Document(s) 10 of 21

Distilling the wisdom accumulated through 21 meetings attended by hundreds of expert and opinionated participants is necessarily an arbitrary process. Consensus was neither sought nor attained from this disparate group, but what follows are some of the main points around which there was a degree of agreement, together with some of the issues where disagreement was notable.

Role of Leaders

To begin with, participants recognized that the activities of national leaders on the international stage differed considerably from their behaviour domestically.¹ In both spheres, the leader’s role was key. At home, as the head of a government, a leader could direct, order, and generally cause things to occur (despite the great variation of constitutional frameworks across the L-20). Leaders could reasonably expect that their directions would be acted upon; in the event of non-compliance, they had recourse to a variety of sanctions.

Obviously, the situation internationally was different. In that setting leaders could seek to convince, ask for cooperation from their peers, make commitments (often of a fairly broad nature) on behalf of their country, or delegate tasks to Ministers, officials or organizations. Especially in smaller gatherings, the personal characteristics of the leader sometimes counted for as much as the size or power of the nation they represented. Participants generally agreed with Paul Martin that the personal relationships among leaders, established and nurtured over time, could make a material difference to the outcome of events.²

The nature of the work which leaders might undertake at an L-20 table occasioned a range of responses from participants. On the one hand, there seemed little appetite for a new Bretton Woods-like round of institution building.³ On the other, especially in some specific fields such as health, there was an urgent sense that leaders should mobilize to fill institutional gaps.⁴ In particular, notwithstanding the existence of the United Nations and all its emanations, participants consistently decried the lack of an effective forum within which to address the differing interests of North and South. Generally, participants observed that leaders should not be asked to develop complex legal instruments – this was the wrong sort of forum for negotiating detail. It was also noted that the tradeoffs which leaders might make would often be implicit and difficult to codify, but none the less real for that.⁵ Overall, there was a disposition to encourage Ministers and officials to get on with the institutional reform which they could accomplish at their own levels⁶ and, in fields such as safe drinking water and sanitation, there was major support for devolution of decision-making to the local level, provided that community funding and capacity development made this decentralist approach meaningful.⁷

The list of what leaders should not attempt was fairly lengthy. Although many participants stressed the importance of capacity building in specific fields such as health and science and technology,⁸ others expressed doubts, both in terms of leaders’ ability to connect effectively at the local level and in terms of their willingness to commit to this kind of support over an extended period of time. Capacity-building was seen as vital, but not politically attractive. Another disagreement arose around the extent to which leaders should be attempting to mobilize the private sector. In the Princeton discussions on global public goods, the question of engaging private finance was extensively discussed, essentially in a positive vein. On some subjects (especially water and health), however, participants split over the extent to which governments should enter into partnerships with corporate interests.⁹

Finally, participants frequently addressed ways in which leaders could be given substantive support when dealing with issues which were often fairly technical. In the economic field, the support systems were clear (e.g. as required, the OECD for the G-8); in others, such as the environment, the matter was less obvious.¹⁰ The related question of the extent to which an L-20 should have or would need a dedicated secretariat (and its possible size) prompted debate between those who wanted the leaders to have a minimal administrative footprint and those who were especially concerned that leaders should be properly prepared and sufficiently well staffed to allow for ongoing implementation of their decisions.

On a more personal level, participants in the Ottawa stocktaking meeting midway through the workshop series stressed the importance of informality to foster open discussion and to reduce the need for intensive preparation. Human dynamics were key considerations. Leaders had to enter the room feeling that a successful outcome was possible. Barriers of language and culture needed to be taken into account to ensure symmetry of developed/developing country engagement so that leaders could connect personally and have free-flowing discussions.¹¹

Overall, the extensive workshop discussions served to highlight the critical role leaders play and the extent to which personal relations amongst them often drive events.

