The 17th G20 Heads of State and Government Summit took place in 15-16 November 2022 in Bali. The event was held against the backdrop of the conflict between Russia and Ukraine, and even in the face of growing confrontation between the US and China and tensions between the US and Saudi Arabia over oil supplies. Some analyses of the Bali summit have focused on how the power politics that the war reflects have damaged the G20 as a collective-action mechanism. ECIR specialists have highlighted relevant expert abstracts from international media about the past G20 meeting.
1. Finanacial Times contributing editor Ivan Krastev believes that Middle Powers are reshaping geopolitics. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is the clearest example of our new reality.
The editor claims that the war in Ukraine has shone a spotlight on the activism of the Middle Powers as the major driving force of the reshaping of the international environment. For instance, South Africa, India, South Korea, Germany, Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Israel.
Whereas America’s allies in Europe came together in defence of Ukraine and against Beijing’s tacit support for Vladimir Putin’s war, the global south remains reluctant to see Kyiv’s resistance to Russia as an anti-colonial war. This is marked by the fact that their own postcolonial identities are shaped by struggles against European empires, or against US hegemony, not against Russia or China.
Some Middle Powers are democracies, some are autocracies and others populate a grey area in between, some are developing countries with booming populations, others are economic powers struggling with demographic decline. Some earned their Middle Power status thanks to geographic size, others thanks to economic might. But, according to the author, they all share one fundamental feature: they are determined to be at the table and not on the menu, since they all have the power and ambition to shape their regions.
Turkey’s role in the Russia-Ukraine war is an example of Middle Power activism. The expert claims that Ankara has downplayed its identity as a Nato member and US ally in exchange for the role of mediator between Moscow and Kyiv.
Thus, Middle Powers aspire to have the global influence of Washington or Beijing. Even though it’s unlikely, the only difference from the Cold War is that. the Middle Powers had to adjust to the whims and plans of the superpowers, but today the US and China have to manage a world reshaped by their activism.
2.Another columnist at Foreign Policy Adam Tooze considers that at a time of global conflict, world powers showed that cooperation can work. The analyst positively analyzes the past G20 meeting, believing that it exceeded all expectations. In Bali, the focus was on Ukraine.
There was no one who was keen to ally themselves with Russia. “This does not mean that China, India, and Brazil were going to fall in line with the United States and Europe in condemning Putin. In that crucial respect, they preserved their stance of nonalignment. But there was no hiding the fact that they regard the war in Ukraine as a threat to the world economy and are aghast at Putin’s nuclear saber-rattling”, – the author argues.
The columnist also supports the idea that the emerging-market nations that might once have been regarded as junior members of the G-20 demonstrated clout and independence. These are the nonaligned powers that to be reckoned with, and even individually they are significant players.
He considers that the two conflicts—Russia vs. West and China vs. United States—split the world.
Even though the risk of escalation between China and USA is serious, both Beijing and Washington recognize the need to keep channels of communication open.
Thereby, the Bali G-20 demonstrated that conducting diplomacy in an age of crisis does not mean that things are destined to blow up or fall apart.
3. As for the other CNN editor Rhea Mogul, the analyst believes that G20’s criticism of Russia shows the rise of a new Asian power. And that country is India. New Delhi deftly balances its ties to Russia and the West.
Analysts say that Modi is emerging as a leader who has been courted by all sides, winning him support at home, while cementing India as an international power broker. Happymon Jacob, associate professor of diplomacy and disarmament at the Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) in New Delhi says that Western leaders are listening to India as a major stakeholder in the region, because India is a country that is close to both the West and Russia. New Delhi has strong ties with Moscow dating back to the Cold War, and India remains heavily reliant on the Kremlin for military equipment. At the same time, New Delhi has been growing closer to the West as leaders attempt to counter the rise of Beijing, placing India in a strategically comfortable position. Jacob from JNU said. ” There is a feeling that India is seen as a key country that can provide for the needs of the region in South Asia and beyond.”
Pant, from King’s College London, also argues that Modi’s idea is to project India as a country that can respond to today’s challenges by echoing the concerns that some of the poorest countries have about the contemporary global order. In this way, India’s positioning of next year’s summit is “very much of being the voice of the developing world and the global South”.
After analyzing the opinions of various experts, we can conclude that developing countries can be salutary when identifying global solutions. Their general thought of experts leads to the fact that in most places in the world globalization translates to regionalization. This regionalism can be seen as a response to the process of globalization and geopolitical eruptions associated with this process. This is the key to the influence of actively developing countries. Whereas the old regionalism was formed in a bipolar Cold War context, the new is taking shape in a multipolar world order. Another main difference is that the old regionalism was created “from above” (often through superpower intervention), but the new is a more spontaneous process from within the regions, where the constituent states now experience the need for cooperation to tackle new global challenges. The new regionalism is linked to globalization and can therefore not be understood merely from the point of view of the single region. It should be defined as a world order concept, since any process of regionalization has repercussions in other regions, thus shaping the way in which the new world order is being organized. As in the Cold War, there are existential risks that require active management. However, the G-20 is providing a useful forum for diplomacy, and this forum may be one of the arenas in which that management takes place.
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