance of Matthew Bishop in the writing of this article. See http://www.g20.org/about_what_is-g20.aspx, accessed 22 Feb. 2010.

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Anthony Payne The point being made is clear enough, and it takes us directly to the question of the membership of the G20, which is somewhat complicated and possibly even still uid. Setting aside the ex officio involvement of the managing director of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the President of the World Bank, and the participation in the April 2009 meeting of the secretary general of the United Nations, the director-general of the World Trade Organization (WTO) and the Chairman of the Financial Stability Forum (FSF), the G20 is composed of 19 country members (Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, France, Germany, India, Indonesia, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Russia, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, South Korea, Turkey, the United Kingdom and the United States) and one supranational member (the European Union). In addition, Spain and the Netherlands were invited to the Pittsburgh meeting as observers, although it is understood that during the meeting their leaders spoke freely alongside the others as if they had the status of members. Moreover, since the last G20 summit the EU has appointed its rst permanent president of the European Council and its rst high representative for foreign and security policy, thereby adding considerably to at least its potential ability to represent all of its member states collectively in global affairs. In other words, the exact mode of EU representation within the G20 is at present rather unclear, but undoubtedly extensive. If, therefore, for the sake of argument, we count all the member states of the EU as members (of a sort) of the G20, but do not double-count France, Germany, Italy and the UK, this means that the G20 actually represents 42 countries. They sustain a current population of 4.37 billion people, which is 64.4 per cent of the worlds total population, and generate a gross domestic product of US$56.73 trillion, which is 81.6 per cent of the worlds total GDP.2 These are unquestionably hugely signicant proportions of the number of people and weight of resources in the world; but it is also evident that they do not embrace everybody or everything. Who is excluded? The answer, strikingly, is no fewer than 150 of the 192 countries of the world (using membership of the UN General Assembly as a working denition of a country for this purpose). These constitute, to state the obvious, the overwhelming majority of countries. They govern no fewer than 2.42 billion people, who constituteat 35.6 per centa sizeable minority of the worlds population, and they generate US$12.76 trillion of the worlds current GDP, whichat 18.4 per centis a far from irrelevant component of the total. It is also the case that several regions of the world, such as North, East and West Africa, the Caribbean and Central and Eastern Europe, are completely devoid of representation. Also left out are populous countries such as Iran, Pakistan, Nigeria and Ukraine; relatively rich countries such as New Zealand and Singapore; and all the smallest fty or so states of the world with populations below 1.5 million people. We could take this line of argument still further and note that Indonesia and Saudi Arabia are the only countries from the Islamic world that belong to the G20, and that many of the poorest parts of the world (in Latin America, sub-Saharan Africa and Central Asia) have but modest representation, especially
2

CIA, World Factbook 2009 (Washington DC: CIA, 2009).

