On July 15-17, 2006, the Group of Eight’s (G8) 31st annual summit took place in St. Petersburg. It was the first regular summit Russia hosted since it joined the club as the eighth member country in 1998. As its priority themes for the summit, Russia chose energy security, infectious disease and education, the first time that these subjects had been selected in advance as the substantive core of a summit’s overall design. To the summit, Russia invited — for only the second time as a self-contained set — the leaders of the systemically significant countries of India, China, Brazil, Mexico and South Africa. And to help prepare the summit and deliver its results, Russia created an unprecedented Civil G8 mechanism that brought Russia and international civil society leaders into the summit process as never before.

Now that hosting responsibilities have passed on to Germany, which is well on the way to preparing the next summit in Heiligendamm on June 6-8, 2007, it is an appropriate time to assess Russia’s contribution as a G8 host, in its own right and also as a foundation for its German-hosted successor and for the G8 in future years. Thus far the views on this subject have given rise to a great debate between critics and supporters of the St. Petersburg Summit and the G8 as a whole.

The critics, including former World Bank president James Wolfensohn, European Central Bank governor Jean-Claude Trichet and Bank of England governor Mervyn King, explicitly and implicitly criticize the G8, its St. Petersburg Summit and its Group of Seven (G7) finance ministers forum for their economic failings. These failings include not dealing with the mounting imbalances in the global economy, the simultaneous tightening of interest rates by national central banks and a looming financial crisis from asset inflation, general market euphoria and proliferating derivatives trading. The critics further see the G8 as obsolete in a world where economic power is rapidly passing to India and China. They even suggest an end to the G7 finance ministers forum, in favour of global economic governance through a reformed International Monetary Fund (IMF).

In sharp contrast, a second school of supporters, including former German chancellor Gerhard Schroeder and editorialists from around the world, have a much higher opinion of the G8 and Russia as its 2006 host. Some see the 2006 summit as a defensive event, with Russia using the unparalleled opportunity to showcase its economic revival and deflect criticism of its policies at home and abroad. Others more expansively conclude that Russia hosted the G8 as well as any other country ever had, and began to serve as a representative of developing countries in the club. Schroeder himself goes further, judging Russia’s presidency to be efficient and successful, as President Vladimir Putin develops Russia in a democratic direction. And others even conclude that Russia will be a “hard act to follow” as Putin used his G8 presidency to reassert Russia’s global role and brought it to a level not seen since 1989.

A close look at the available evidence suggests that the judgement of even the most optimistic supporters may be too modest, and too definitive as well. As a G8 host in 2006, Russia bore an extraordinary double burden. It was asked to deliver a summit that would, as usual, address and help solve pressing global problems. But it was also expected, for the first time in summit history, to produce one that would demonstrate, confirm and deepen the host’s credentials and character as a democratic polity at home. On the whole Russia met this double standard, and thus did much to shape G8 summitry in the years to come. It delivered a summit that made important advances and innovations on its three priority themes and on the burning political issue of the Middle East conflict that erupted that year in Lebanon. Russia’s responsibility of hosting, its acceptance of summit conclusions that affirmed democratic principles throughout and its responsiveness to civil society at home and abroad helped to empower democratic constituencies within Russia at a difficult and critical time. And for the future, Russia helped make the G8 a global center of domestic governance, directly brought the capabilities, needs, diversity and legitimacy of the “Plus Five” powers of India, China, Brazil, Mexico and South Africa permanently into the summit, and involved civil society, legislators, youth and religious leaders to democratize the G8 itself. Yet, as the year after St. Petersburg unfolds, there remain doubts about whether Russia as host finally found the formula to ensure that the G8’s often far-reaching and innovative principles are actually implemented by its members and delivered to solve real problems in the global community as a whole. It is here that action is needed to make the G8 a genuinely accountable and effective center of global governance for today’s 21st-century world.

