The Munk Debates Podcast - Friday Focus: G20 or G-zero?

Episode Date: September 8, 2023

The following is a sample of the Munk Debates’ weekly current affairs podcast, Friday Focus.   On this edition of the Friday Focus podcast, Janice and Rudyard dedicate the show to talking about the upcoming G20 meeting in India. How should we understand the G20 meeting of the world’s largest economies in a world that is more divided than ever along regional lines? What is the relevance of the BRICs alliance to the future of the G20? Could a BRICs +, as is being orchestrated currently by China, displace the G20 in the near term? And finally, how do we preserve a rules-based international order in an era where the United States is no longer the global policeperson? Is there a different style of leadership needed for our more divided world? If so, what does this look like? Enjoy! To access full-length editions of the Friday Focus podcast consider becoming a donor to the Munk Debates for as little as $25 annually, or $.50 per episode. Canadian donors receive a charitable tax receipt.  Become a Munk Donor ($50 annually) to get 72-hour advanced access to the full length editions of Friday Focus and Munk Dialogues. Go to www.munkdebates.com to sign up. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The following is a complimentary excerpt of this week's edition of the Friday Focus podcast by the Monk Debates. To access full-length editions of each and every episode, along with all kinds of great additional benefits and perks, become a donor to the Monk debates. You can do that for as little as $25 a year, and you'll receive each and every year 50 Friday Focus episodes at full length. It's all available right now on our website. in just a few simple clicks. Triple W. The Monk Debates.com. Look for the Friday Focus option in our navigation bar, the top right of the website.

Make your donation, and we will send you each and every Friday a link to listen to the full-length edition of this program. Thanks in advance for your generous contribution. Hello, Monk listeners. Welcome to the Friday Focus podcast. I'm Rudyard Griffiths, the executive director of the Monk Debates. I'm joined by Janice Gross Stein. the founding director of the Monk School of Global Affairs, International Renowned Scholar and author.

Janice, how was the first week back at the University of Toronto students piling in, excited the energy? I bet it is a fun time of year. It is actually great at this time of year. Thousands of students back. Everybody full of optimism. Everybody's mood is positive. And the place is coming. I contrast the university this week with the underground shops in the downtown core.

Wow, the decibel is at 10 in the university. It's still only at a three or four in the heart of our financial district in this city. It says something, doesn't it? It does. We're all back at university, but we're not back to the office. Not yet. We'll see if slowing growth in Canada, possible recession, encourages people to get back into work to make sure they have a job by Christmas.

But look, that's topic for another show. I want to start this week with the big news that is going on internationally, which is the meeting of the G20. And I think what I want to get your take on, Janice, is what is the state of this institution? Because it always had, you know, I think a somewhat kind of checkered past and a somewhat troubled at times argument for relevance. And I'm just wondering if those things now have kind of culminated to a point where the G20 is, in a sense, under threat. G is not attending. The Biden administration looks bent on, you know, kind of pursuing its League of Democracies, kind of narrative and approach at the G20.

And, you know, India is there maybe as the future of the G20. I don't know as the host country surpassing the UK now in terms of total GDP. What is your take? Where are we at in terms of assessing the influence and relevance of the G20 today? It's really an interesting moment in history, Ruddin. And just as a historical footnote for our listeners, this was in part Paul Martin's brainchild, just to put a little Canadian color on this story.

And why did he think this was a good idea? for the reason you just mentioned. There were new economic players who have and had no voice in our international institutions. Nobody can reform the Security Council. If you want a lifelong career of utility, let's talk about that one. But if you're interested in anything practical, let's move along. But even on the more important ones, like the International Monetary Fund, World Bank, the old folks, the established powers,

were not willing to give up chairs and invite the new members in and increase their voting power. And that's really the role of the G20 here. This is an enlarged club that has, as you mentioned, India in it, Saudi Arabia, Brazil, the BRICS countries, you know, Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South.