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How many Gs are there in global governance after the crisis? by comparison with the EU countries. Of course, such observations only draw attention to the difficulty of designing one body that has a properly representative membership of a complex international community. However, they are enough to show quickly and decisively that the G20, as it has emerged, does not convincingly stand as proxy for the world. We need therefore to bring into the analysis of global governance after the crisis some consideration of what the excluded countries think, and might want to do, about the new reality of a system topped by the G20. I describe them as the marginal majority of the worlds statesmarginal at least in relation to the G20s proclaimed role. The point is that they not only unquestionably have a right to have a say (for that is implicit in the meaning of the concept of sovereignty), they manifestly do have a say. One of the most interesting new features of global governance over the past ten to 20 years has been the growing activism of the full range of poorer, smaller, weaker states, many of them at last throwing off the constraints of colonialism and the subsequent inhibitions of the newly independent to assert ever more loudly and effectively their concerns and perspectives. The core parts of this article seek therefore to set out some of the current positions of non-G20 countries in considering the contemporary contours of global governance in the two key diplomatic arenas that have lately mattered the most to them. These are nance (of course) and trade (as always). However, it is also clear that the environment, especially the issue of climate change, has lately come not only to present itself as a matter of pressing urgency in its own terms within the framework of contemporary global governance but to have serious implications for the ordering of both nance and trade. We will return to this point in the conclusion of the article. Finance The global governance of nance was conducted for most of the latter part of the Bretton Woods era within a distinctive architecture characterized by regular meetings of G7 nance ministers and central bankers, sustained contact between the nancial officials of these countries, and consistent technocratic support from the IMF, the World Bank, the Bank of International Settlements and assorted other international bodies. In specically nancial matters the G7 was supported by four other countriesBelgium, the Netherlands, Sweden and Switzerlandwithin the (misnumbered) G10, these being the original participants in the IMFs so-called general arrangements to borrow agreed in the 1960s. This old nancial architecture was deemed more than adequate until the onset of the Asian nancial crisis in 1997 brought into being a reformist political agenda that came to be dubbed the new international nancial architecture (NIFA). This is what led to the creation of the G20 in 1999 in its initial incarnation as a wider grouping of nance ministers and to the establishment in the same year of the FSF. The idea, in a nutshell, was to bring into the governance of nance a modest number of other systemically important countries, this euphemism being a polite way of referring to countries 731
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Anthony Payne whose nancial problems, as and when they occurred, had the potential to become problems for the system as a whole. As Susanne Soederberg noted at the time, the key objective of this inter-state initiative was to integrate emerging market economies more fully and exibly into the world economy and its main manage ment mechanisms; it was not an attempt to shift the balance of power between the developing and developed world but to strengthen the existing system through collective surveillance.3 In short, NIFA was not really very new at all: the old architecture still dominated, and ever more extensive capital mobility remained the dominating motif of the global nancial order.4 Indeed, one could go on to suggest that everything that was discussed by the G20 nance ministers prior to the crisis was conducted largely within the framework of this continuing NIFA consensus. The task still seemed to be conceived, in the words of Jacqueline Best, not as one of engaging the emerging countries in a dialogue about the merits of the nancial practices of the G7 countries, but rather as one of convincing them by political means of the universal appeal of such practices.5 The extent to which this has changed following the creation of the G20 summit is a matter of debate, and is in any case something on which it is still early to reach a rm judgement. On balance it is likely that old G7 nancial orthodoxies will be adjusted over time, not only in response to the views of new G20 members but also of course in response to changing circumstances after the crisis of 20082009. But that discussion is not the issue at stake here. What is important to note from the perspective of this article is that a critique of the NIFA consensus has already emerged quite powerfully in many other countries of the world. It was articulated with great force during the course of a United Nations Conference on the World Financial and Economic Crisis and its Impact on Development called by the then President of the UN General Assembly, Miguel dEscoto Brockmann of Nicaragua, in New York in late June 2009. In his remarks after the event dEscoto made the point that the outcome document was adopted by all of the members of the General Assemblya grouping he described somewhat mischievously as the G192. He also argued that the UN was the proper venue to discuss global nancial and economic matters. As we have seen, this is not something that has ever been accepted by the G7/8 or by the G20, and this will have been the reason why the United States and other leading powers did not exercise themselves fully in the diplomacy of the conference and thus in all probability do not feel more than formally committed to its outcomes. We can, however, take the various themes and demands that appeared in the statement as indications of the kind of arguments advanced in the conference by the marginal majority of non-G20 countries in which we are especially interested. They add up to a distinctive and alternative take upon the causes of the global nancial crisis and, above all, what to do about it now. This alternative agenda included the following important elements:
3

Susanne Soederberg, On the contradictions of the New International Financial Architecture: another Procrustean bed for emerging markets?, Third World Quarterly 23: 4, 2002, p. 614. 4 P. B. Kenen, The international nancial architecture: whats new? What is missing? (Washington DC: Institute for International Economics, 2001). 5 Jacqueline Best, From the top-down: the new nancial architecture and the re-embedding of global nance, New Political Economy 8: 3, 2003, p. 376.

