Publication
Omar Shaban Ismail · QudsNet · 2019
An assessment of the G7's role in international political economy, examining the performance gap between stated ambitions and actual achievements.
The G7 is an international bloc bringing together the world's largest economies: the United States, Britain, Germany and France, Japan, Italy and Canada. It was founded in 1975 as an international framework for consultation on world affairs. The oil crisis from which the West suffered severely with the October 1973 war was the principal reason for forming this group. Six countries — France, Britain, Germany, Italy, Japan and the United States — took part in its founding, and Canada joined later. With Russia's accession in 1998 it became the Group of Eight; Russia's membership was frozen in 2004 following its annexation of Crimea. The group still opposes Russia's return to it, while US President Trump is striving to bring Russia back in.
The current meeting is the group's forty-fifth. It is being held in France and chaired by French President Macron. A number of emerging economies, such as India, Brazil and Egypt, have been invited to take part in some of the summit's sessions, which represents an acknowledgement by the major powers of the importance of coordinating with the emerging economies — all of them outside Europe and America — given that some of these emerging economies are expected to overtake the traditional major economies.
The Iranian file was at the top of this summit's agenda. The Trump administration washed its hands, without consulting its allies, of the agreement with Iran on the nuclear file, a move Europe objected to. This American disengagement from the agreement with Iran is one of the most significant disputes between Europe and the American administration.
Because of the gravity of the American position and Europe's rejection of it, France has been working quietly for months, in coordination with other countries such as Germany, to put forward an initiative to ease the tension between America and Iran and to restore respect for the agreement that Europe did the essential work to reach. The Iranian side, which is seeking to avoid further American and international sanctions, has valued and welcomed the French role and efforts.
In a way that appeared surprising to some of the participating countries, the summit hosted Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif, and a meeting was held with the French president and other Western countries without the participation of the American side. The French and European mediation between Iran and America appears to carry signs of success in easing a tension that had turned, a few weeks earlier, into limited clashes in the waters of the Gulf.
Considerable attention was likewise taken up by the fires in Brazil's Amazon forests, which constitute the lungs of the planet, with the Brazilian president refusing international assistance to extinguish blazes that threaten the safety of the Earth. The G7 summit nevertheless succeeded in pressing the Brazilian president to accept international assistance, which in his view is nothing but an intervention bearing the marks of Western colonialism.
The G7 comes in for a great deal of criticism because of its failure to confront many of the world's challenges in the fields of the environment, inequality between North and South, climate change and other challenges facing the world.
Despite the depth of the disagreements, the clash of interests and each state's pursuit of the best it can secure for its people, the language of dialogue, the creation of mutual interests and the search for common ground are the means by which the civilised world confronts disputes and differences.
Only fools kill one another.
Topic: International Economy — Text © QudsNet — archived here with attribution to the source. — Original source