The coroner's report on G7

Editor's note: Radhika Desai, a special commentator for CGTN, is a professor of political studies at the University of Manitoba in Canada. The article reflects the author's opinions and not necessarily the views of CGTN.

At the G7's upcoming meeting in Kananaskis, Canada, the world may pronounce it dead. Institutions can often continue a zombie existence long after their hearts have stopped beating simply because the structures and practices that once animated them can persist without life.

It is already known that the traditional joint communique demonstrating the bloc's ability to come to an agreement will not even be attempted, and the host, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney, is reportedly busy trying to salvage some success on something, whether on economic recovery, Ukraine, artificial intelligence, climate change, or even the Israel-Iran issue that has just heated up to war temperature.

So, if the G7 is dead, what killed it? Some leaders will swear they saw Donald Trump holding the smoking gun of disagreements – on trade and the economy, climate change, Ukraine, and now even Israel that has pitted the U.S. against its G7 peers which have finally begun to break ranks, if still very timidly. However, concluding that Trump killed the G7 would be the wrong inference. The smoking gun may be in his hands, but history placed it there.

The G7 was born amid the 1970s crisis. Thanks to the economic boom World War II triggered in the U.S., it emerged as the world's most powerful country. However, economic recovery among its peers and rivals in the following decades, particularly Germany's "Wirtschaftswunder" or economic miracle, and Japan's own economic transformation, eroded U.S. power and by saturating limited world demand, also set off a downturn world economic downturn in the 1970s.

Long chafing under U.S. domination, its peers and rivals objected to the U.S. dollar's "exorbitant privilege" and the currency itself, demanding gold instead, and eventually forcing the suspension of the U.S. dollar's convertibility into gold in 1971. They opposed the U.S. war in Vietnam and resented America's "cost-free takeover" of their economies.

If this was not bad enough, the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries was formed and quadrupled oil prices while the demand for a new international economic order dominated discussions on world economic forums.

The U.S. could no longer pretend to control the increasingly complex and volatile international situation and G1, or U.S. "leadership," was transformed into the G7. Forced to consult more widely, the U.S. first turned to Germany, France and the UK on economic matters in 1973, brought in Japan and Italy for the first summit of the G6 in 1975, and Canada the following year. The G7 has met annually since, and with ever more public fanfare.

While the friction-filled early meetings sought to enforce discipline on the unruly U.S., by the 1980s and 1990s, neoliberalism and globalism gave the G7 some unity at the cost of the developing economies, which suffered great setbacks.

Three things changed in the new century. The developing economies that had either escaped, modified or rejected neoliberalism began posting higher growth rates. Particularly after the 2008 North Atlantic financial crisis, "multipolarity" became the new catchword. Clearly, even the collective power of the rich countries had declined and they could not call the shots any more. The G20 was created in an acknowledgement of multipolarity after the 2008 crisis.

Second, neoliberalism was not without its consequences for the rich countries themselves. They suffered slow growth and investment, deindustrialization, rising inequality and financialization. This economic decline only accelerated the shift to a multipolar world. However, the developed world seems unable to acknowledge this simple fact and clings to its neoliberal globalist ideology.

Third, the resulting social division led to political disaster, especially where neoliberal policies were applied most zealously – the U.S. and the UK. The first suffered the election of Donald Trump and the second Brexit. There has been no resolution and a new phase of the crisis has started.

The 2025 G7 Summit will find the U.S. in flight from globalism but the rest still committed to it. The summit can only try to minimize the damage Trump will attempt to inflict. They will try to find ways of carrying their version of globalism forward on their own. And by inviting a host of other countries – Australia, Brazil, India, Mexico, Saudi Arabia, South Korea, South Africa and Ukraine – they will seek to diversify their economic and political ties. However, in the absence of Russia and, above all, China, this will be a futile quest.

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