The G20 agenda utterly fails
to break with the tired, broken free-market policies that brought devastation
to our world.
The Hamburg G20 might go down
in history as the moment the international elite just couldn't hold it together
any longer. For years, leaders of the most powerful countries have come
together to cooperate on how to run the world: the G6, G7, G8, G20. Their
watchword was stability.
Holding it together was far
preferable to allowing an international free for all. Agreeing among themselves
was preferable to cooperating with small, poor and troublesome nations at the United
Nations. That's why they invented this system of global policymaking.
But the global elite has
fractured. In the run-up to the Hamburg G20, the talk was of the global
strongmen who had taken centre stage, for whom diplomacy was simply war by
other means. The power of Trump,
Putin, Erdogan and their ilk derives from a form of nationalism that believes
global rules are for the weak.
The G20 came to prominence in
2008 after the financial crash meant the richest G8 countries needed the wealth
of emerging nations to stabilise the world economy. The likes of Saudi
Arabia and Turkey were granted a seat at the table. In London in 2009, they
patted themselves on the back on a job well done.
But their reforms were too
timid, too beholden to the free-market ideology that caused the crash in the
first place. Today that crash haunts this G20 like a ghost that won't be
exorcised.
The tectonic plates of
global power are moving, and only a new politics can get us out of this mess.
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The international elite are
divided. This should scare us, as such divisions can plunge the world into
violence and disorder. But the situation is not hopeless...
This G20 will pitch the
"strongmen" against the "moderates" - Merkel,
Macron, Trudeau. The latter might look nicer, talk nicer and act nicer. Merkel
has put climate change, migration and free trade on the agenda, much
to the chagrin of Trump.
We shouldn't be fooled. The
G20 agenda utterly fails to break with the tired, broken policies of the free
market. In other words, those very policies which, by increasing inequality and
devastating communities, turning everyone into a self-interested individual,
have unwittingly given rise to the likes of Trump. And that's to ignore the
"Trumpism" in European politics - the barbaric immigration
policy at Europe's borders through which thousands of desperate migrants
die in the Mediterranean every year.
Sure, Merkel wants cooperation
on climate change and thinks globalisation should work for the many, not the
few. Who can disagree? But what does that really mean? A desperate attempt to
restore the system that was destroyed on the day Lehman Brothers collapsed.
The G20 agenda talks about the
need for structural reforms to reduce debt. Like those deeply anti-social
policies the European Union has imposed on Greece
for the last eight years, which have devastated that country and its people?
International capital flows
are good, the G20 agenda tells us. For whom? Unregulated capital flows have
sunk economies from Jakarta to Istanbul, with millions losing jobs and livelihoods
as a result. Agribusiness can feed the world, we're told. Yet there is already
more than enough food in the world to feed 10 billion people - so how do 800
million go to bed hungry every night? How is the further displacement of small
farmers to make way for monocrops going to help?
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Merkel crowns her benevolent
agenda a "Partnership for Africa". But as Zimbabwean activist Fanwell
Bokosi told this week's G20 counter-summit - "a partnership normally means
both sides are at the table and agree". In fact, this partnership is about
using Western aid and power to politely suggest African countries might want to
change their policies to make life easier for western multinationals to
"invest" in their countries. It also means they will be able to
avoid their taxes, and repatriate their profits back to the west when they've
fleeced the continent.
Even mainstream economists and
newspapers are unimpressed. Jeffrey Sachs gave a despairing speech before the
conference began, essentially saying 20 people can't solve these problems -
especially not these 20 people. Liberal German daily Der Spiegel said, under a
leader titled "the G20 farce", "the group meeting here is
an exclusive club that is mostly interested in preserving a creaking system of
financial market-driven capitalism".
Which is why there is such support for the protesters in Germany
this week. The tectonic plates of global power are moving, and only a new
politics can get us out of this mess. If we want to preserve the openness of
globalisation, the only way is through regulation - of capital, of big
business, of trade. There is no other way that the incredible riches of our
world can be shared by the many.
What does this look like? The
G20 fear a healthcare crisis as antibiotics stop working. So scrap
intellectual property rights for drugs companies, and use public funding to
insist on public priorities in medical research, and access for all. Climate
change? Urgently reduce carbon emissions and put massive funding into helping
developing countries develop free of fossil fuels. Terrorism? The simplest of
all. The G20 are the biggest backers of terrorism in the world. Stop it, and
put real effort into creating a world order based on peace and cooperation in a
properly funded and functional UN.
The G20 cannot or will not
adopt such an agenda. Only massive popular action can bring it about. Who
knows, they may patch together the vaguest of communiques from the Hamburg G20
in the next 24 hours. But it will represent no more than an attempt to hold
together a creaking building, slowly collapsing in on itself, with a piece of
sticky tape.
This is the end of something.
What will come next? That is still to be decided - and it depends on us.
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