We no longer live in a US-led unipolar era – and that may be a good thing. But as power has shifted to other parts of the globe, multilateralism – the idea of international cooperation in pursuit of the common good – has tragically unravelled.
On one level, of course the concept survives: countries in the global west, east, north and south occasionally take responsibility for cooperating on big crises. Think of Kenya, leading a UN-backed mission, which will deploy soon, to assist the Haitian police in stabilising the country.
Yet at a deeper level, when it comes to building and strengthening the international organisations we need, multilateralism is in poor shape. The G7, an informal body of advanced democracies that meets each year to coordinate global policy, represents the global west. While still powerful. it accounts for a shrinking share of the global economy and demography. G7 leaders, having read the tea leaves, are rightly seeking to reach beyond their narrow club.
For a while the attempt looked promising. But the 2024 G7 summithosted by Italy took place in a luxury resort called Borgo Egnazia in Puglia. And it felt like a Last Supper.
The global fracture with Russia has deepened, and the Ukraine war has no end in sight. Western tensions with China are rising, with both the US and the EU ramping up tariffs on Beijing in light of China’s unfair trade practices. War in the Middle East has indefinitely shelved any hope of normalisation between Israel and Saudi Arabia, while exposing western hypocrisy, double standards and complicity with Israel’s egregious violations of international law. The far right is on the rise in the largest European countries, casting doubt over the future of liberal democracy, while Donald Trump’s spectre looms on the horizon in the US.
Yet at this frightening juncture, the G7 appeared painfully weak; the most stable government around the table in the Puglia resort was that led by the far-right Italian prime minister Giorgia Meloni. Despite a show of unity for the cameras – leaders sang happy birthday to Olaf Scholz, and embraced their host Meloni warmly for the cameras – the fractures could not be hidden, for example in the haggling over references in the final communique to abortion and LGBTQ+ rights.
Such rifts between the seven big powers threaten to deepen. If the French parliamentary elections open the way to a far-right government, and if the US presidential election were to return Trump to the White House it is hard to see what could be salvaged from the G7, with a deepening cleavage between liberal and illiberal governments pulling at its core.
When Joe Biden came to office in 2021, turning the page on fraught Trump years for transatlantic relations and international cooperation, there was genuine hope of a revival of multilateralism, and the G7 was central to that hope. The idea was that consensus on key global challenges such as climate, the economy and pandemics could be built first among like-minded countries, and then broadened to other players in what was consolidating into a multipolar world. That method seemed to work: we had initiatives to cut methane emissions or to tax multinational corporations. Those agreements were first reached in the G7, then exported to the G20, and eventually made their way to larger multilateral groupings such as the OECD in the case of taxation, or Cop26 in Glasgow in the case of climate.
Russia’s fullscale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 upturned the method. Nonetheless, the G7 remained central to the promotion of multilateralism. That year, the west also finally acknowledged that it needed to build bridges, especially with democracies in the global south, which, while firmly condemning Russia’s invasion, were unwilling to follow the west’s lead in sanctioning Moscow and supporting Kyiv. In this spirit, Germany, which held the G7 presidency in 2022, invited leaders from Argentina, India, Indonesia, Senegal and South Africa, among others, to attend.
By 2023 the crisis had deepened and the global dimension of the Ukraine war had crystallised. Countries in the global south were clear that they wanted to remain non-aligned. The war reflects instead a conflict between the global west and the global east, with Russia and China growing ever closer. Beijing has stepped up its economic and technological support for Moscow, particularly after the Ukrainian counteroffensive in 2023. Furthermore, the link between the war in Europe and growing tensions in the Asia-Pacific region came increasingly under the spotlight. In that context, the G7 remained central. Just as the Brics (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) were inviting other countries to join their anti-western grouping, the 2023 Japanese G7 presidency edged towards a G7-plus, inviting other major democracies in east Asia, including Australia, Indonesia, and the Republic of Korea, plus Vietnam.
The Puglia summit’s threadbare outcome was in part a reflection of the threat now facing multilateralism. Leaders basically reached only one meaningful agreement on using revenues from Russia’s frozen assets as collateral to issue a $50bn loan to Ukraine. The deal, a long time in the making, was reached amid growing fear that time is running out.
Beyond Ukraine, there was precious little to show. Leaders paid lip service to Biden’s plan to end the war in Gaza. The UN security council had already done as much, but there seems to be little movement towards implementation. The west’s approach to the Middle East hasblown a hole in its credibility in the global south. Nor was there any strategic coherence to the list of external invitees, which featured large and small democracies such as Argentina, Brazil, India, Kenya and Turkey on one hand and autocracies such as Algeria, Tunisia and the UAE on the other. True to its tilt to the right, the G7 launched an initiative to counter irregular migration. If this is the platform from which the west is gaining traction in the south, it’s a steep uphill climb.
The G7’s narrative was not led by it, but imposed on it: and that speaks of the growing weakness of, if not outright threat to liberal democracy in the west.
Nathalie Tocci is a Guardian Europe columnist
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