Africa growing, but they do agree on one thing, and only one thing. We are tired of an international order that is run by the big powers, and the Russians and the Chinese will characterize this as the West. This is the beginning of the end of the Western monopoly on order, but in many ways it's an anti-bigit power movement, which doesn't work as far as these countries are concerned, because they don't exercise voice in those older institutions. So I think the G20 is here to stay, regardless of how dysfunctional it is, you know, in any given meeting, because there's no alternative still to institutions that give voice to these countries. What we are seeing, by the way,

a whole bunch of new smaller ones pop up. But I guess my question, Jen, is how small is bricks now? I mean, it's doubled his membership. China is clearly the Xi Jinping has identified himself as the self-appointed leader. They are now increasingly trading amongst each other in their currencies, not the US dollar. These involve major players, Saudi Arabia, Brazil, Russia, China, China. all non-dollar denominated trade in major commodities like oil, foodstuffs. It goes on and on.

And I would just say, like, the original thesis of the G10, 20, you could say, is being pursued and satisfied within an expanded bricks led by China. That's, you know, what happened recently doubling the size of bricks, as you just said, Rudyard at their last week, a long waiting list of countries knocking on the door to get into bricks is telling because it is saying, and it's hard to get U.S.-Canadian, you know, UK leaders to pay attention to this. We've had it, guys. Don't talk to us about a liberal rules-based international order, whose rules for whom. That's really the message that's coming out.

On the other hand, very little unifies these countries, except their opposition to the existing institutional arrangements. I really think the end of the dollar is hyped. The dollar, you know, is a reserve currency for a good reason, which is the extraordinary liquid capital markets in the United States. Every time there's a crisis, what happens, Redge, you know, better than anybody else. there's a flight to the dollar.

And so I think the predictions of growing trade, the de-dollarization of the global economy, I think they're frankly hype, but it's the politics that are really interesting. I think we're long overdue for a discussion, not about a liberal rules-based international order, which is just a favorite, phrase in Ottawa and on some days in Washington. But for a rules-based international order,

what rules do we need to take some of the friction and the bumpiness out of existing global trade, global security? And the United States has a loud voice, but it no longer has a veto. For sure. One little nasty footnote to all of this. Rogers, course, Shishi Pink shows up at the BRICS meeting, pushes hard to get new members, invite you, succeed, but doesn't come to the G20. Yeah, and that's what I was going to mention,

Janice. To the prime minister. Well, it's a snub to Modi, but to me, I mean, that surely is, if not a sign of the coming death knell of the G20, I mean, what is the relevance?

of the G20 of China is not there. Russia is not there. You, I mean, you're, it starts to become this weird no man's land between the two big emerging power blocks. You know, we've left the unipolar order. Yeah. We are now in a new geopolitical structure, which on one side has, you know, Europe, the United States, Canada, smattering of countries in Asia, maybe include Japan in that.

And then the rest, the other countries where 80% of the world's population actually lives and demographically and economically probably where a lot of the world's future economic growth is going to come from. And they are lining up against, you know, a BRICS plus model. Whereas you say, and, you know, to paraphrase Larry Summers, you know, when they have conversations with the Chinese, it's to discuss a new airport or roadway. What the Americans and Canadians give them is lectures. And we can enjoy lecturing. It often feels very good. I'm sure to be at the head of the class, you know, talking about the important principles and ideas that should inform

students thinking and behavior. But those students have kind of graduated a lot of them economically. They're moving on. Their per capita GDPs are rising. ours are falling. Per capita GDP in Canada is back to 2017 levels. The last seven quarters per capita GDP, so total economic output divided by the population, is down. I mean, I don't know, Janice, what's that phrase about going bankrupt? I think it's Hemingway. You know, you go bankrupt gradually and then all of a sudden. And I just, I wonder if we're, not approaching some kind of inflection point here where these multilateral institutions, it's a long list of victims that are out there that are roadkill right now from the WTO to,

