Nations compete at expanded G20
2009-09-26 14:14
Pittsburgh - A surprise deal to bring China, India and other emerging powers into the elite club of global summitry has unleashed a new round of jockeying as nations vie to shape the agenda.
In a midnight announcement on Friday, the White House said the Group of 20 - an ad hoc gathering of wealthy and emerging powers meeting in Pittsburgh for its third summit - would become the key forum for global economic decisions.
The G20 was created last year after the global economic system went into tailspin. It will effectively eclipse the Group of Eight, a club of only rich economies that met in its first form in 1975 to tackle the oil crisis.
Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh welcomed the agreement, saying Western leaders realized the G8 was "ill-equipped to handle all the global issues".
"Interdependence in a globalized world means that no country, however powerful it may be, can take on the entire burden," Singh told a post-summit news conference.
Smaller nations push
The most forceful advocates for the change were smaller developed nations outside the G8. Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd has billed the G20 as a powerful new global force, while South Korea snagged the role as a G20 summit host next year.
But diplomats and activists immediately got to work to press for another round of reform and to figure out which nations should be part of the Group of 20 and how it would relate to the rump Group of 8.
One, an anti-poverty advocacy group backed by rock star Bono, called the G20 a "step in the right direction" but said Africa was sorely under-represented.
Only one African head of state - South Africa's Jacob Zuma - was in Pittsburgh as a G20 member, although Ethiopia's Prime Minister Meles Zenawi was here to represent the New Partnership for Africa's Development.
Spain and The Netherlands have sought spots at the G20 table, even though they are represented by the European Union executive.
Spanish Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero came to Pittsburgh as a guest and voiced hope that his country would keep getting invited.
Taiwan excluded
Taiwan, which by most measures is one of the world's top 20 economies, has little chance to join the G20 as China claims the island.
Dominique Strauss-Kahn, head of the International Monetary Fund, feared it was perhaps inevitable that some nations would feel excluded by the G20, particularly in Africa.
"When you have 25 or 26 countries in a room, you have another 160 that are outside the room," Strauss-Kahn said.
On the opposite end, Japan said it still believed in the G8.
Japan, the world's second largest economy, has fought a lonely battle not to expand the G8, relishing its role as the only non-Western nation other than Russia in the club as a way to exert global influence.
Japan had historically had friction with China, which has scuttled Japan's goal of another powerful position - permanent membership on the UN Security Council.
Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama, facing the setback only a week after taking office, said that summits involving 20 or more leaders would be unwieldy.
"And subjects must be extremely limited if you want to reach a conclusion among so many people," he told reporters. "I don't really think the significance of the G8 has disappeared."
Canada support
Hatoyama said he was supported by Prime Minister Stephen Harper of Canada, the least populous nation in the elite G8. Harper told reporters that Canada would host the next G20 and G8 summits together in June in the town of Muskoka.
Russian Finance Minister Alexei Kudrin believed that the G20 and G8 summits could co-exist, saying: "These formats have their own completely distinct particularities."
But analysts doubted leaders were paying more than lip service to the G8.
"There is a new global compact," said Andrew Cooper, a regular watcher of global summits and associate director of the Centre for International Governance Innovation in Waterloo, Canada.
Cooper said Obama made a decision to pursue the G20 format as he performed better at the last G20 summit in London in April than at the G8 in Italy in June, with its stream of small, short meetings.
"I think he just decided that we have to have one core group and that he wanted to plan out his diplomatic campaign for the next couple of years," Cooper said.