WORLD WORLDWIDE ITALY News Journal Update - (en) Italy, UCADI #176: The crisis of concerted globalization (ca, de, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

 In the globalization of the world economy and trade, three phases are

conventionally identified: the first coincides with the end of the 19th
century (from 1870 to 1912-1914), the second goes from 1950 to 1980 and
the third which begins with the end of 20th century and is about to
change face due to the crisis of concertation which is an essential
element of this phenomenon . Already halfway through the second phase of
globalization, the collapse of the Bretton Woods system in 1971 and the
energy crisis of 1973 induced the most developed countries to equip
themselves with a coordination center for the process underway, so much
so that they decided, on the sidelines of the Rambouillet Conference in
which France, West Germany, Japan, Italy, the United Kingdom and the
United States participated in 1975, to create the Group of Six (G6).
Already the following year, at the second meeting held in San Juan,
Puerto Rico, Canada was admitted and subsequently the European Economic
Community at the London summit in 1977. Since then the meetings of the
world concerted body continued to govern the crisis Balkan, dividing up
the spoils of the former Yugoslavia and managing the 1989-91 crisis with
the subsequent Rambouillet meetings.
The Soviet Union was invited for the first time in 1991 to the parallel
discussions at the G7 summit in London. Subsequently, the newly formed
Russian Federation was gradually involved in the G7 process leading to
the first participation, at the 1994 Naples summit, of Russian President
Boris Yeltsin, with the launch of the so-called G7+1 format, whose
meetings should have taken place at the conclusion of each summit.
Starting from the Denver summit in 1997 - at the invitation of the
United States and the United Kingdom - Russia fully entered the summit
format (G8), at the meeting held in Birmingham in 1999,
without however participating in the meetings of the Ministers of the
economics (so-called finance track ).
In December 1999, the G20 of Economy Ministers was established, with the
inclusion - in addition to the G8 - of a series of emerging countries
and the European Union. The importance assumed by this assembly on the
international scene has accentuated its character of representation of
the institutional counterpart of peoples who aspire to development and
the achievement of economic well-being that allows them a dignified
life. Emblematic in this sense was the bloodily repressed
anti-globalisation demonstration in Genoa in 2001 which intended to
peacefully protest against this state of affairs.
The rapid rise of a series of countries hitherto excluded or
under-represented in governance mechanismsglobal economy (in particular
the so-called BRIC: Brazil, Russia, India, China, defined with this
informal name in 2001, but also the new MIKTA: Mexico, Indonesia, South
Korea, Turkey and Australia) required trying to anticipate the evolution
of the world economy within a broader format than the G7/G8, pushing
British leader Tony Blair, in 2005, to invite five emerging countries
with particular political and economic importance to the G8 summit:
Brazil, China, India, Mexico and South Africa.
Thus, starting from the Heiligendamm summit in Germany (2007), the
so-called "Heiligendamm process" was institutionalized, which involved
the G8 plus the 5 countries mentioned above in a dialogue relating to
four specific areas: innovation, freedom of investments, development
cooperation, in particular with Africa, energy and climate change. In
2006, the first summit was held under the Russian presidency

St.Pietroburgo

The economic and financial crisis of 2008 acted as a catalyst for the
ongoing process, leading the then US President George W. Bush to
convene, in November 2008, the first Summit at the level of Heads of
State and Government in the G20 format, which includes the G8 plus Saudi
Arabia, Argentina, Australia, Brazil, China, South Korea, India,
Indonesia, Mexico, South Africa, Turkey and the European Union, and in
which several international organizations also participate.

The G20 crisis and the emergence of BRICS

Two years earlier, in 2006 in New York, the foreign ministers of Brazil,
Russia, India and China had met on the sidelines of the general debate
of the United Nations Assembly. From these meetings arose the decision
to meet on 16 June 2009 in Yekaterinburg, Russia, for the first formal
summit of the BRIC group: Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, Dmitry Medvedev,
Manmohan Singh and Hu Jintao, respective leaders of Brazil,
participated. Russia, India and China.
On the agenda is the improvement of the global economic situation and
above all the reform of financial institutions.
The question was asked how the four countries could cooperate to promote
the development of their economies and it was decided to ask for a
different distribution of the quotas deposited with the International
Monetary Fund, established as part of the exchange agreements signed in
1944 during the Bretton Woods conference which assigned to the dollar
the role of an international currency unit of exchange, sanctioning a
positional income of the USA which retains the right to mint the
currency in total autonomy, thus influencing its market value to their
advantage and unloading the consequences on the world of the debt
accumulated to finance their economy and military power.
Faced with the refusal of their request, the Brics discussed how they
could remedy this situation and expressed the need to identify a new
global reserve currency, which should be "different, stable and
predictable". What happened in 2002 with the birth of the euro could
have been repeated with equal success.
Although the final statement of the meeting did not directly criticize
the "dominance" of the US dollar, the request triggered, as a first
effect, a decline in the value of the dollar compared to other main
currencies and led the Republic of South Africa to request membership of
the group in 2010 which transformed into BRICS. Since then, the new
grouping increased its coordination activity of the respective
economies, working hard to conquer the markets, supported by a good
performance of the Russian economy and robust growth rates of both
Chinese and Indian GDP.
In 2014, just as the G 20 summit in Sochi was canceled due to the
outbreak of the Ukrainian war and the Russian occupation of Crimea, the
BRICS gathered for their sixth summit in Fortaleza, Brazil, on 15 July
2014 to the New Development Bank, chaired by Dilma Rousseff, based in
Sciancai which has the task of being an alternative to the World Bank
and the International Monetary Fund in promoting the development of the
most disadvantaged countries.
After the success of the BRICS meeting in Johannesburg and the entry of
six other countries into the organization and into the capital of the
Bank, while 17 others have advanced their candidacy, it is completely
understandable that Chinese leader Xi Jin Ping has decided to do not
take part in the next G20 meeting. China will participate in the summit,
but in a lower key, with its prime minister, to testify that the
epicenter of the governance of the world economy is inevitably shifting
and that the hegemony of the United States and Western countries is
starting to decline which may not be rapid, but certainly the subject of
a no-holds-barred clash.
in many of the poorest but raw material-rich countries.