you could say, the Security Council of the United Nations. I mean, that's always been a bit dysfunctional. But there's lots of examples of these Western-led institutions that came out of Bretton Woods after World War II that have lost relevancy. It's just, I mean, that's a fact. I don't say it with any joy, any relish, any, any, any, uh, any, uh, endorsement. I'm just trying to be realistic about, you know, a new world order that is not a Western-led world order. So let's just look at the other side of this coin for a second. I think the reason

is Xi Jinping, and who knows, because you have to be inside Xi Jinping's hat and so are also by him. I think the reason he did not come to the G20, yeah, is in part less embarrassing, you know, a grouping that is still led by Western powers. But it's also. So a really deliberate slap in the face to Modi, the prime minister of India. You know, he just released a map, China released a map, which shows significant parts of the Indian border incorporated into China. By the way, on the other, on the Southeast Asian side, there's some of that going on too. And there is a terrific rivalry between India and China. India has just joined.

And that's the other side of this, a Western-led security organization with a clearly anti-Chinese focus. The Quad. The Quad is not. You know, it is Western-led, for sure, UK, Australia, the United States, and India. So this is a much murkier picture where that India-China rivalry is a big story. story. I wonder, frankly, what the bricks are going to get done. If they get anything done at all, the expanded bricks over the next 10 years other than to me, the issue of Communicate, you know, they are having to my own establishment.

Jen is fair enough, Janice, but what do we do? We issue endless communicates too. So I don't think that compare and contrast is as effective as an argument as it used to be. what I think there's a bigger argument here. Almost all our institutions, international institutions, are functioning at very low levels. And that's the big word. You know, it's really interesting.

Just to sidetrack us for two minutes here. In Bremen of the Eurasia Group was the one who coined the phrase G0. What do he really mean by that? He said, it's not a G2 world. It's not the United States and China. It's G-Zero. And he's right about this.

Both of those two biggest economies in the world are dysfunctional. There are two countries driven by weak domestic politics in one way or another. And that's really scary, frankly. Well, India has a government right now that is led, that is manipulating right-wing Hindu nationalism in a way. that are making almost every minority in India, deeply, deeply uncomfortable. Nothing is working.

So where is Ian right now? He's saying, government is broken. And the new sovereigns in the world, and it's a neat phrase just to think about technopolar's, the big sovereign companies that are creating the new technological order. They are sovereign actors. and when Apple and Google and Meta, they know what they're doing.

They are running international trade. And they have a focus, unlike these dysfunctional institutions. Ian has a great way with Cat Trades. He's a former month debater, and we enjoyed his debate with Larry Summers and Paul Krugman. But this whole kind of Silicon Valley riffs that these techno companies are so big, they're emerging as new sovereign. They don't have armies. They don't have judicial systems.

They don't have all of the awesome powers of the state, the Leviathan. Okay? It exists. It doesn't always assert itself. Sometimes in China recently it has. But these states can and will be when they want to be incredibly powerful. And just as China crushed tech, if there is a set of circumstances where states genuinely feel threatened by these. these corporate, corporate enterprises, they will act.

And they have the tools to act in these, these quote, new sovereigns, Google Apple, meta, I don't think they're going to get standing armies. I don't think they're going to get judges and judiciaries. I don't think they're going to get the ability to make laws. Yes, they can influence, they can lobby. They're powerful in that way. But this kind of techno, it's not even techno optimism.

To me, it's a kind of techno feudalism that maybe Silicon Valley, at its darker moments, fantasizes about, I think is just that. It is a fantasy, and it's, again, a different version of boys with toys, this time, zeros and ones, and their delusions of grandeur. Thanks for listening to this excerpt of the Friday Focus podcast to get full-length editions of each and every episode of this program. Simply go to our website, triple-w, the monk debates.com. Click on the Friday Focus tab in our navigation on the top right of the site. Make a donation as little as $25 a year of 50 cents an episode, and we'll send you not only the full-length editions of each and every Friday Focus podcast,

but all kinds of special offers, perks, access to events, and additional content. Again, you can do that right now, by becoming a donor to the Monk Debates at triple W. Monk Debates, MUNK, DebateswithanS.com.