The recently held G20 Summit in Hamburg has set high hopes for the G20 process in terms of being inclusive, effective and result-oriented. The fact that trade, investment, migration, terrorism and many other priorities including excess capacity in the steel sector could be incorporated with specific action is testimony to collective commitment for a better world.
At its creation the G20 was meant to facilitate coordination, cooperation and problem-solving among key actors in a specific policy field, which then was global financial stability. The G20 was not meant to be a jack-of-all-trades, offering welcoming words and restating support for long-accepted and previously reconfirmed goals, as most subsequent G20 summits did.
Only six weeks went by between the Taormina G7 and Hamburg G20 meetings, which were both chaired by a major EU Member State. A substantive link between the two summits was therefore to be expected. Indeed, at least to some extent, a useful connection was set in motion. The results of these two events seem to suggest an informal – but organic – relation between the diplomatic and cooperative efforts of the much narrower and more homogeneous G7 with the G20 summit.
When the finance ministers of the G7 countries proposed the G20 in the late 1990s, a good sense of realism prevailed. They recognized that addressing issues of global finance required the political support from—and involvement of—emerging market economies. This view proved prescient in seeking policy responses to the 2007–08 global financial crisis. The leaders of the G20 met at their first summit in Washington D.C. in 2008 to agree on measures to resolve the crisis through dialogues among the “systemically relevant” countries.