L-20 Composition

The vexed question of exactly which countries should be members of an L-20 came up most frequently at the beginning of the meeting series and then to a degree at the end. After an initial breaking of lances, it was recognized that there was probably no magic number of countries which would add up to twenty and be perfectly “representative” of the 192 members of the United Nations. The initial sug­gestion was that the 20 countries arbitrarily chosen as the G-20 Finance Ministers group should be the starting point, although it could be argued that both African and Islamic countries would be under-represented. Moreover, selecting the largest (in population or GDP terms) countries in each region raised the matter of how well the leaders of large countries could represent the (probably quite different) interests of their smaller neighbours.

Once launched into the workshops on specific subjects, participants often “punted” the question of membership as being too hard although, for some topics, the presence or absence of a particular country or type of country prompted a substantive discussion.¹² Procedurally, it was recognized that, if membership were allowed to become the primary focus early in the effort to gain support for the concept, the initiative would become a negotiating nightmare.¹³

Inclusion in some form of L-20 “top table” would mean different things for different countries. For major emerging economies (Brazil, India), membership would amount to recognition of their new global status. If several African countries took part (South Africa, Nigeria, Egypt), they would assume that that continent’s priorities would receive a better hearing. If key Islamic countries were included (Indonesia, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Turkey), the “Christian” monopoly will have been broken and greater respect conferred. For China, there would be the opportunity to help initiate a new, important process rather than contemplate being a simple “add-on” to the existing G-8. By the same token, Russia would be unlikely to welcome a body which might eventually supplant a group (the G-8) which it had finally managed to join.

For the established G-8 members, a larger group would inevitably mean the dilution of their influence, perhaps with growing pressure on European Union members to consolidate their representation.¹⁴ For Canada, the incentive to be a founder member would be high since, by many measures, its claim on a “top table” space is diminishing. And for the United States, no amount of institutional tinkering would reduce its predominant position in the short term, but the broader representation in a new body with the ability to make a fresh start on key global issues would provide the Americans with an avenue for re-engaging with a world community which has become suspicious and uncooperative. At the same time, the US would have no interest in simply affording a select group of countries the privilege of lecturing it at close range on its foreign policy shortcomings.

Given the pivotal role which the United States might play, a recurring debate in the workshops concerned whether to concentrate as a first step on convincing the US to embrace the L-20 approach or whether to gather support elsewhere in the hopes that the US would want to join in the end (a variant of the “if you build it, they will come” philosophy). On balance, by the end of the workshop series, the judgment seemed to be that the latter made more sense.¹⁵

Finally, by the last workshop in Washington DC, active consideration was being given to options apart from an expanded summit at leaders level based on the G-20 Finance Ministers. Alternative formulations were presented including chairs for smaller, poorer countries, using regions as a vehicle for representation, and using the existing or adapted constituencies in the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund as channels for summit input. Also mentioned was the idea of an enlarged core group of countries composed of the G-8 plus a selected number of emerging market economies (China, India, Brazil and South Africa being the most obvious choices), followed by a “variable geometry” consisting of a half a dozen countries chosen on the basis of the issue or challenge under consideration at a given meeting. This idea merged with another version whereby health ministers might meet in an H-20 (the group of the most critical countries in health governance), and an E-20 might meet on environmental issues composed of a different configuration of countries, and so on. If and when these ministerial forums developed proposals with which only leaders could deal, then summits would be convened with the H-20 or E-20 countries to resolve the outstanding issues.¹⁶

Not surprisingly, no agreement emerged from the Washington workshop, and the sense was that issues related to composition would only be clarified when the discussion moved closer to operational reality, at which point a collection of arbitrary, political decisions would be made.¹⁷

Possible Agenda Items

By the end of the workshop series, it had become clear that, if an L-20 approach was to proceed, one of the most important factors would be the choice of agenda items for the initial meeting. To a degree, that agenda would be driven by events, but workshop participants generated a number of characteristics which might apply to candidate items.

Participants generally agreed that the topic should be neither too technical (e.g. breaking the agriculture trade impasse or managing financial crises) nor too complex (e.g. reconstructing fragile states). Although issues already being dealt with in other established forums or organizations might in the right circumstances be given impetus, the inclination was not to recommend that leaders take them over. This would probably apply, for example, to the current efforts to reform the United Nations and the Bretton Woods institutions.

