G8 leaders search for future relevance

By Ben Nimmo Jun 27, 2010, 21:49 GMT

Toronto - The Group of Eight (G8) is a big, rich club, but the Group of Twenty (G20) is bigger and richer: how can G8 members keep their grouping relevant?

The weekend's back-to-back summits of the G8, which links the world's richest developed countries, and the G20, which also includes the major developing powers, have been widely seen as marking a power shift from the smaller to the larger group.

That has forced G8 leaders into a rare burst of soul-searching as they ponder how best to keep the organisation relevant.

'Too often, these international meetings fail to live up to the hype and the promises made. I'm sure other leaders would admit that,' Britain's new Prime Minister David Cameron wrote in Canadian daily The Globe and Mail on the day the summit opened.

Indeed, events conspired this year to raise more questions about the relevance of the G8 than ever before.

First, 2010 marks the deadline that G8 leaders set themselves five years ago to boost their development aid to poor countries by 50 billion dollars, and the deadline for a mid-term review of rich states' progress toward boosting their overall aid by 2015.

The rich states are estimated to be 10 billion dollars short of the first target and at least 20 billion short of the second, in what is widely seen as a serious blow to their credibility.

'We must follow through on our initiatives and meet our commitments, because if the G8 fails to address the most difficult problems facing the world, no one else will,' Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper urged leaders as he opened the summit.

Secondly, one of the G8's main claims to importance in recent years has been that it puts the United States and Russia at the same table to discuss security and, most importantly, nuclear disarmament.

But this year's signature of the 'New START' nuclear-arms treaty between the old foes, and the apparently burgeoning friendship between their presidents, has diminished the G8's importance in that role.

That was highlighted when G8 members on Saturday failed to agree to extend a long-running partnership on securing dangerous nuclear stockpiles around the world.

'It is very disappointing and extremely short-sighted for the G8 not to have extended the programme,' said Kenneth Luongo, co-chairman of nuclear security think tank the Fissile Materials Working Group.

Thirdly, the fact that the G8 meeting comes back to back with a G20 summit with rising powers such as Brazil, China and India has inevitably led experts to predict that the larger group will become the natural place for debates on issues of economics and diplomacy.

'You will see agenda items begin to migrate' from the G8 to the G20 in the coming years, said Heather Conley of the Washington-based Centre for Strategic and International Studies.

With such questions surrounding their club, G8 leaders in Canada appeared to conclude that the best way to defend it would be to make sure that it does what it promises.

'We need to show people that we can get real results - by concentrating on key priorities and then driving them through relentlessly, year after year,' Cameron said.

Indeed, the words 'delivery' and 'accountability' came up time and again in leaders' statements, as they strove to make clear that the G8 would be able to keep its vows.

'To enhance the credibility and effectiveness of the G-8 ... we must follow through on our initiatives and meet our commitments,' Harper stressed.

The group does, indeed, look set to last at least one more year, after French President Nicolas Sarkozy promised to host its next summit in the spring of 2011.

But behind the determined rhetoric, there seemed to hang a hint of nostalgia - almost as if leaders were accepting that their long-lived and much-loved club is no longer the most important one in town.

'There is nothing that can substitute for the wide-ranging, frank and intimate discussions that occur between old allies and long-time friends,' Harper told his fellow-leaders.

'The G8 is family,' Sarkozy said.