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How many Gs are there in global governance after the crisis?

making the post-crisis economic stimulus initiated by several leading G20 countries work for all by distributing more of these funds to low-income countries, negotiating temporary debt standstills with creditors, streamlining conditionalities within the IMF and providing exible, concessional, fastdisbursing and front-loaded assistance to developing countries through the multilateral development banks; mobilizing additional resources for social protection, food security and human development to support early economic and social recovery in developing countries; implementing fully the many commitments to increased official development assistance and continuing debt relief made repeatedly over the past few years by the rich countries of the world during a series of meetings and summits; introducing a new special drawing right allocation at the IMF to help increase global liquidity; and reforming the governance and remit of the Bretton Woods institutions and the other major standard-setting international bodies on the basis of a fair and equitable representation of developing countries including the poorest.

The political tone of the whole document was critical of the neo-liberal bias of the past two decades and sceptical of both the capacity and the commitment of the IMF to act as the major agency of nancial reconstruction. It specically stated that regulatory failures, compounded by over-reliance on market self-regulation, overall lack of transparency, nancial integrity and irresponsible behaviour, have led to excessive risk-taking, unsustainably high asset prices, irresponsible leveraging and high levels of consumption fuelled by easy credit and inated asset prices. The voice of the majority (rather than the Anglo-American duopoly) of the worlds countries could also be heard in the declaration that developing countries did not cause the global economic and nancial crisis but were nonetheless severely affected by it. It is true that the document frequently fell back on the use of the imprecise catch-all notion of developing countries to make its critique of past G7/8 leadership, thereby arguably embracing the perspectives of some G20 members. It did, however, make clear that it recognized the existence of different categories of developing countries and expressed particular concerns about countries in special situations, including those formally recognized by the UN as the least developed countries (LDCs), small island developing states, landlocked developing countries, African countries and countries emerging from conict.6 In short, it was not difficult to detect from where the voices that spoke the loudest in the document came. As Joseph Stiglitz noted in a brief post-conference commentary, many had said it would be difficult for 192 countries to reach consensus, and that was why discussions should be limited to a self-selected group of 20. In fact, as he went on, the UN agreement was stronger and more forceful than the [April 2009] G20
6

United Nations, Conference on the world nancial and economic crisis and its impact on development, A/ CONF/214/3*, 2426 June (New York: United Nations General Assembly, 2009), various paras.

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Anthony Payne communiqu. It also demonstrated why it was important to have an inclusive process: the G192 were willing to raise key issues that the internal politics of the G20 may have made too sensitive.7 Of course, it should immediately be said that it is always easier to raise issues than to build a working consensus on what to do about them, and that that is precisely the difference between the remit of a UN conference and that of a G20 summit. Nevertheless, Stiglitz was making the valid point that there existed many concerns and perspectives across the world system that the G20 has not yet picked up and perhaps will not pick up. These do not at present cohere into a neat critique, and are not likely to do so. Indeed, some non-G20 countries remain attached to nancial orthodoxy. The Committee of African Ministers of Finance and Planning and Governors of Central Banks, meeting in Cape Town in February 2010, declared that the resilience built by a decade of economic reforms has provided a sound foundation for recovery and committed itself to the continuation of measures designed to improve business condence.8 However, other poor countries are still agitated about the politics of debt relief, while others are nervous about the prospects for continuing aid. Some small Caribbean and Pacic countries have deployed offshore nance as a core development strategy and argue that they have done no more than ll some of the niches naturally created in a neo-liberal global order characterized by the free ow of money.9 They feel that they have been largely left to themselves to make the case against the G20s aggressive pursuit of what it condemns as the tax evasion implicit in offshore nancing. Generally, too, it remains the case nearly a year after the conclusion of the UN conference that most of the items around which its alternative agenda was built remain either at best issues under continuing discussion within conventional nancial policy circles or at worst pleas that fell on deaf G20 ears. It is not that a signicant backlash is emerging against early G20 positions on nancial issues, but rather that there also exist voices singing different tunes that are struggling to be heard. Trade By comparison with nance, the global governance of trade has been structured since at least 1995 in a much more formal way, namely, according to the rules and modus operandi of the WTO, established at the beginning of that year. These have been much discussed and have generally come to be well understood.10 In essence, the WTO is a member-driven institution, a forum in which member states
7 8