Topics might need to be re-framed to make them as attractive as possible to a broad range of countries (e.g. shifting the emphasis from climate change to energy security) and should be cast as specifically as possible so as to make clear the leaders’ key contribution. Asking leaders to take on large, amorphous subjects such as development assistance or global health would be unhelpful, and the same would apply to long-term problems with few immediate deliverables or solutions. Bringing leaders together to be demonstrably ineffective was unacceptable.

Some workshops came up with long lists of potential undertakings by leaders (e.g. in the climate change, energy security and water fields), but catalogues of this kind would present operational hurdles in terms of effective implementation.¹⁸ Others discussed the linking of their subjects to security concerns, usually in an attempt to encourage buy-in by the United States.¹⁹ Another, perhaps more benign, form of linkage was the reminder that many potential agenda items could be placed in the context of one or more of the Millennium Development Goals (especially in such areas as science and technology, health, and safe drinking water and sanitation).

At the beginning of the workshop series, in order to identify what topics would make socially and politically attractive agenda items for an L-20 meeting, it was agreed that they should be rated against their ability to meet or provide the following:

• a value-added initiative that could be agreed upon in a way not likely through other forums or organizations (e.g., G-8 or UN or Bretton Woods agencies);
  
  
• a workable solution – a forward looking, focused suite of actions and promises that offered a win-win-win outcome for L-20 countries;
  
  
• legitimacy through adequate representation, particularly by the United States and the major developing countries; and
  
  
• tangible results with substantial, broad-based benefits, realistic and acceptable financing mechanisms and organizational feasibility.

Once the workshops began, the criteria indicating the “ripeness” and relevance for L-20 engagement were sharpened.

• Cross-cutting problems. The problem must cut across the traditional “vertical” structures of government. National governments may have invented new organizational structures to address issues that do not fit neatly into monoministerial silos. A high-level governance structure might be valuable in overriding and unblocking bureaucratic obstacles to effective links across these divisions at both national and international levels.
  
  
• The dimensions of other international negotiations. Important related issues are often embedded in high level international negotiations. For example, concerns about national and global security or about global climate change run into questions about poor countries’ access to dual-use or clean technologies owned by rich countries. Also, negotiations about trade in agricultural and food products run into poor countries’ perceptions of their vulnerability to trade barriers arising from stringent technological standards imposed by rich countries.
  
  
• Sustained follow-through. Given the common shortfall between announced aspirations (even commitments) and delivery, there may be a strong case for an L-20 mechanism that would put high-level “weight” behind efforts to achieve concrete action on these plans and proposals.

In the end, after an exhaustive review of possible topics for consideration by an L-20 group, the list of realistic agenda items was quite short:

1. a specific element of international health, possibly management of the avian flu or another pandemic;
   
2. climate change/energy security; and
   
3. some aspect of nuclear proliferation.

The rationale for this narrowing down to three possible agenda items (or, more precisely, areas from which agenda items could be drawn) will be described in the next chapter.

Skepticism and Doubt

In an uncertain world, only the naïve and the dangerous lack doubt. The people invited to the project meetings were neither of these, and they brought with them an array of questions and misgivings about the L-20 approach which enlivened the debate and enriched the outcome. Although it is probably fair to say that the majority of participants came away believing that some version of an L-20 could fill a demonstrable gap in the current structure of international institutions, not all did so. It would be misleading not to include some of the more common concerns which arose in the course of the twenty-one meetings.²⁰

• If the L-20 idea is intended to address issues of legitimacy by including representatives of developing countries at the “top table”, expanding the size of the “oligarchy” only makes it larger, not more legitimate. Smaller, poorer countries will still not be adequately represented.
  
  
• Attempting to deal with “horizontal” aspects of legitimacy by broadening geographic representativeness still leaves the “vertical” concerns unmet. Solving global problems requires a significant degree of democratization, coupled with principled efforts to increase meaningful local decision-making.
  
  
• No matter how cleverly structured, it is very difficult to arrange meetings which allow leaders to “get past” protocol and set piece speeches. Moreover, protocol exists, after all, to level the playing field between principals – not all leaders are equally well endowed intellectually, and some may find a small summit setting threatening.
  