ST. PETERSBURG SUMMIT PERFORMANCE

As a regular host, Russia’s first accomplishment was to set an agenda, and deliver agreements on it, that combined innovation and iteration in the delicate blend that breeds summit success. While previous summits had dealt with energy security, infectious disease and education as important topics, never before had these been identified so far in advance as part of only three central themes that constituted the core of the summit’s overall design. As the first two priorities came directly from President Putin, Russia had no difficulty in getting its summit colleagues to accept and stick to this agenda. The trilogy built iteratively on the work of the G8 summits in Gleneagles in 2005 and before. Energy security flowed from Gleneagles emphasis on climate change. Infectious disease and education were critical components of Gleneagles’s concern with African development. And on all three priorities, Russia innovatively expanded and reframed the agenda. Energy security included, for the first time as an important component, physical energy security and energy poverty as link to African and global development. Infectious disease placed a new emphasis on the spread of HIV/AIDS into Eurasia. And education included the important dimension of the need for openness, migration and multiculturalism.

This agenda proved to be timely and well tailored in addressing the present and prospective needs of the G8 members and global community as a whole. Energy security was front and center in 2006, as world oil prices rose above US$77 a barrel, a level in inflation-adjusted terms not seen since the last oil big shock in 1979. And in a world where global terrorism and renewed nuclear proliferation had arrived, the concern with physical energy security was a global priority that the G8 summit, unlike the fragmented and incomplete United Nations system could and did treat as an integrated, coherent whole. The concern with the Eurasian face of AIDS arose at a time when Russia was the G8 member suffering most at home from the disease, and when India was replacing South Africa as the country with the largest estimated absolute number of citizens living with HIV. And the education agenda well matched the needs of a world in an age where human capital and innovation and aging populations were central concerns.

As a summit host, Russia proved willing, able and adept at accepting and adjusting to its partners’ priorities and core interests, and getting them to adjust to Russia’s in return. Faced at the start with a domestically driven German veto of any G8 mention of nuclear power as a legitimate part of a secure energy supply mix, Russia persisted with its supportive partners to get this changed. Hosting its first regular summit on the 20th anniversary of the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear explosion and the 10th anniversary of the Moscow Nuclear Safety Summit, Russia finally got the Germans to relent. As a result, the G8 affirmed the value of safe and secure civilian nuclear power at home and was thus able to speak with greater credibility to an Iran that was considering whether to accept a G8 offer to help create such nuclear power, if that country would give up its program leading to homegrown nuclear arms.

On infectious disease, Russia added and blended the concerns of those focused on the well-known dangers of HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria with those concerned about the new danger of a rapidly globalizing avian flu, and included the need to address such new diseases with immediate, intrusive measures within the sovereign jurisdiction of the originating state. On education, Russia accepted the arguments of the United States and Canada — both federal systems where classically defined education was the jealously guarded constitutional prerogative of sub-federal states and provinces — that the subject and summit action were better reframed as human capital and innovation, as a globally oriented, forward-looking approach that would avoid domestic political difficulties for the North American members at home.

As a result of such flexible adjustment and accommodation, the St. Petersburg Summit delivered some strong results. These came across most of the summit’s six functions of domestic political management, deliberation, direction setting, collective decision making, delivering its decisions and the development of global governance as a whole. Within Russia as the host country, the summit had a large imprint. It was selected by its citizens as the third most important and newsworthy international event of the year and generally received favorable acclaim in public opinion polls and the major daily newspapers. The summit set new normative directions, most notably in reframing energy security to put environmental protection and open markets in first place, and emphasizing the need for transparency, openness and the rule of law across all the three priority themes. The summit produced 317 clear, concrete, future-oriented collective decisions, the highest number in the 31-year history of the G7/8 summit. It embedded those decisions to a considerable degree with the catalysts known to produce compliance on the part of the members during the following year. And it did much to develop G8-centered global governance, most notably by hosting many subject-specific ministerial meetings to prepare and follow up on the summit, including the third energy ministers gathering in history and the first-ever meeting of G8 ministers of health. Russia thus proved it was a fully accomplished host of a regular G8 summit, producing one with a performance well above average in most respects.

St. Petersburg also proved successful in the task of immediate crisis response in the field of political security. With a new conflict in the Middle East erupting on the eve of the summit, the Russians accepted a draft document prepared at Canadian initiative, with American support, that set forth an appropriate and novel response for coping with the immediate conflict and for laying a foundation for breaking the recurrent cycle of violence and moving toward permanent peace in the years ahead. The G8 leaders ruled on the three contentious issues given to them in square brackets by their officials, and did so in the way that President Putin as host preferred. The final document was endorsed by the UN Secretary General and by China — one of the United Nations Security Council Permanent Five (UNSC P5) veto powers — and the rest of the Plus Five countries at their meeting with the G8 the next day. This new G8 roadmap was then legally approved by the UN back in New York. It was subsequently adopted in its essence by other relevant plurilateral summit institutions such as la Francophonie. 

