India Prime Minister Narendra Modi accepting the G20 presidency gavel in Bali, 2022/Reuters

Lisa Van Dusen

September 3, 2023

In this time of fervid geopolitical power consolidation, the G20’s role as a multilateral limbo — between the rules-based international order/US-led G7 and the aspiring world order/China-led BRICs group — makes the summit in Delhi the most important G20 in more than a decade.

That importance is based not on the event’s success or failure measured by the generation and wording of a final communiqué alone, but on what this G20 reveals about the ongoing battle between those established and aspiring world orders.

The first official G20 meeting was held at the ministerial level in December of 1999 in Berlin, but the group was really born three months earlier, on September 25th, at the Ritz Carlton on Embassy Row in Washington, where G7 finance ministers were gathered.

On that balmy DC evening, as the sidewalk outside the hotel sprouted a thicket of boom mics and floodlights, two Canadians held court. One was Finance Minister Paul Martin, the driving force behind the idea of a G7 finance-ministerial group expanded to reflect the early, borderless economic mutations of globalization. The other was Don Johnston, former Canadian Treasury Board president and Martin’s fellow Montrealer, who was then Secretary General of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD).

The multilateral mobilization of finance ministers was in response to a series of debt and default crises, from Russia to Mexico to Southeast Asia, that had activated a whole new form of financial contagion fuelled by — among other accelerants — the impact of the internet on currency crises, capital flows and the checks and balances of a suddenly outdated global financial and regulatory architecture. Martin agreed to act as chair of the new group — which would include as ex-officio members the IFI heads and central bankers — for its first two years.

At that September meeting, the communiqué remained vague on the criteria for membership. “We will invite our counterparts from a number of systemically important countries from regions around the world,” it read, “to launch this new group.”

In fact, the basic composition of the new “G??” (some called it the “GX”) had been determined five months earlier. On April 27^th, in the office of US Treasury Secretary Larry Summers, he and Martin had begun “sketching the framework of a new world order on a brown manila envelope,” per later, great reporting by The Globe and Mail’s John Ibbitson and Tara Perkins.

As it turns out, per the glaring lesson of Thailand’s role in the abovementioned Asian financial crisis, systemic importance can stem from economic strength or economic vulnerability. The calculus regarding which of the non-G7 economies to include reflected that dichotomy. Size did not weigh in the mix as much as other determinants, including geopolitical weight and regional political influence. “I would love to say we sat down and ran the numbers on whose GDP was bigger, but we didn’t,” Martin later told Ibbitson and Perkins of his meeting with Summers. “We both had a pretty good perspective on where things lay.”

So, that original list included 19 countries — Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, France, Germany, India, Indonesia, Italy, Japan, the Republic of Korea, Mexico, the Russian Federation, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, Turkey, the United Kingdom, the United States — and the European Union.

In November 2008, the first G20 leaders-level meeting was held, 10 days after the election of President Barack Obama and two months before his inauguration, amid the economic rubble of the financial cataclysm that crystallized his victory in the campaign’s final weeks. That was followed by the crucial London G20 in April 2009, at which the group underscored the value of its global reach by proving indispensable to the post-crisis economic recovery.

As the Economist recently pointed out, growing economic ties between China and India and the post-democracy proclivities of their leaders are more reliable measures of the bilateral relationship than any irritant. In that sense, Xi’s absence from Delhi next week may be more an act of deputation than of sabotage.

Canada’s role in, and relationship with, the G20 has been energetically sustained over more than two decades, as Policy contributor Sen. Peter Boehm — who served as sherpa for six G7 summits — wrote recently in Whither the Gs? Summitry in a Time of Disruption. “To make a generational reference, assessing the G20 and the G7 is not a Beatles vs Stones comparison,” Boehm mused. “While both groups have their individual (and overlapping) memberships, styles, functions and fans, their issue sets and approaches to global problems have tended to be different. Of interest too, especially outside our country, is the perception that Canada has been an engaged, committed member of both in functional terms, regardless of who our prime minister was at the time.”

In the history of the G20, New Delhi may prove to be as pivotal a moment as 1999 and 2009.

The Delhi G20, hosted by Prime Minister Narendra Modi per India’s turn in the rotating G20 presidency, will drop gavel two weeks and two days after the BRICs Johannesburg meeting at which the Beijing-led, anti-democracy, authoritarian-curious grouping of Brazil, India, China and South Africa announced an expansion of its own, by six countries: Argentina, Egypt, the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Ethiopia and Iran. Two of those, Argentina and Saudi Arabia, are G20 members, as are all the original BRICs countries. For its part, the US-led G20 has added to its Delhi invitation list: Bangladesh, Egypt, Mauritius, Netherlands, Nigeria, Oman, Singapore, Spain and United Arab Emirates. Three or four of those are currently better suited to the BRICS expansion but, being unencumbered by democratic accountability for their geopolitical alignments, are presumably keeping their poaching options open.

Further churning that geopolitical brine is the announcement that Chinese President Xi Jinping, representing the BRICs/new world order/authoritarian side of this contest, will not be in Delhi, dispatching Premier Li Qiang in his place. (Russian dictator Vladimir Putin has also sent regrets, citing a busy schedule rather than the International Criminal Court warrant for his arrest for war crimes in Ukraine). Xi’s snub has been spun as a possible effort to undermine both Modi’s role as host and India’s ascension as a US-backed democracy to counter China. “The absence of China’s president will be a blow to India’s rotating presidency of the multilateral gathering and the status of the New Delhi summit,” per The Financial Times this week. “It also shakes the stature of the G20 as the pre-eminent global leadership forum, amid deep fissures between its members.”

Given Modi’s role in advancing a number of anti-democracy agenda items in India — including human rights rollbacks, the adoption of surveillance-state tactics and privacy obliterations, the abuse of the legal system to silence and sideline political opponents and the leveraging of ethnic divisions to sow and weaponize political upheaval — the notion that he is somehow at odds with China’s president obfuscates his status as the latest, polymorphously persuadable Pervez Musharraf in America’s geopolitical Rolodex. The notion that “the stature of the G20 as the pre-eminent global leadership forum” is the real tactical target is more pertinent to the proceedings. As the recent Economist leader What if China and India became friends? pointed out, growing economic ties between the two countries and the post-democracy proclivities of their leaders are more reliable measures of the bilateral relationship than any irritant, present or past.

All of which puts President Joe Biden, currently facing a re-election battle against the aspiring new world order’s favourite democracy-degradation actor, in an interesting position. Biden has, so far, adopted the diplomatic approach of publicly addressing the tactical shenanigans that plague every process, institution, organization and negotiation of the democracy-led, rules-based international order based on their explicit, typically misdirectional rationales. That strategy may well be tested in Delhi.

And the G20 will face the task of determining not whether it continues to exist, but of settling on a new definition of “systemically important”, within a whole new context of systemic risk.

Policy Magazine Associate Editor and Deputy Publisher Lisa Van Dusen was a senior writer at Maclean’s, Washington columnist for the Ottawa Citizen and Sun Media, international writer for Peter Jennings at ABC News and an editor at AP National in New York and UPI in Washington.