  
• Twenty people are still too many for a sensible conversation.
  
  
• Under current circumstances, it is difficult to imagine enticing the United States to the table and, without the United States, the effort would be pointless.
  
  
• The L-20 would have no legal basis, unlike for example the Security Council. Even if it is true that many, if not most, international institutions are to some degree broken, an L-20 would have no basis on which to attempt to replace them. In the end, the L-20 would be a self-selected club.

To round out this survey of skepticism, it is worth quoting at length the doubts expressed at the Stanford workshop on energy and security, because this thorough listing, although focused on a particular issue area, gives a good sense of the complexities involved in any approach as ambitious as the L-20 project.

Throughout our deliberations we were also mindful that there are many reasons to be skeptical of the L-20 process. Among them:

• L-20 should not be convened to solve problems that may solve themselves. For example, efforts to counteract the workings of OPEC must realize that OPEC’s effectiveness as a cartel is prone to over-statement, and arguably the price run up in recent years is largely unrelated to OPEC’s work.
  
  
• Governments find it very difficult to look and invest beyond 2–3 years, but investments in most energy projects have amortization periods of 10–25 years.
  
  
• It may be particularly difficult for governments to engage in meaningful coordinated action on oil supply because the decisions at their disposal lead to multiple possible strategies, and depending on the strategy the composition of the L-20 may need to be varied. A strategy to boost investment in spare capacity requires Saudi Arabia’s participation; a strategy to boost investment in alternative supplies would be hampered by Saudi Arabia and other core low-cost oil suppliers.
  
  
• It is difficult for governments to promote and coordinate large R&D projects without them becoming patronage-ridden (e.g., Synfuels). Such problems may particularly hamper efforts to pursue such programs in a coordinated global fashion.
  
  
• Ambitious international R&D programs involve intellectual property issues, which, historically, have proven difficult to resolve. The L-20 could initiate such programs only to find them stalled by such obstacles.
  
  
• The L-20’s role in nuclear power is unclear. The area of greatest potential leverage is proliferation. However, perhaps proliferation is already beyond control, given events in Iran and Korea and likely responses by their neighbors. Moreover, internationalization of the fuel cycle (a topic that has already been floated by others and met much resistance) may be too hard for the L-20. Perhaps a smaller group, if any at all, could make progress.
  
  
• A long list of possible issues—as done earlier this report—does not provide a clear picture of priorities, or clarity on the continuing role the L-20 might play. There are too many areas where the L-20 needs substantive analysis to decide, and where the pros and cons are not fully listed or apparent. ²¹

Interestingly, despite these concerns, the Stanford workshop concluded that the L-20 approach retained great promise.

The New World of Networks

In addition to doubt, of course, project participants brought ideas to the table, and among the most interesting and potentially transformative was the work on government networks provided by Anne-Marie Slaughter, Dean of the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University. Dr. Slaughter prepared one of the background papers for the first project meeting, “Government Networks, World Order, and the G20”. In it she suggested that a fundamental conceptual shift should be contemplated.

Stop imagining the international system as a system of states – unitary entities like billiard balls or black boxes – subject to rules created byinternational institutions that are “apart from” and “above” these states. Start thinking about a world of governments, with all the different institutions that perform the basic functions of governments – legislation, adjudication, implementation – interacting both with each other domestically and also with their foreign and supranational counterparts.²²

Slaughter maintains that the crucial actors would remain nation states, but they would be “disaggregated”, relating to each other on a multiplicity of levels. The primary authority would still rest at the national level, except where explicitly delegated. Government officials would participate in many different types of networks, within the country, with counterparts in other countries, and with officials in international organizations.

Much of this “dense web” of networks already exists, improving compliance with international rules, increasing international cooperation and generally acting as “global transmission belts for information”. Slaughter maintains that, if this trend were recognized and reinforced, the networks could improve national institutions through the rapid propagation of best practices, raise standards across the board and act as extremely efficient conduits for technical assistance aimed at capacity-building. She also suggests that networks are well suited to encouraging the kind of inclusive discussion and argument which helps generate high-quality solutions to complex problems, an important aspect of which involves the need for active “buy-in” by the various affected interest groups. Although government networks would still have recourse to state-centred “hard power”, they would also be in a position to mobilize the various components of “soft power” – the power of information, socialization, persuasion and discussion.