Joseph Stiglitz at http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/jun/28, accessed 10 Oct. 2010. Communiqu of the meeting of the Committee of African Ministers of Finance and Planning and Governors of Central Banks (Committee of Ten), 21 Feb. 2010, Cape Town, at http://www.treasury.gov.za/comm_ media/press/2010/2010022102.pdf, accessed 20 March 2010. 9 Don D. Marshall, The New International Financial Architecture and Caribbean OFCs: confronting nancial stability discourse, Third World Quarterly 28: 5, 2007, pp. 91738. 10 See, within an extensive literature, Rorden Wilkinson, Multilateralism and the World Trade Organisation: the architecture and extension of international trade regulation (London: Routledge, 2000); Amrita Narlikar, International trade and developing countries: bargaining coalitions in the GATT and WTO (London: Routledge, 2003); and Donna Lee and Rorden Wilkinson, eds, The WTO after Hong Kong: progress in, and prospects for, the Doha Development Agenda (Abingdon: Routledge, 2007).

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How many Gs are there in global governance after the crisis? ndertake multilateral trade negotiations, supposedly working via consensus u rather than voting. Its foremost decision-making organ is its biennial ministerial conference, which has thus far met only six times, although negotiations usually carry on informally in Geneva between ministerials, thereby creating a sense of almost continuous bargaining, especially once a round has been formally initiated, as it was in Doha in November 2001. However, the formal equality of the WTOs procedures does not, by common consent, describe the way that decisions are actually taken within the organization. In practice, many of the techniques most frequently used in WTO meetings to try to reach agreement (the Green Rooms, chairs drafts, friends of the chair and so on) have come to be viewed with suspicion and growing hostility by many of the less powerful member states.11 They have smacked not of facilitation but of manipulation. Even the WTO secretariat, which ought in theory to act as a source of neutral support for all WTO members, has at times been seen as institutionally prejudiced in favour of the Quad: the United States, the European Union, Japan and Canada, which dominated global trade politics throughout the postwar era and into the early years of the WTO. In truth, a crude power politics runs through the WTO without necessarily being effective enoughmaybe, in the nal analysis, crude enough to force through deals. Amrita Narlikar has made the interesting argument that the ministerial process itself (by which she means the central part played within the WTO by these biennial meetings) has perhaps sabotaged the working of the organization by creating periodic crescendos in the negotiation of trade which serve only to expose, and conceivably heighten, the power asymmetries between the many countries that are now members and thus participate in the meetings.12 The key point about such negotiations in the contemporary WTO is that a very high number (currently 153) of the countries of the world are involved, albeit with markedly different levels of commitment and resource. The days when trade was sorted out within a rich mens club, outside which so-called developing countries quietly waited for crumbs, are comprehensively over. Many of the developing countries have come to be fully engaged in the global politics of trade over the course of the past decade, and they have created a diverse array of coalitions that in their intricacy shatter the notion of any single, or even overriding, developing countries position. It is not possible or necessary here to set out in detail the travails into which the Doha Round ran up to the moment of its suspension in 2006. But it is useful to identify some of the many coalitions that actively pushed their particular cases in the Doha Round as it slowly ran aground. They included:

the trade G20 (not to be confused, of course, with the G20 proper), which came into being in opposition to a joint US/EU proposal on agricultural trade at the Cancn ministerial in 2003 and set out its stall to press for signicant cuts in the domestic support provided by the big post-industrial western states,

11 12

See Aileen Kwa, Power politics in the Global South (Bangkok: Focus on the Global South, 2003). Amrita Narlikar, The ministerial process and power dynamics in the World Trade Organization: understanding failure from Seattle to Cancn, New Political Economy 9: 3, 2004, p. 414.

