27 January 2010: New York Times
By Katrin Bennhold and Alison Smale
DAVOS, SWITZERLAND — For years, the power brokers who gathered here to mull over the state of the world worried collectively about an outdated system of global governance. From the U.N. Security Council and the International Monetary Fund to the Group of 8, the arguments went, international institutions were unfit to solve global problems because they no longer represented the balance of power in the world.
Then the Great Recession finally forced a change. The G-8, representing the largest Western countries plus Russia, has devolved power to the larger G-20, which includes the major developing countries as well. The makeup of participants in Davos has shifted along with it.
This year, even if most panels are still dominated by white men from established Western countries and institutions, China is sending its largest delegation ever. India and Brazil are well-represented as well.
But while the embrace of the G-20 as a global board of directors goes some way toward addressing the issue of legitimacy, it has laid bare what is a potentially trickier problem: That of forging consensus among a even larger number of significant players on the international scene with different priorities and interests.
Consensus, some here said Wednesday, might be too ambitious a goal. Instead of multilateralism, Graham Allison, a professor at Harvard University, suggested what he called “many-lateralism:” when a sizable group of countries agree, they should move forward, letting the laggards adjust later.
Such a strategy can work even if the laggards are superpowers: An international agreement to ban land mines was boycotted by the United States and some other countries. But in the 13 years since it was signed, the U.S. military has not used land mines nor has it manufactured or exported any. In effect, said Kenneth Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch, it ended up complying with the ban.
Some even say that U.S. opposition to the International Criminal Court, also set up without Washington’s participation, has been softening, with signs that the Obama administration is cooperating on investigations like Darfur.
“Consensus rules are a recipe for paralysis,” said Mr. Roth, who is in Davos this week. “The lesson is that you build the institutional norms with a flexible process and with a critical mass rather than allowing the laggards to set the agenda.”
Others, like John Chipman of the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London, proposed that the G-20 be given more powers of enforcement in the realm of international security as well as financial regulation, since the U.N. Security Council has difficulty forging agreements because several countries hold veto power.
“The G-20 has the legitimacy,” Mr. Chipman said.
Few leaders would agree more than President Nicolas Sarkozy of France, who in September 2008 was the first to propose a summit meeting to deal with the financial crisis. Out of that grew the enhanced role for the G-20.
“The G-20 is a harbinger of global governance in the 21st century,” Mr. Sarkozy said in his keynote address to the World Economic Forum Wednesday. “It symbolizes the return of politics, which had been delegitimized by untamed globalization.
“Without the G-20, confidence would not have been re-established,” Mr. Sarkozy said. “Without the G-20, the spirit of each man for himself would have prevailed.”
The financier and philanthropist George Soros is not quite so convinced that the G-20 is the best organization to undertake the regulation he believes is required for world markets and banks.
“We are moving in the right direction with the G-20 taking leadership,” he said. “But I don’t think that’s quite enough.”
Solutions ought to include a revamp of the International Monetary Fund, he suggested, noting that its current mechanisms and membership are “out of date.”
“You don’t need 193 countries” to go along with regulation for it to be effective, he added. “But you do need the major markets.”
A journalist from South Korea, apparently emboldened by this thinking, asked Mr. Soros for his advice for the government in Seoul, which this autumn will host the first G-20 meeting in Asia, the fastest growing region of the world.
“I’ll have to reflect on that,” Mr. Soros demurred. “I don’t have a snap answer.”
