It was almost 30 years ago when the then French President Valery Giscard d’Estaing hosted what he wanted to be a cozy country weekend for the leaders of the world’s major economic powers.
The gathering took place at an old chateau, reserved for the French president as a weekend retreat, on the edge of the Rambouillet forest near Paris. The leaders of the United States, Canada, Japan, Britain, Germany and Italy were present alongside Giscard. Thus was born the Group of Seven (G-7) annual meeting that has continued since. The summit is hosted by the member states on a rotating basis.
Giscard, an economist, had wanted the summit to focus only on global economic issues. That was the peak of the world energy crisis triggered by the quadrupling of the oil prices that forced the industrial nations to re-design their economic strategies. Inevitably, however, the summit could not be kept confined to economic issues. Leaders of the world’s most powerful nations could hardly ignore the crucial political issues of the day. In time, the summit developed into an international political and media circus drawing thousands of officials and journalists. Not a trace is now left of the intimacy that Giscard had initially looked for. The exercise has become one giant photo opportunity. Not surprisingly, those who seek publicity against the global system represented by the G-8 also want to be present to steal as much of the limelight as possible.
This year it is Italy’s turn to host the summit in the port city of Genoa. The summit, which begins today, is the first major test of the new Italian government led by Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi. This is because, for the first time ever, the G-8 summit has been clearly threatened with violence. The Red Brigades, which were supposed to have disappeared many years ago, have returned to threaten the participants with “ revolutionary execution”. Other less violent groups have warned they would try to disrupt the proceedings by blocking roads, organizing sit-downs and forced entry into private sessions
At least 100 organizations opposed to globalization have been hard at work to prepare for what they label “The Genoa Campaign”. The aim is to bring in at least 100,000 protestors and seize control of the city.
Italy’s new Foreign Minister Renato Ruggiero has tried to defuse the situation by organizing a pre-summit session in Genoa designed to let protestors air their grievances and go home. As star guests he has invited former South African President Nelson Mandela, the Guatemalan natives’ rights campaigner Rigoberta Menchu, the widow of Martin Luther King Coretta King and the French peasant revolt leader Jose Bove. Numerous other busybodies, always ready for a free lunch and boat ride, were also invited.
All that, however, has not appeased the opponents of globalization who represent an unusual coalition of ex-Communists, religious fundamentalists, environmentalists, gays and lesbians, romantics and run-of-the-mill adventurers. The anti-globalization coalition, operating under the name of Genoa Social Forum (GSF), has just issued a statement calling for “energetic action” to drive the G-8 leaders out of Italy. The GSF claims that the G-8 is “an evil group” dedicated to “robbing the poor to make the rich even richer”.
In recent days, Genoa has been turned into a city under siege. According to reports, the Italian government has even devised a secret plan to transfer the entire summit onto a luxury cruiser parked just off the coast. The GSF suggests that the G-8 be replaced by a special session of the United Nations’ General Assembly to discuss global economic issues. What is astonishing is the GSF’s genuine or feigned ignorance of the real work of the G-8. The protestors claim that the G-8 is a kind of cabal in which leaders of the most powerful countries take secret decisions that affect the global economy. Italy’s Nobel-prize winning poet and comedian Dario Fo has compared the G-8 to an octopus that injects poison into the world economy through its eight fangs.
As a reporter who has covered almost a dozen of G-7 and G-8 summits, I find that claim hilarious if not actually absurd. Not only have the summits never succeeded in developing anything resembling a unified strategy, but they have also failed to implement the limited changes they have agreed upon. The issue of reforming the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), for example, has been discussed at virtually every summit since 1975. And yet nothing concrete has happened. As for trade liberalization talks, the summit has not been able to provide even broad guidelines. Progress in that field was achieved first through the General Agreement on Tariff and Trade (GATT) and then through the negotiations that led to the creation of the World Trade Organization (WTO). Even the modest decision of forgiving the African nations’ foreign debt, initially taken in 1995 in Canada, has not yet been implemented.
If a case is to be made about scrapping the annual G-8 summits, it must rest on the fact that the exercise is expensive and futile. Now it has also become a cause celebre for the nostalgics of communism and others who have been defeated by history.
The problem is that globalization has never been properly explained to the public at large. The false claim that globalization has increased poverty in the world has not been refuted by facts and figures as it could easily be done.
Nor has anyone explained that many despotic and corrupt regimes hide behind the anti-globalization mask because they do not wish to relinquish control of their national economies to the forces of the free market. On the cultural front, anti-globalization has become the rallying cry of philistines who think national cultures need to be “protected” in the same way that the Mafia protects its protégés.
The G-8 leaders gathering in Genoa should not be content with bear hugs, clownish handshakes and toothpaste smiles. They should come out and explain why globalization is to the ultimate benefit of the world. If they cannot do that, they had better scrap the exercise and deprive the reactionary forces that masquerade as soldiers of global justice of a stage on which to perform their macabre dance.
