India & G20 in the Global Context

Summary:

-       The first edition of the Indialog newsletter explains why there were concerns about the possibility of a joint statement at the G20 leaders’ summit.

-       The article places India’s G20 presidency in a broader global context noting:

i) the assistance that regional powers like Brazil, Indonesia, and South Africa provided in securing consensus

ii) widespread concerns, fueled by the Trump presidency and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, about a fraying geopolitical order

iii) efforts that India, in concert with others, has taken to push for the reform of the UN Security Council

-       The article argues that India’s achievements at the G20 leaders’ summit - where it could bridge a number of divides - ought to be placed in a broader global context.

Indialog #1:

On September 9, 2023, in an outcome that surprised many, G20 members agreed to a joint statement adopting the New Delhi Leaders’ Declaration. Forging consensus among all the G20 members wasn’t a predetermined outcome, and Prime Minister Modi’s announcement of the same on the first day of the summit was viewed as an “unexpected early breakthrough”.

This article explains why there were concerns about the passage of a joint statement and places India’s achievement in ensuring consensus among the G20 members within a broader global context, where many multilateral institutions and mechanisms are viewed to be ineffective.

Concerns about a joint statement:

One of the primary sticking points within the G20 was how the leader-level document would refer to Russia’s actions in Ukraine. The war cast a “long shadow” over G20. A few days before the leader-level summit in New Delhi, a senior Indian government official told Reuters that “consensus would be very hard”. This is because Russia and China had “toughened their position” since the 2022 Bali G20 meeting on the kind of language that would be used in the leaders’ declaration.

The 2022 Bali Declaration noted that there was a “discussion on the issue” of the war in Ukraine which adversely impacted the global economy and that within the G20 “most members strongly condemned the war in Ukraine and stressed it is causing immense human suffering and exacerbating existing fragilities in the global economy”. It is crucial to point out that even the 2022 joint statement wasn’t a settled issue and media reports noted that India had played a key role in ensuring consensus. Most tellingly, the 2022 Bali statement reiterated Prime Minister Modi’s statement to President Putin that “today’s era is not an era of war” – which at that time was seen as “New Delhi’s sharpest public response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine”.

As Russia and China had shifted their position since the adoption of the Bali statement, it was unlikely that similar language could be used in the 2023 declaration. Along with a change in the two countries’ stance, members of the G20 that opposed the war made it clear that softening language would not be something that they could sign on to. For instance, in one of the first minister-level meetings that India organized, the French Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire said that “most members [of the G20] strongly condemned the war in Ukraine” and that if the 2022 Bali language isn’t adopted, the French would “not sign on the final communique”.

Given these two diametrically opposing positions, there was understandable uncertainty about a joint statement in New Delhi. Signs that language over Ukraine would be a sore point among G20 member states were clear from the outset of India’s presidency. Following one of the very first ministerial meetings, which brought together G20 Finance Ministers in Bengaluru, there was no consensus document. Instead, a ‘Chair’s Summary and Outcome Document’ was released.

This would remain the trend for the remainder of Ministerial-level meetings. Of the 16 meeting documents uploaded to the official G20 website, there was no consensus over a single document. Following the first Foreign Ministers’ Meeting in New Delhi on March 1-2, 2023, each document explicitly stated the paragraphs over which there was no consensus and listed the countries (Russia and China) that objected to the inclusion of geopolitical issues in the document.

In light of the uncompromising stances adopted by China and Russia, it is easy to understand why the adoption of a joint statement was not a given. Just a day before the New Delhi Leader’s Declaration was officially agreed upon, the European Union stated that the “compromise language suggested by India” was “not strong enough for them to agree to” and U.K. Prime Minister Rishi Sunak aimed to “press G20 members to take a tougher line against Russia’s invasion”. Even as leaders were arriving in New Delhi on Friday, September 8, 2023, Indian officials were working to find “compromise language” for a joint statement.

There was a sense among scholars and analysts that the 2023 New Delhi G20 would not have a joint communique – a first in the G20’s history. Some scholars stated that “it seems increasingly unlikely that India will be able to tread a delicate line and cajole G20 members into producing a consensus of joint communique at the summit” and others argued that the prospects of reaching a consensus at the leaders’ meeting didn’t look good. Other leading voices were much more pessimistic about the possibility of a consensus.

