Summit deal just the start of jockeying
A surprise deal to bring China, India and other emerging powers into the elite club of global summitry has unleashed a new round of jockeying as nations vie for membership.
In a midnight announcement Friday, the White House said the Group of 20 -- an ad hoc gathering of wealthy and emerging powers meeting in Pittsburgh for its third summit -- would become the key forum for global economic decisions.
The G20 was created last year after the global economic system went into tailspin. It will effectively eclipse the Group of Eight, a club only of rich economies that met in its first form in 1975 to tackle the oil crisis.
The new format gives major developing nations such as Brazil, China and India a seat at the table. The most forceful advocates for the change were smaller developed nations outside the G8 such as Australia and South Korea -- which was designated the host of the G20 summit in November next year.
But diplomats and activists immediately got to work to figure out which nations would be part of the Group of 20 and how it would relate to the Group of 8.
One, an anti-poverty advocacy group backed by rock star Bono, called the G20 a "step in the right direction" but said Africa was sorely underpresented. Only one African head of state is in Pittsburgh -- South Africa's Jacob Zuma.
On the opposite end, Japan said it still believed in the G8.
Japan, the world's second largest economy, has fought a lonely battle not to expand the G8, relishing its role as the only non-Western nation other than Russia in the club as a way to exert global influence.
Japan had historically had friction with China, which has scuttled Japan's goal of another powerful position -- permanent membership on the UN Security Council.
Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama, facing the setback only a week after taking office, warned behind closed doors that G20 summits could prove unwieldy due to the size, according to Japanese officials.
"As the focus is shifting to the G20, we are not going against the trend," a senior Japanese official said on condition of anonymity, but added: "Japan's position of stressing the importance of the G8 summit will remain unchanged."
Other leaders were also cautious in declaring the Group of Eight dead, saying it still had a usefulness -- particularly at the level of ministers' meetings.
Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper announced that the town of Muskoka, near Toronto, would host the next G20 and G8 summits together in June next year.
"These formats have their own completely distinct particularities. I believe they can fully co-exist," Russian Finance Minister Alexei Kudrin told reporters.
But analysts doubted that leaders were paying more than lip service to the G8.
"There is a new global compact," said Andrew Cooper, a regular watcher of global summits and associate director of the Centre for International Governance Innovation in Waterloo, Canada.
Cooper believed that Obama made a decision to pursue the G20 format as he performed better at the last G20 summit in London in April than at the G8 in Italy in June, with its stream of small, short meetings.
"I think that this was his call as he got tired of going to all these different summits," Cooper said.
"I think he just decided that we have to have one core group and that he wanted to plan out his diplomatic campaign for the next couple of years," Cooper said.
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