These St. Petersburg agenda priorities and achievements are the foundation for the German approach in 2007. To be sure, the Germans are exercising their prerogative as host to set their own priorities, giving pride of place to the many financial, economic, trade and investment issues that St. Petersburg, with its full agenda, did not adequately address. But the Germans’ first priority, economic growth, includes resource use as one of its five components sustainable. This component focuses on energy efficiency, climate change and the Kyoto Protocol, in which President Putin played the critical role in bringing into force as ratified international law. Germany’s second priority of African development starts with the health systems and HIV/AIDS that Russia highlighted through its priority on infectious disease. Germany’s priority of African development ends with peace and security, where progress can help the peace process in the Broader Middle East and North Africa as a critical region for energy security, regional security, counterterrorism and the control of weapons of mass destruction.

DEMOCRATIZING RUSSIA AND THE G8

The even more impressive and long-lasting success of St. Petersburg comes in the realm of process, above all in democratizing the G8 at home and on a global scale.

Russia’s first advance here was to invite to the summit the leaders of the systemically significant countries of India, China, Brazil, Mexico and South Africa. These Plus Five powers were critical to helping the G8 effectively address the priority of energy security, as the five were the great new demand powers straining a finite global supply. They were also key on the critical new front in the global war against infectious disease. Moreover, China’s presence as a UNSC P5 member was important in the easy acceptance at St. Petersburg of the G8’s new approach to peace in the Middle East, and its subsequent legal endorsement at the UNSC. The presence of these five rapidly rising powers as important summit participants showed the world that the G8 Plus Five had the predominant power to govern the global community effectively, the open inclusiveness to incorporate rising powers in a way the UNSC P5 could not, and the diversity in geography, language, religion and level of development needed to enhance its sensitivity, representativeness and legitimacy as a center of global governance as a whole. Furthermore, as all of the Plus Five but China are democratic polities, this particular set of participants deepened the democratic character of the G8. In addition, an ever-expanding, all-democratic European Union reinforced the power, democratic devotion, diversity and inclusiveness of the G8 itself.

St. Petersburg was only the second time that these Plus Five powers had been invited to participate in the summit as a self-contained set, having been invited to the Gleneagles Summit in 2005. They had been part of a much larger group invited to the Evian G8 Summit in 2003. Russia’s invitation, issued at the urging of its G8 partners, thus set a precedent that meant that the old G8 would likely become the new G8+5 on a regular basis in future years. Thus Germany has invited from the start to its Heiligendamm Summit the same five powers, relabelled the “Outreach Five,” or O5. Germany has further suggested to its G8 partners that these five would routinely participate in the G8 in all future years. As the partners look with favor upon this suggestion, it is clear that at St. Petersburg, as an iterative confirmation of the Gleneagles innovation, a new G8 had been born.

St. Petersburg’s second democratizing innovation was the unprecedented openness of the summit process. It came in part through a new Experts Council that Russia created at home to help prepare analytic papers to advance the priority agenda. In support of the regular sherpa preparatory process, the Expert Council allowed more knowledgeable individuals from inside and outside governments in Russia and the G8 to be involved in a meaningful and influential way.

To help prepare its summit and deliver its results, Russia also mounted an unprecedented Civil Eight mechanism that brought Russia and international civil society leaders into the summit process as never before. Through Civil 8, civil society was there from the start. It had direct face-to-face contact with all the sherpas (the leaders’ personal representatives) together at several times throughout the year, which had never happened before. Civil 8 successfully synthesized a large and diverse set of inputs and advice into an intelligent, coherent and helpful set of recommendations that were effectively communicated to G8 governors, including at the highest level, in the Civil 8-sponsored dialogue with President Putin two weeks before the summit’s start. That hard-won direct dialogue, for the first time, brought the G8 host leader together with 700 global civil society leaders in an open, freewheeling, two-hour public exchange. Through the free world media in attendance, that dialogue was available for all citizens of the global community to see, hear and read. President Putin not only listened politely and thanked civil society for its contribution but also endorsed some of its recommendations, promised to raise them with his G8 colleagues, frankly noted sources of resistance and identified civil society as allies in his effort to convince his G8 colleagues to do the right thing. Through him as host, Civil 8 had become a de facto ninth member of the summit itself. The depth and durability of the civil society connection were driven to new levels, including through the post-summit Civil 8 meeting with the African Partnership Forum, and through the Civil 8 meeting with the representatives of Russia’s and Germany’s sherpas as 2006 drew to a close.

