The recent G20 meeting in Osaka highlighted both the obstacles to and the need for genuine engagement between the world’s leading nations. On the eve of the summit, Vladimir Putin dismissed “the so-called liberal idea” in a provocative interview with the Financial Times, saying it had “outlived its purpose [and that] our western partners have admitted that some elements of the liberal idea, such as multiculturalism, are no longer tenable.”
From the start of the summit political candour seemed unattainable. China and the United States were in a trade war; Saudi Arabia was represented by a Crown Prince widely believed to be responsible for the murder of a prominent journalist, and Britain was still seething over Russia’s poisoning of former spy Sergei Skripal, and his daughter, in Salisbury in March 2018. Despite a high-minded agenda – eight themes including Innovation, Employment, Women’s Empowerment, Develop-ment and Health – it was soon clear that the conference could not deal with many of the world’s most pressing issues. China, for example, would not discuss its human rights abuses in Xinjiang province – where more than a million Uighurs are being held in reeducation camps – nor its ongoing battle with pro-democracy protesters in Hong Kong.
The summit’s surreality peaked when US President Trump amiably greeted the intellectual author of the murder of Jamal Khashoggi, referring to Prince Mohammed bin Salman as “a friend of mine,” who has done “really a spectacular job” and adding that it was a “great honor” to meet with him. Trump also successfully pitched a photo opportunity with the North Korean dictator who, he later said, had sent him “a beautiful letter” on his birthday. The only other scene which matched these grotesque fatuities was Ivanka Trump’s awkward cameo in a conversation between the head of the IMF, Christine Lagarde, British Prime Minister Theresa May, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and French President Emmanuel Macron. It was hard to tell which Trump was more ill-at-ease in a room of adults.
Embarrassing as Ivanka and her father can be, they are symptoms of a larger problem. At a moment when its leadership has never been more important, the United States seems determined to squander both its moral and political capital. Its continuing failure, in the words of New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman to “stop treating politics as entertainment” has left it captive to “a president who daily undermines truth and trust — the twin fuels needed to collaborate and adapt together…” So, instead of speaking to the climate emergency other G20 members were trying to address, Trump said: “We [the United States] have the cleanest water we have ever had, we have the cleanest air we’ve ever had, [and] I’m not willing to sacrifice the tremendous power of what we’ve built up over a long period of time and what I’ve enhanced and revived.”
What this meant, essentially, was that a group which represents more than 80 percent of the world’s economic output and two-thirds of its population failed to reach unanimity on global heating – as the Guardian now calls the threat posed by climate change.
In a recent book called A Thousand Small Sanities: The Moral Adventure of Liberalism, Adam Gopnik refers to the “distinction that’s sometimes made between patriotism and nationalism … [that the] patriot loves his place and its monarch and its cheeses and its people and its idiosyncrasies [but] the nationalist has no particular sense of affection for the actual place he advocates for (he is often an outsider to it) but employs his obsessive sense of encirclement and grievance on behalf of acts of ethnic vengeance.” Patriots are capable of enlightened internationalism and cooperation; nationalists are not.
That is why summits like the G20 cannot currently achieve anything beyond Trump’s gesturing, even when it appears to offer temporary respite from a trade war or a breakdown in denuclearization talks. There are simply too many nationalists – Narendra Modi, Donald Trump, Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin to name the most obvious – for liberal democracy to work. Another telling instance of the current zeitgeist came when Brexiteer members of the European Parliament turned their backs as the Ode to Joy was played at the opening of the European Parliament in Strasbourg. Liberal democracy may not yet be exhausted, but there are no shortage of political leaders who are doing their best to make it so.
