Thursday, 5 March 2009

Knelling renewal

A column by former Australian Prime Minister Paul Keating in today's financial times gives me an oppotunity to sum up the conclusions of two longer blog posts earlier in the week. Mr Keating argues:

What is needed is a new global economic and political settlement. The first priority should be to make the G20 a permanent gathering. The leaders should meet at least once a year and, in current circumstances , twice. A permanent G20 structure, representative of the major debtor and creditor countries and the most strategically powerful ones, will sound the death knell of the Group of Seven leading industrialised nations. This is two decades too late, but better late than never.


The first two sentences, in the context of an altered global order, are undeniably sound. Ideally, the G20 should be institutionalised with a secretariat to give it the coherence it has lacked since its formation in the aftermath of the Asian and Russian financial crises a decade ago. But far from heralding the end of the G7, a broader concert of powers makes a developed democratic concert more important than ever. A coordinated position of the developed democracies is the best hope of nudging the G20 towards stricter measures concerning nuclear proliferation, the environment and human rights. It is also the best hope of lending coherence to the G20 even on issues with a basic consensus - with 20 countries to bring on board for any measure, prior agreement between some of the more powerful members will naturally aid negotiation. The G7 should be deepened, and perhaps widened, but certainly not abolished.

1 comment:

We Change Europe said...

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