This process of civil society participation also made a difference at St. Petersburg itself. The leading independent publication at the summit, G8 Summit 2006: Issues and Instruments, started with a statement by the host leader, as it had in the 2005 edition, but then followed, for the first time, with a statement by and about Civil 8. The chair of Civil 8, the exceptionally committed and talented Ella Pamfilova, gave briefings and interviews at the summit in a way equal to senior figures of the Russian government itself. And perhaps encouraged by his earlier public Civil 8 encounter, President Putin ended every day at the summit by appearing before the world’s media in a lengthy, open session to discuss what had gone on behind closed doors.

Moreover, some of Civil 8’s many recommendations appeared in the summit communiqu?s. Civil society as a relevant and valuable actor was recognized in the chair’s summary far more than ever before and also throughout most of the individual communiqu?s. On the priority issue of energy security, when the Russian presidency had first circulated to its G8 partners its five-page concept paper in November 2005, the relevance of environmental values was almost invisible. At the first Civil 8 workshop a few months later, the energy group was dominated by environmentalists. They kept up the pressure — on paper, in speeches and in guerilla theater T-shirts at the July civil society forum — right through to Civil 8’s encounter with President Putin himself. Two weeks later at St. Petersburg, the G8 communiqu? on energy security started with the importance of environmental security and spoke of it throughout. And on the road to St. Petersburg, President Putin made the expensive decision to reroute his pipeline providing energy security to the east to protect Lake Baikal, the largest body of freshwater in the world.

In all, Civil 8 participants conducted a transparent, inclusive process that brought in a large and diverse group of civil society from many issue-focused communities, G8 countries and regions around the world. No one who wanted to contribute was turned away. Russia as G8 host was able, through the Civil 8, to show the world the strength of Russian civil society, and the Russian government’s respect for and responsiveness to it. Civil 8 demonstrated that a G8 that had long had a legitimacy deficit had now become more democratic by proving that there was a meaningful place for civil society’s voice inside the process, as well as from the rooms, the rock concerts and the thrown rocks and shouted slogans on streets outside.

Civil 8 and its G8 connection in 2006 thus set an unprecedentedly high standard that has inspired the G8 for the years ahead. Even before her year as host started, German chancellor Angela Merkel indicated that she planned a dialogue with leaders of non-governmental organizations similar to that held by President Putin. The German sherpa team declared that the G8 dialogue with civil society pioneered by the Russians would continue on a permanent basis in their year and in those to come.

STRENGTHENING THE FUTURE G8

Despite these multidimensional accomplishments, there remains much to be done to build on St. Petersburg success and thus strengthen the G8 Plus Five as an effective center of global governance in the years ahead.

The first step is to bring Russia and the European Union in as full members of all parts of the G8 system. In the case of Russia, this includes the G7 finance ministers forum. Here Russia’s energetic hosting in the first half of 2006 of two G8 finance ministers summit preparatory meetings proved Russia’s reliability and the worth of a G8 finance ministerial. It did so most notably in affirming as early as February 2006 the need for the market-oriented approach to energy security that the G8 summit leaders ultimately endorsed. With Russia now the world’s first-ranked, full-strength energy superpower and one of only two G8 members with a regular fiscal surplus, with its vast foreign exchange reserves, and as an emerging contributor to development assistance, there is little on the G7 finance agenda that warrants Russia’s exclusion. Russia should also be admitted to a revived trade ministers’ quadrilateral, formed in 1981 by the United States, the European Union, Japan and Canada — especially now that even the U.S. has agreed that Russia should join the World Trade Organization (WTO).

The second step is to develop a full set of regular G8 ministerial meetings that would cover most of the ministries that G8 governments have, whose agendas have now migrated outside their domestic polity in today’s rapidly globalizing age. This includes turning into annual events the intermittent G8 meetings for ministers of energy, development and health. Indeed, the case of health is especially important if Russia remains outside the Global Health Security Initiative, which was created in 2001 and includes only the G7 members and Mexico. There is also an argument for creating a G8 defense ministers forum to deal with issues such as peace and security in Africa and, above all, the G8 perennial issue of Afghanistan.