An analyst noted that if the leader-level summit flops, it would be a “major diplomatic, and political, setback” for New Delhi and the Indian Prime Minister. However, he was careful to point out that India has a history of working with nations that don’t get along and New Delhi could manage differences among the various blocs within the G20.

It is easy to dismiss pessimism around a joint statement with the benefit of hindsight, but as explained above, there were very real causes for concerns. The lack of a single ministerial-level consensus document leading up to the leader-level summit, signals from officials indicating that consensus is proving to be elusive, and jockeying over language on Ukraine didn’t exactly raise hopes.

Thus, when consensus was finally achieved on September 9, there was widespread surprise. Eventually, it was the bloc within the G20 that aimed for strong language against Russian actions in Ukraine that appeared to compromise. The New Delhi Leaders’ Declaration had modified language on Ukraine, with the communique “recalling the discussion in Bali” on the war in Ukraine, reiterating “national positions” and stating that “today’s era must not be of war”.

For nations that advocated for stronger language against Russia, this was a climbdown, with some leaders facing strong questions and criticism over the watered-down text. Certain media outlets noted that the G20 statement softened its language towards Russia and scholars argued that while there were a number of successes linked to the summit, the only disappointment was “the leaders’ failure to produce a strong statement in support of Ukrainian sovereignty”.

The global context:

In the days since the leader-level summit in New Delhi, there have been reports about what occurred backstage to make the joint statement possible. Needless to say, substantial credit goes to diplomats and officials leading India’s G20 presidency who engaged in intensive discussions with their G20 member state counterparts. In an interview, India’s Foreign Minister Dr. Jaishankar noted that Brazil, South Africa, and Indonesia assisted India’s efforts in obtaining a joint communique.

It is interesting to note that all three countries mentioned by Minister Jaishankar are emerging economies and have just held (in Indonesia’s case) the G20 presidency or are about to do so (Brazil in 2024, and South Africa in 2025). Their assistance with the communique perhaps points to an understanding that if the G20 in New Delhi failed to produce a joint document, there could be greater concerns about the import of G20 as ‘the premier global forum’ for economic issues going forward.

This brings us to the broader global context within which the G20 leader-level summit took place. The G20 summit in New Delhi occurred at a time when the ideas and institutions that represent a so-called ‘rules-based liberal international order’ are crumbling. The deterioration of this order isn’t a new or recent phenomenon. It is crucial, however, to place the achievements of India’s G20 summit within this broader context.

Trump’s election to the White House, for instance, triggered heated discussions about the state and fate of this order. In July 2018, a number of international relations scholars released an ad in the New York Times stating that “the international order formed after World War II provides important benefits to the United States as well as other countries” and this order and its institutions, created under the leadership of the United States, were “under attack by President Donald J. Trump”. The statement concluded with the following: “Almost nobody benefits from a descent into the chaos of a world without effective institutions that encourage and organize cooperation”.

Writing in response to this statement, scholar Stephen Walt listed the reasons why he didn’t sign on to the statement, arguing that this “so-called liberal order” was “never a global order and there was an awful lot of illiberal behavior even by countries and leaders who constantly proclaimed liberal values”. In a similar vein, Graham Allison noted that the liberal order is a “myth”. Paul Staniland highlighted how “proponents of the order” have presented a “narrow and highly selective reading of history that ignores much of the coercion, violence, and instability that accompanied post-war [WWII] history”.

Surveying the literature on the liberal international order, Rohan Mukherjee pointed out that while critics of the order’s idea alleged “that the liberal international rules-based order was never truly liberal, international, rules-based, or orderly” there was more at play within these debates. Most crucially, he argued, “virtually all of these critics” conflated the “liberal international order with U.S. foreign policy”.

If the Trump presidency triggered heated debates about the international order, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine only fueled these conversations. Russia, a permanent member of the Security Council, could – and did – veto any statement, let alone potential action, that was to emerge from the UNSC. This is not to say that every use of force is sanctioned by the UNSC. Rather, it is to point out that “debate over the state and future of world order has intensified” following Russian actions.