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Anthony Payne for substantial improvements in market access for the agricultural products of developing countries and for the elimination of export subsidies by developed countries over a specied period of time;13 the four cotton-producing West and Central African countries of Mali, Benin, Chad and Burkina Faso, which were exercised about the protection that the US gives to its domestic cotton-growers and proposed a complete phase-out of subsidies on cotton, together with nancial compensation for cottonproducing LDCs until the subsidies disappeared;14 the LDCs themselves, which united to call for special and differential treatment within global trade rules for countries so designated;15 the Alliance on Strategic Products and Special Safeguards Mechanisms, also known as the G33, led by Indonesia and the Philippines, which was originally set up to argue that poor countries should be allowed to dene unilaterally what was their special product and be awarded special treatment in respect of it; the Core Group, which was determined to resist the inclusion in the round of the so-called Singapore issues, namely trade and investment, trade and competition policy, transparency in government procurement policy, and trade facilitation; the Africa Group; the African, Caribbean and Pacic (ACP) Group; the Small and Vulnerable Economies grouping; and even the Recently Acceded Members Group, which brought together the 15 or so countries that have joined the WTO since 1995.

One could in fact easily add to this list, because the intensity and longevity of the negotiations from 2001 to 2006 meant that bargaining groupings formed and reformed, with countries joining, leaving and rejoining according to the politics of the situation and the extent of their available resources. Some of the groupings even sought to combine at certain moments, with the Africa Group, the ACP and the LDCs gathering together in Cancn and thereafter as a putative, albeit loose, G90a potential majority grouping in a supposedly democratic organization that at that time had 146 member states. It is apparent too that the bigger emerging market economies that were asked to join the non-trade G20 in late 1999 took part in a variety of trade coalitions within which they sometimes stood alongside other poorer, weaker countries for specic trade purposes. In the end, as we know, the Doha Round was not, and to date has still not been, consummated. Although there are many reasons for this, many of which relate to the failure of the US and the EU to engineer the bargain between their interests that has traditionally brought a trade round to a conclusion in the post-1945 era,
13

Ian Taylor, The periphery strikes back? The G20 at the WTO, in Lee and Wilkinson, The WTO after Hong Kong, pp. 15568. 14 Donna Lee, The cotton club: the Africa Group in the Doha Development Agenda, in Lee and Wilkinson, The WTO after Hong Kong, pp. 13754. 15 Helen Hawthorne, Acceding to the norm: the accession of LDCs to the WTO, The Hague Journal of Diplomacy 4, 2009, pp. 735.

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How many Gs are there in global governance after the crisis? it is also true that the sheer number of country participants, the determination and skill with which a lot of new WTO players have asserted their causes and advanced their cases for effective inclusion in the global trading order, and the resultant enormous complexity of the grand bargain that would be needed to sign off a deal have contributed signicantly to the Rounds failure. In that sense, the marginal majority of countries have shown themselves to have at least some clout in global trade politics: not enough to make deals in their interests, perhaps, but arguably enough to be part of the blockage in the way of what they did not want and certainly to establish beyond doubt that what has been put on offer thus far within the WTO process has not been the development round promised with so much apparent conviction at Doha at the outset of the negotiation. Interestingly, by the time of the Hong Kong ministerial in December 2005, the last in the sequence thus far, a new Quad had in effect emerged, composed of the US and the EU but also now China and India, the traditional leaders of the developing countries. This innovation did not bring the Doha Round to fruition, but it has opened up the contours of what might be the next phase in WTO politics, in which the new Quad would seek to shape a deal between its members and then try to sell it to the rest. This would in effect put all of the other members of the WTO back in the position that used to be occupied by the developing countries as a whole prior to the WTOs creation, namely being stuck with only two options: either to sign up to what others had agreed regardless of its perceived merits, or to walk away from the WTO game completely, with all the resulting damaging consequences for their nancial, trading and development prospects. In such an eventuality the strength of the incipient G90 would be acutely tested, and it might nd itself comprehensively marginalized.16 At least the current status quo of a suspended Round avoids this gloomy prospect. For the moment, while the nancial crisis dominates attention, global trade politics is in abeyance. Although the G20 communiqus have ritually called for the resumption of negotiations, nothing has happened. Nevertheless, the point is that, as, when and perhaps if the Doha Round is resumed, the shape of the bargaining will be altered quite signicantly as a consequence of the new primacy of the G20 summit. It is far from clear that the G90 grouping can any longer rely upon China, India, Brazil and other big developing countries to argue its collective cause. These countries will have a difficult path to tread, because they will want both to push their own trading prospects, probably quite aggressively, and yet still to be seen to articulate and represent a broad global South position. In the event of resumed talks, we shall have to see which behaviour ultimately takes priority.