The third step is to strengthen the legislative, judicial and civil society institutions among the G8, so that this democratically devoted center of global governance goes beyond governing only through and with its executive branch. Here Russia took several small but useful steps forward in 2006. But a major leap could help with the German priorities of encouraging good governance and respect for the rule of law globally, including within Russia and other G8 members themselves. One concrete step, building on St. Petersburg’s advance in education, would be to create a G8 scholarship exchange program so that promising postsecondary students from the G8 Plus Five powers could study in partner countries and thus learn at first hand about how things work there.

The fourth step is, on an ad hoc basis as dictated by the agenda, to add other countries, beyond the Plus Five, at the summit itself and to the ministerial and official-level groups that constitute the invisible, submerged body of the summit iceberg below. The Germans have made a good start here, by promising once again to bring committed African leaders to their summit in 2007. But the entire system should be assessed to see how such expanded participation could both encourage more effective problem solving and also reinforce democratic principles and practices. This thrust could well include holding a meeting of the finance ministers G20 at the leaders level on a one-time basis, both to see if this architecture works as well as has proven to at the finance ministers level and to help solve pressing global issues — such as energy, health, trade and the reform of the international financial institutions — where all the systemically significant countries are integrally involved.

The fifth step is to move toward incorporating deeply democratic, domestically diverse, globally relevant India as the ninth country member of the G8, in a way somewhat similar to the long process through which Russia was incorporated from 1992 to 2006. The success of St. Petersburg proved that the historic decisions first in 1998, to admit Russia as a regular G8 member, and then in 2002, to have it host a regular summit, were the right ones to take, even if there were doubts about the present global power and domestic democratic performance of Russia at the time. By this “Russian standard” that has now proven its worth, India stands out as the one country on the Plus Five candidate list that in the definable future will deserve a greater place in the inner G8 club.

GLOBAL GOVERNANCE: DISAPPOINTMENTS AND DOUBTS

These steps are needed not only to help with global problem solving and democracy promotion in today’s rapidly globalizing world. They are also badly needed to help with the G8’s greatest outstanding defect — effectively delivering its many, often pioneering promises to its many citizens, stakeholders and the desperate people in the world as a whole. The G8 was deliberately created by its founders as a flexible, informal, “soft law” institution directed and delivered by democratically and popularly elected leaders, unconstrained by any rigidified, legally constrained, resource-short international bureaucracy that claimed to speak on its behalf. This core “constitutional” characteristic of the G8, recurrently reaffirmed by successive generations of G8 leaders, remains fundamental to the G8’s success. There is thus no need for any permanent international G8 secretariat, either newly created by the G8 itself or volunteered by well-meaning existing bodies such as an Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), to which Russia still does not belong.

To be sure, the established multilateral organizations play an important role in implementing and otherwise contributing to G8 governance. In 2006 Russia made important advances in involving those organizations in the summit’s preparations and production from the start. Based on this initiative and its solid results, it would be wise for the WTO, the OECD and the International Energy Agency (IEA) to admit Russia as a full member, as a long overdue step.

But on the whole, other ways must be found to solve the G8’s great “commitment-compliance gap.” While members’ compliance with their priority G8 commitments has been growing in recent years, it is still well short of what its citizens and their global colleagues expect and need. Moreover, the initial indications from the G8 Research Group’s assessment of compliance with the St. Petersburg Summit’s priority commitments six months after the summit suggest that compliance is well below the level of summits in recent years. Clearly the strong commitment of Russia and the G8 in 2006 to do a better job of ensuring compliance with their commitments, and monitoring their compliance performance, is not sufficient to meet the objectives they as G8 governors themselves have set.

There are now several exercises underway globally to assess by various methods compliance with the G8’s promises and their implementation. But these exercises remain fragile and fragmented and, in the case of intra-governmental G8 efforts, very opaque. The time has come to combine these efforts, in a multi-stakeholder global “G8 compliance consortium,” so that G8 governors can join with their own legislators, judiciaries, auditors general and civil society to know how well their promises at the summit are subsequently being transformed into practice on the ground. The democratically and popularly elected leaders of the G8 should be the ones who most want to know reliably whether their collective will is being converted by those below and beyond into the results they want. And because that which is measured is treasured, a more effective collective monitoring process should help convert G8 promises made into G8 promises kept.