Much before 2022, India had been calling for reforming the multilateral UN architecture. In 2003, Prime Minister Vajpayee warned that “until the UN Security Council is reformed and restructured, its decisions cannot reflect truly the collective will of the community of nations”. In 2011, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh called for the reform and expansion of the UNSC to “reflect contemporary reality”. In 2023, at the closing of the G20 Summit, Prime Minister Modi urged leaders “to make global structures, including the UN Security Council, reflective of current realities”.

Rohan Mukherjee has documented in detail how India’s position to reform the institution is one that it “has held consistently for decades and expressed in previous times of crisis”. He also outlined the Indian government’s official position on UNSC reform along three axes of “institutional inequity: membership, formal powers, and informal powers”.

A number of initiatives have arisen to reform the UNSC. Perhaps the two most important include the ones advocated by the G4 bloc (Brazil, Germany, India, and Japan) and (its ‘rival’) Uniting for Consensus (UfC) group (Italy, South Korea, Pakistan, Argentina, and Mexico). Both these initiatives first arose officially on the stage in 2005 – demonstrating the long-drawn efforts for reform.

Furthermore, it isn’t only rising and regional powers such as the ones described above that seek change in the UNSC multilateral structure. The UN Secretary-General, Antonio Guterres, has made clear that there is no alternative to reform and “it’s reform or rupture”. Highlighting that “multilateral tools and mechanisms are weakening” the Secretary-General said that these tools and mechanisms are failing or worse, are non-existent, “in the face of rising geopolitical tensions and challenges”.

Securing consensus:

The consensus that India managed to achieve at the G20 leader-level summit thus needs to be viewed within this broader global context. Foreign Minister Jaishankar noted as much in an interview post the summit stating that there are “fundamental issues about the inequities of the current global order” and India found itself placed at the center of divided and polarized east-west and north-south axes [2:15-3:00].

While there are questions and conversations, as there ought to be, about what the joint statement achieves beyond its symbolic value, it is crucial to place the New Delhi Leaders’ Declaration in the broader global context. As Karthik Nachiappan observes, “the most prominent takeaway [from the G20] was India’s bridging disposition, working with countries, industrialized and developing, to produce a consensus”.

In an environment where questions have been (justifiably) raised about the role and efficacy of multilateral organizations in addressing global challenges, India managed to bring together a disparate range of actors. Indian diplomacy, as a scholar observed, “demonstrated its ability to take on current geopolitical disagreements” and eventually, forge consensus.

Links:

• On India-China: ‘A big-picture look at the India-China relationship’, the first episode of the Global India podcast, features Amb. Vijay Gokhale and Amb. Shivshankar Menon in conversation with Dr. Tanvi Madan (senior fellow at the Brookings Institution). This episode provides an overview of India-China ties from 2008 to the present. According to Amb. Menon, one of the core problems in the bilateral relationship is that China doesn’t want India to rise:

Amb. Menon’s assessment of one of the core issues in India-China ties

• On industrial policy: Dr. Saon Ray has an article on the role of industrial policy in global value chains (GVC) in India in Transition. Dr. Ray notes that India’s production-linked incentive (PLI) schemes should be seen in the “context of GVC-oriented policies aimed at increasing India’s GVC integration.”

  On a related note, Dr. Mariana Mazzucato & Dr. Dani Rodrik recently released a working paper on industrial policy & conditionalities, along with a range of case studies (including the U.K. government’s role in creating the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine & the 2022 CHIPS Act’s aim to bolster semiconductor manufacturing). The authors argue that industrial policy with conditions can “lead to transformation” and industrial policy without conditions “might just lead to subsidies, guarantees, and handouts for firms to stay in place.”

• On climate/energy: The International Energy Agency released the latest version of its flagship publication, World Energy Outlook 2023. The report notes that “positive trends on improving access to electricity and clean cooking have slowed or even reversed in some countries”. However, “the emergence of a new clean energy economy, led by solar PV and electric vehicles (EVs), provides hope for the way forward”. The report shows that clean energy investment “has risen by 40% since 2020”. Chapter 5 has regional insights, with a section on India (see image on key trends in India, 2010-2050 below).

  

  Key trends in India (2010-2050); World Energy Outlook 2023 Report