The US and Western reaction

The United States is reacting to this situation by submitting for the
moment to the initiative of its counterpart, weaving regional alliances
such as the one with the countries of the Pacific area, supported in
this work of weaving relationships by the revived imperial aspirations
of the United Kingdom, the which desperately tries to remedy the
disasters of Brexit, reconstructing a completely hypothetical and
inconsistent Commonwealth which today no longer has any reason to exist.
At the moment the concerns do not appear to be excessive due to the
political lack of homogeneity of the BRICS, proof of which is that many
of the countries that are part of it or aspire to join it continue to
maintain very close economic, political and commercial relations with
the West. However, their lack of support for Western positions regarding
the Ukraine war says a lot about their place on the international stage
and how strong their relations with Russia and China are.
But there's more. These countries have a tendency to consider the
Ukrainian war one of the many wars afflicting the world, important for
the West because for the first time the war is taking place in the
European area, but they believe that the disastrous conduct of the
military operations they are carrying the economy of Ukraine is
collapsing, the territory of which is increasingly polluted, devastated
by war, invaded by bombs, to the extent that it no longer constitutes a
suitable space for economically viable agricultural production that can
be placed on the market. Furthermore, the block on exports of Ukrainian
wheat and cereals has shown that the world economy can easily do without
these products which can conveniently be replaced by those coming from
other sites and in particular Russia.

The G20 in Delhi and the primacy of the economy

The consequences of this choice are well understood if one only reads
the final resolution of the Delhi summit on the war which does not
distinguish between aggressors and those attacked to the point of having
infuriated the Ukrainians who emerged as true losers from the meeting
which marked the prevalence of economic interests over each other. Proof
of this is that the most publicized result of the meeting was the
announcement of the creation of a land-sea transport corridor from India
to Europe which would allow us to at least partially bypass the
expensive, long and dangerous (due to piracy and accidents) making this
solution preferable as it halves the time. Upon closer inspection, in
reality, it is about creating a corridor that competes with the already
very efficient and functional one managed by Russia passing through its
territory and which currently mainly handles Chinese but also Indian
goods. The new corridor not only presents many political problems to
overcome but in fact undermines the effectiveness of the sanctions
against Iran by crossing its territory, clears customs for Saudi Arabia,
involves Israel by providing for the use of its ports.
The consensus necessary for the final deliberations of India, Brazil and
the Republic of South Africa which converge on the US positions seem to
strengthen the G20, recognized as the supreme economic forum, to the
detriment of the role of the BRICS, but to understand what is happening
it is necessary to consider that Russia and China, by slipping away,
managed to politically isolate Ukraine, uninvited and mentioned in the
final declaration, effectively downgrading the Ukrainian conflict to one
of the many wars of the piecemeal world war that is tearing the world apart.
It must be acknowledged that international relations are experiencing a
situation of stalemate, of warring equilibrium, while the new advances
with the BRICS and the old with the G20 is slow to die. It will be a
long and slow agony that will characterize the next few years and with
uncertain and unpredictable outcomes. Anyone who thinks of giving Russia
or China a push and thus resolve the dispute is deluded and has
everything to lose from a war of usury, proof of which is that the
declaration on war is generic and vague: a mere statement of principle.
And this while Putin and Russia break their isolation with the
invitation to the next G20 in Brazil.

The role of the European Union

Faced with the coalition of many countries from emerging economies and
above all in view of their needs for independence and financial
autonomy, the European Union certainly has something to worry about.
However, in this clash the European Union risks succumbing for two
reasons: on the one hand, it is completely a prisoner of its place in
NATO, acting as a foolish servant in the war against Russia and in
support of Ukraine, a war waged to the detriment of its own economic,
commercial and strategic interests, strongly desired by the United
Kingdom, precisely to divide Europe, from the United States, due to
Biden's shady deals in the country and the irredentist and business
lobbies paid by the Ukrainian government. As proof of this, just think
of how much the sabotage of Nord Stream two cost the European economy,
On the other hand, pursuing one's own project in terms of economic
development, trying to give life to an economy that on several occasions
we have defined as neocurtense type, the realization of which is
increasingly problematic in the face of the disappearance of the Russian
partner that originally should have accompanied the transition towards
the new structures, providing low-cost energy and allowing the economies
of EU countries to accumulate the capital necessary to implement the
so-called green revolution that Europe intends to lead, at least to
remain at those which are the official declarations of the Union, but
which in the face of the ever deeper crisis of the German locomotive,
the contemporary crisis of the Franco-German axis and in particular of
the so-called Rhenish capitalism,given the growing difficulties of the
continent's economies, it appears increasingly problematic to achieve.

The Editorial Staff

https://www.ucadi.org/2023/09/21/la-crisi-della-globalizzazione-concertata/
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