16

See S. Chang, WTO for trade and development post-Doha, Journal of International Economic Law 10: 3, 2007, pp. 55370; M. Fernndez, Trade negotiations make strange bedfellows, World Trade Review 7: 2, 2008, pp. 42353.

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Anthony Payne Conclusion It is apparent, then, that all 192 countries in the current world system have concerns about and perspectives on contemporary global governance after the nancial crisis of 20082009, and are seeking to participate in its resolution in a variety of ways and in a number of different diplomatic and institutional arenas. Yet, despite the expansion of the G7/8 into the G20, the fact remains that the vast majority of countries are excluded from membership of the organization at the apex of the system. Can this be justied? And what does it mean for the legitimacy of global governance? As it happens, the old G7/8 system did possess, after a fashion, a principle by which some ideological justication could be offered for the claim to leadership made by this small number of countries. It was that they were not only rich and powerful, but also liberal democracies running market economies. However, as has been widely noted, the entry of Russia into the club seriously weakened this stance, and indeed many critics never accepted the argument at all, taking the view instead that the G7 countries constituted nothing but a self-selecting elite. In the midst of the anxieties generated by the global nancial crisis of 20082009 rather fewer commentators seem to have noticed, or to be bothered by, the fact that the move from the G7 to the G20 as the newly dominant body has shattered the remaining pretensions of this principle. Several key new G20 member countries manifestly do not function fully as liberal democracies. This leaves the G20 having to make the argument that its legitimacy derives from its economic weight and broad membership, precisely as proclaimed on its website. There is clearly something to be said on behalf of the broader mix of cultures and values represented by the G20 as opposed to the G7/8. Nevertheless, the main justication for G20 membership seems to be economic weight, which is really a reference to power: the sense that a country matters to the stability of the global order, that it is systemically important. Put differently, the G7/8 needed to expand into the G20 in order to bring in the key players that necessarily had to be involved in managing the global nancial crisis. As such, this is a claim made for the most part on the grounds of political expediency and not at all in the language of morality that has often been associated with global governance (as opposed to raw global politics). The problem here is that there does not exist a clear dividing line in terms of power or systemic centrality between the 42 countries that (arguably) belong to the G20 and the 150 countries that are denitely excluded. Which, for example, is the 43rd country in global economic weight, and how much less powerful is it than the 42ndand, if the gap is not great, why is that country not included? The gradations of power then continue all the way down the ladder of course, there being no obvious place to draw the line dividing those inside from those outside the leadership club. As we have seen, all the other 150 countries possess some power in global politics, enough usually to get their issues onto the stage of global governance, even if often not enough actually to shift the positions of the powerful and change 738
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How many Gs are there in global governance after the crisis? the policies of the dominant institutions. In other words, the majority of the worlds states may be marginal, but they are not missing. It is important, therefore, to begin to think about how they might actually come either to t into or to challenge a new G20-led world order. To my mind, the most likely possibility is that other countries, or groups of countries, will press either to be allowed to join the G20 or to treat with it in some fashion. In relation to the rst point, there is not much point in speculating about or trying to propose new members, because the lesson of the formation of the G20 in the rst instance is that, if new countries are to be added, this will be done for short-term political reasons rather than by reference to notions of merit or representativeness. We should simply reiterate a point made at the outset of the article, which is that, at this stage in the G20s history, its membership is not xed in hard and fast terms. In relation to the second point, this is already happening. Singapore and 27 other small or medium-sized countries have recently formed an informal coalition to be known as the Global Governance Group or 3G. The group is now seeking to agree and circulate a set of principles and objectives to be circulated as a UN document before the G20 next meets in Canada in June 2010.17 On this model the trend will be for other existing, or new, country groupings to seek to engage as necessary with the G20. Another, albeit less likely, possibility is that, on some issues and over time, the marginal majority might articulate a nascent G150 position. This will no doubt prompt some analysts to discern the emergence of a new NorthSouth politics, which would in effect be a G20 vs. G150 politics, operating largely as the old politics supposedly did, except that China, India, Brazil, South Africa and so on would, as it were, have swapped sides. In all probability the pattern of alliance formation on the many complex issues running through the nance and trade agendas will not fall into such a neat cleavage, with the result that an effective G150 politics will be very hard to get off the ground. However, there may still emerge a strong moral dimension to the new politics of global governance in that some countries may increasingly begin to argue a case for thinking completely differently about the whole development or growth model upon which the world order has been based since the beginning of the industrial era. In particular, they may seek more and more to bring the environment into the debate about nance and trade, and to insist that environment-related issues be treated as intertwined, rather than separate, facets of global governance. Already, in the global environmental politics that has run from the time of the rst UN Conference on Environment and Development in Rio de Janeiro in June 1992 through to Kyoto in December 1997 and now to Copenhagen in December 2009, certain common themes have been identied which have been presented as constituting the essence of a Southern position.18 These suggest that responsibility for global environmental problems lies with the industrial and post-industrial countries, that these countries should take at least the rst steps towards amelioration, that any
17 18

