Saving the planet, the G20's mission

As expected, the G20 in Rome ended with nothing achieved. Multilateral gatherings usually only work if a hegemon sets the direction; otherwise they get lost in a thousand streams of conflicting interests. The one at EUR was no exception

At the end of the proceedings it was agreed that participants would commit to cutting emissions by the middle of the century, before arranging to meet again at the subsequent (failed) COP26 in Glasgow. Nothing more. Very little for all the publicity that surrounded the event, but perfectly normal given the history of the assembly.

The G20 was born at the end of the 1990s in a purely economic sphere, to better manage financial crises (the latest had struck a few months earlier). In practice, it presented itself as the long arm of the Washington Consensus, the core of the American empire.

It is (or was) attended by 19 states from every background plus the European Union. Toothless as it was, for at least fifteen years it served as the shop window of globalisation, in other words of an American hegemony taken to be placid. In rubber-stamping decisions made across the ocean, it worked as a megaphone for the sly, paternalistic advice handed out to the clientes. At least until the rise of Beijing and Moscow's frustration undermined its cohesion. Making it even less concrete than at its beginnings. So in recent years the G20 has become an occasion when the planet's main leaders meet to hold bilateral talks that they would otherwise struggle to arrange in the same number and in so short a time. That's all.

There remains the artificial attempt to present the issues discussed as universal and any agreements as efforts to save the whole planet, but the results invariably betray the forum's lack of weight. Meanwhile the climate within it has become far more fractured than at the start.

That is what happened at the Rome G20, above all in the clash between India, China, Russia and the rest of the Western countries over the climate question, with the Asian chancelleries opposed to any binding commitment on the matter, worried that as usual Washington and its allies would use global warming to hit their industrial production and to impose the rules of the game.

And so a fake compromise emerged around the middle of the century, with the signatories unable even to agree on what that deadline actually means. If for Washington it means 2050, for Delhi it would be 2070, and for Moscow even later. Discrepancies that reveal opposing world views, impossible to reconcile in two days spent in the Italian capital. And which above all reveal a more quarrelsome attitude on the part of America's antagonists, less inclined to present a common front for the international media, much more interested in defending their own interests, in the name of greater concreteness.

This empties the G20 of any value as an assembly, leaving only the fruits of the tête-à-têtes between heads of state and government held on the sidelines of the summit.

Dario Fabbri

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