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Unpromising projections

Thursday, April 2, 2009

MEETING TODAY IN THE ONCE DECREPIT, now regenerated surroundings of London’s dockland, leaders of the world’s most economically important nations face an impossible media task. They want to project a convincing picture of decisiveness and capability in cleaning up our global mess.

International summits as a matter of course have their so-called “final” communiqués written well in advance – and in this case (no doubt because of the high stakes and the desire of so many parties to get a jump on the “spinning” process) an all-but-complete draft of that document was made available to journalists several days ago.

 

Unsurprisingly this G-20 communiqué, like all of its breed, is an attempt to smooth over disagreements and tensions. I guess we’ll know by the end of today, London time, whether it’s been successful in that attempt. Whether the summit itself is successful – in working out that universal clean-up we’re all hoping for – is a question most media observers will be answering with a resounding NO.

 

Briefings from the office of the event’s host, Prime Minister Gordon Brown (above left, greeting two prominent guests) have backed off from his earlier ambitious aim for a wholesale re-forging (or at least a clear start on such re-forging) of the Bretton Woods Agreement concluded toward World War II’s end, which has so signally failed to protect us from worldwide financial failure in the last year or so.  There’s been just too much querulousness from among the very disparate members of the G-20 - not to mention very real differences in national interests - for that to happen.

 

For what it’s worth, too, the title to be applied to any reformed international economic order has been giving civil service mandarins in the British Treasury some pause. If today’s gathering were indeed to set in motion a whole new global framework, the old name taken from the New Hampshire resort where the 1944 accord was signed might have to cede to “The Canary Wharf Agreement”. That’s not been regarded as at all auspicious by the treaty-drafters and image-spinners in London.

 

This waterfront location actually derives its name from being historically the unloading point for produce imported to Britain from the Canary Islands, off north-west Africa’s coast (how’s that for a landmark of international economic relations?)  But the eponymous bird itself (above right)  - he’s indigenous to those islands - conjures up an unwelcome image in English-speaking industrialized societies like ours.

 

The very familiar metaphorical trope “Canary in a Coalmine” (not least its use in song by Sting and The Police) reminds us after all that a canary’s essential function in an emergency is simply to die  …  before all the humans do.

   

 

 

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SALIENT AMONG THE DIVISIONS BETWEEN THE G-20 is a deep one within the so-called advanced economies.

 

Europe’s press has been vocal, and over time the US media have caught on too, in highlighting how little Western Europe sees eye-to-eye with the Obama Administration – especially about a dramatic upsurge in public spending being the best route out of recession.

 

Much of Europe of course already devotes a lot of public spending to cope with economic downturns. Unemployment insurance and medical care are publicly provided for those who fall upon hard times (indeed often for everyone, in the more enlightened countries at least).

 

As the economist and frequent media commentator Jacques Mistral of the French Institute for International Relations put it on the summit’s eve: “European wage-earners are not frightened by the danger of losing suddenly their homes as they are in the U.S. French workers, even if they are fired, do not lose their health protection. And nowhere in Europe are retirement pensions in danger”.

 

All the same, European distress is being loudly expressed …  screens and front-pages are abuzz with coverage of mass tire-burning in Paris to protest against the (German owned) Continental Tire Company laying off workers … the American 3M Corporation’s European chief executive being taken hostage in his office for similar reasons … and (exemplifying a rather different aspect of the economic crisis) vandalism at an Edinburgh home owned by the publicly bailed-out Royal Bank of Scotland’s former CEO. And then of course came yesterday's mass action, with images beamed around the world, against that same bank's and the Bank of England's office buildings in London.

 

Distress, economic deprivation and suffering, though, all remain relative concepts. There are entire stretches of the world with populations who already suffer appallingly – well beyond anything experienced or even imagined by most Europeans or Americans – and who will have their tenuous existence made infinitely worse by the global emergency.

 

Will they have a voice at Canary Wharf, amid the lobbying and spinning? The International Monetary Fund's Managing Director Dominique Strauss-Kahn, says they will: “At the G-20, I will be speaking for the poorest countries”, he claims.

 

Let’s hope he will. When he appeared on his home country’s TV network France 2, he underlined a projection about the developing world that I doubt many leaders at the G-20 will be emphasizing, since their most powerful mandates are domestic.

 

Strauss-Kahn said: “Three million more children will die between now and 2015 if we don’t come out of this crisis soon”.

 

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