G-8 meets
amid calls to take on new members
TOKYO (AP) -
The Group of Eight nations, holding their annual summit in Japan
starting Monday, have always been a club for the world's biggest
and brightest economies. Now a growing chorus is saying it's
time the clubhouse doors swing open to some newcomers.
Outsider China
has eclipsed more than half the club's members in economic size
and the gross domestic product in Brazil is larger than Russia's.
"When do
they move from the G-8 to the G-13?" asked Lael Brainard
of the Brookings Institution, a Washington-based think tank.
"None of these problems can be solved without the participation
of countries like China, India, Mexico, Brazil and South Africa."
Indeed, the G-8's
grip on the world economy isn't what it used to be.
The U.S., Japan,
Germany, Britain, France, Italy, Canada and Russia accounted
for 58 percent of the world economy at current prices in 2007,
International Monetary Fund figures show - down from 65 percent
in 1997.
As the G-8 members
have moved well past their glorious high-growth periods in the
decades after World War II, other nations have jumped to the
fore as economies to be reckoned with.
Chief among them
is China. It's $3.4 trillion economy is fourth-largest in the
world, nipping at the heels of No. 3 Germany. Brazil has the
10th-largest economy, just behind Canada but ahead of Russia.
After Russia awaits fast-growing India.
It's not only
raw economics. The five nations mentioned by Brainard include
serious military powers and the world's two most populous nations,
China and India. In the global warming debate, China is vying
with the United States as the world's top emitter of greenhouse
gases.
"The world
has changed dramatically," said Robert Hormats, vice chairman
at Goldman Sachs (International), who helped Presidents Ford,
Carter and Reagan prepare for economic summits. "The new
global power structure is not what it was."
It wouldn't be
the first time the G-8 has changed its membership.
The group held
its initial summit in France in 1975 with six members: the United
States, Britain, France, West Germany, Italy and the then-economic
upstart in the world, Japan. Canada came on board the following
year. Russia formally joined in 1997.
In recent years,
as G-8 countries have struggled to address the concerns of the
rest of the world, such as poverty in Africa, the list of summit
participants has ballooned, though the core nations still hold
exclusive meetings.
A total of 22
heads of government - the eight members, seven from Africa, and
several from other leading economies - will be at the summit
in Toyako, northern Japan, and Japanese officials say it's the
largest ever.
Members themselves
are split over whether they need to formally open the group to
new entrants.
French President
Nicolas Sarkozy has been outspokenly in favor, and British Prime
Minister Gordon Brown also supports expansion.
"I think
it is imprudent to invite a country like China, a country like
India, a country like Brazil, a country like South Africa, a
country like Mexico, just for the lunch on the third day,"
Sarkozy told the French-Japan Club in November. "It is in
our interest to put them at the negotiating table, to treat them
like partners and to put them face to face with their obligations."
Others are not
so sure. Host Japan, which has long basked in the honor of being
the G-8's only Asian member, has repeatedly shrugged off suggestions
of expansion in the weeks leading up to the summit.
"Bringing
together the heads of state of, say, 40 countries for two days
of talks ends up constraining everyone's opportunity to speak,"
said Masaharu Kohno, the deputy foreign minister and the country's
"sherpa" representative for pre-summit negotiations.
Then there's
the question of democracy.
John Kirton,
director of the G-8 research group at the University of Toronto,
argues the summit's founding principles included promotion of
open democracy, and he said the group had played key roles in
democratic transitions over the years, including Spain in the
mid 1970s and the Soviet Union in the 1990s. By that criteria,
China does not meet requirements for membership, he has written.
In any case,
the outreach program and the inclusion of a representative of
the 27-member European Union in the talks has vastly increased
the G-8's relevance and reach, he said. Instead of expanding
membership, the group should reform by building up its institutions.
"The G-8
on membership alone is a very large and powerful thing already,"
he said. "I think it's wrong to say the G-8 has too few
members, that it hasn't expanded fast enough, that it's losing
relevant capability in the world."
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