There will inevitably be an agreement. The next G20 in London, where more than 90% of the world’s Gross Domestic Product, 80% of international trade, and two-thirds of the world’s population will meet, is likely to show a strong determination to recover from the financial crisis. However, the likely photo of a united and smiling “family” should not be deceiving: behind the polite gestures for the occasion, there are radically diverging views that divide the twenty participants at this summit.
Firstly, this summit masks a fierce resurgence of international competition. According to The New York Times, for example, Chinese banks have issued more financial loans in the past three months than in the previous year. Furthermore, an IMF report estimates that the Middle Kingdom is using the crisis to focus its investments on research and development and ensure the “long-term productivity of its economy.” It quotes remarks made by President Hu Jintao at the session of the National People’s Congress: “challenges and opportunities always come together.” Meanwhile, The Washington Post lists Beijing’s impressive “shopping list” – several tens of billions of dollars – in minerals, industries, and technologies, ranging from Iran to Russia, and passing through Australia, Venezuela, Brazil, Germany, Switzerland, and France.
The second deception of this meeting is the manifest return of protectionism. According to a recent World Bank report, since the last G20 in Washington, which was supposed to exclude such measures, seventeen of the countries in this group have adopted severe protectionist measures. These include Russian tax increases on foreign cars, Chinese customs barriers against European goods, American, Australian, and French state subsidies in favor of their automotive industries, not to mention the “Buy American” provision contained in the stimulus plan voted by Congress to ensure that only American companies benefit from public aid.
Lastly, the G20 will struggle to overcome the opposition of two philosophies. While European countries, with France and Germany at the forefront, strive for drastic regulation of markets and are obsessed with ending tax havens, the United States insists on the reliance of American consumption on “external growth” and the imperative need to support emerging markets accordingly: one of the pillars of the transatlantic plan, according to Obama, involves the “economic, security, and moral obligation to reach out to the countries and people most severely threatened.” America is no longer interested in setting up a system of large Roosevelt-like agencies, which were experimented within the 1930s and abandoned in spirit since the 1980s. Instead, it appears willing to consider – if only to help sell its production – the emerging countries: basing growth on the economic importance of the lowest incomes and reintegrating them into the global economic circuit to ensure a lasting recovery. Interviewed by CNN after his first face-to-face meeting with Barack Obama, which lasted over two hours and was described by the White House as a “wonderful meeting of minds”, the president of Brazil confirmed the “interest” of his American counterpart in the “Brazilian experience” which has “enabled twenty million poor people to rise to the middle class.”
Between the Chinese economy which, according to the International Herald Tribune, will emerge “strengthened” from the crisis, the good resilience of Brazilian growth, and the Moscow stock exchange that has regained in two months part of the losses recorded since the start of the turmoil, the United States does not lack arguments to defend this new approach focused on the BRIC countries. However, will the leaders of the G20 arrive in London in the new Nano from the Indian firm Tata?