See Lim May-Ann, SIIA welcomes new 3G initiative for small states, 12 Feb. 2010, http://www.siiaonline. org/?q=print/3413, accessed 10 March 2010. For an early insight into this trend, see Marc Williams, Re-articulating the Third World coalition: the role of the environmental agenda, Third World Quarterly 14: 1, 1993, pp. 729.

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Anthony Payne such measures should not hinder the development prospects of poorer countries, and that resource transfers from the rich world should accompany and facilitate all environmental protection activities, including without doubt climate change mitigation. Although, as with the failure of the Doha Round, many other factors contributed to the impasse reached at the UN Conference of the Parties (COP) in Copenhagen, it cannot be denied that such views as these, powerfully and emotionally expressed by some of the smallest and most vulnerable states in the world from the Caribbean and the Pacic, played their part in preventing agreement on a successor climate change regime to the Kyoto Convention. If these voices get louder and more radical, they may, before too long, begin to make connections with those angry at the continuing dominance of narrow neo-liberal models in nance and crude competitive advantage models in trade. If this happened, it would mark the moment when global governance started to be an argument about something completely different from its traditional concerns. In the meantime, what is certain is that global governancearound whatever set of issueswill become even more complicated as more and more countries come to recognize the need to pursue development diplomacy as effectively as they can on the global stage. In pursuing their interests they will inevitably experience many frustrations and failures, because power does still very much matter. But, with skill and sensible alliance-building, they will also strike up some successes. This is, in my view, mostly to be welcomed on broad grounds of democracy and fairness, although it would only be prudent to acknowledge that the residual problem with such a scenario is that global issues will be extraordinarily hard to bring to consensual resolution (as noted already in relation to the Doha Round and the Copenhagen COP). This situation will have its dangers and will require the display of considerable political sensitivity by the G20, as well as attention to procedural facilitation in key arenas, if global governance involving all of the Gs is to be pursued and made to work in our collective human interest. The alternative seems to be to sit back and watch uncritically as the G20 manages global affairs, ostensibly on behalf of everybody, and that does not seem to me to be either an attractive or a sustainable model of global governance for the next phase of the twenty-rst century.

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International Affairs 86: 3, 2010 2010 The Author(s). Journal Compilation 2010 Blackwell Publishing Ltd/The Royal Institute of International Affairs