On the basis of this analysis, Slaughter proposed that project participants re-imagine the L-20.

It could be a global think tank, a caucus in many existing institutions, a catalyst for networked global governance operating through national government officials. It is a genuinely representative global institution that is small enough and flexible enough to be effective. It could become the steering committee of many of the world’s networks.²³

She recognized the potential for the network approach to lead to over-centralized power, a lack of transparency and a reduction in direct accountability. She called for the L-20 to meet these concerns head-on, however, while continuing to focus its efforts on the production of genuine results.

What was striking about the Slaughter thesis was not so much that it was adopted in its entirety, but that it kept re-appearing as the various workshops examined specific subjects as potential L-20 agenda items.²⁴ The network model clearly applied somewhat differently, depending on the issue under discussion, but this alternative way of looking at the world helped re-orient thinking and start new modes of discourse. For this alone, it was a valuable contribution to the ongoing debate.

Endnotes

¹ New York, p. 2; San Jose, p. 2.

² A fine illustration can be found in Margaret MacMillan’s definitive account of the interplay of personalities (especially those of Woodrow Wilson, Georges Clemenceau and David Lloyd George) at the negotiations leading to the Treaty of Versailles in Margaret MacMillan, Paris 1919: Six Months that Changed the World. Random House, 2002.

³ Alexandria, p. 4.

⁴ Geneva.

⁵ New York, p. 4.

⁶ Maastricht, p. 6; Washington, p. 6.

⁷ Alexandria, p. 5.

⁸ See for example San Jose, p. 6.

⁹ See for example the debate over the possible role of the private sector in providing water services, Alexandria, p. 4.

¹⁰ New York, p. 2.

¹¹ Ottawa II, p. 2.

¹² For example the question raised at the New York climate change workshop about whether the European Union should be allotted only one seat – given the EU strong support for Kyoto, the number Europeans at the table would obviously skew the discussion of climate change issues. New York, p. 5.

¹³ A somewhat puzzling sample of the potential misery was the reported French position that they would only be interested in joining if Algeria were a member too.

¹⁴ See the chart in Appendix B.

¹⁵ At the Princeton workshop on financing global public goods, there was an interesting discussion of the alternative of deliberately tailoring an L-20 agenda to meet the aspirations of a conservative American administration (Princeton II, pp. 3–4) and a related canvassing of “grand bargain” agenda-setting which might result in a trio of subjects appealing to a range of countries, but especially the US. This agenda might include, for example, Iraq reconstruction, over-fishing, and climate change (Princeton II, p. 5).

¹⁶ Washington, p. 6.

¹⁷ For another version of the idea, see British Prime Minister Tony Blair’s May 26, 2006 article in the “The Globe and Mail” newspaper calling for the G-8 to meet as a matter of course as the “G-8 plus 5”.

¹⁸ New York, p. 4; Stanford, p. 6; Alexandria, pp. 6, 7.

¹⁹ For example in the health field (San Jose, pp. 4, 5) and during the discussion of financing global public goods (Princeton II, p. 2).

²⁰ See also the list of reasons compiled at the Ottawa “launch meeting” of why an L-20 would not work, Ottawa I, pp. 20–21. These ranged from the impact of domestic politics to simple summit fatigue and the unwillingness of leaders to run the risk of public failure.

²¹ Stanford, pp. 5–6.

²² Anne-Marie Slaughter, Government Networks, World Order, and the G20. L-20 project paper, 2003, http://www.l20.org/ p. 5.

²³ Slaughter op cit., p. 17.

²⁴ See for example the reference to the work of Slaughter and Jean-Francois Rischard, Global Issues Networks: Desperate Times Deserve Innovative Measures, The Washington Quarterly, Winter 2002–03, 26: pp. 17–33, during the discussion of the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction at the Livermore workshop (Livermore, p. 3).

Document(s) 10 of 21