As president of the G-20, Germany exercised the role of host to the meeting celebrated in Hamburg, which had as its watchword “Shaping an interconnected world”, which sums up the desires and values of figures such as Angela Merkel, Justin Trudeau and Emmanuel Macron, but it is distant from the pronouncements of Donald Trump, Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin and from the decision adopted by the United Kingdom, under Theresa May’s leadership, to abandon the command of Brussels. This divergence is not restricted to the heads of State, according to a survey made by Chatham House with 1823 members of the European elite, individuals influent in key areas such as politics, media or business, coming from different member countries of the European Union (EU).  37% were in favour of transferring greater faculties to the EU, while 31% advocated a restoration of powers to national States.

It is possible that among the restorers there exist some who share the conclusions of the report offered by Global Trade Alert, that accuses the G-20 of ineptitude in repelling protectionist measures. Its authors consider the restrictions on imports less scandalous than the “State generosity” of a large part of the economies of the G-20, generator of subsidies and fiscal incentives that benefit its farmers, exporters and manufacturers. Nor can one overlook the possibility that the 31% mentioned may privately believe that Nation States are more effective in formulating policies that are protectionist of the interests that unite them.

With a temperament somewhere between somber and conspirative, Donald Trump works to combine the need to reinforce the policing connections of the nation State with the reduction of its regulatory powers in the economic-financial order, and of taxation where the most concentrated capital is concerned. It was no coincidence that he chose Polish territory to offer his discourse reclaiming the values of the God, family and freedom triad, before he went on to at the meeting of the G-20. This is the fatherland of the efficacious anti-communist Karol Wojtyla/John Paul II and of John III Sobieski, the king that in 1683 defeated the Ottoman forces at the gates of Vienna. Warsaw suffered the totalitarian statism of the Soviets and is in the vanguard of the administrations that most furiously exclude foreign human beings, above all Muslims, who are seeking asylum and refuge in Europe. It is, in addition, one of the few members of NATO that spends more than 2% of their GDP on Defence.

For Trump, the survival of the West is threatened by a conflict of civilizations that is not expressed primarily on the battlefield, but in the mind, the will and the souls of citizens living in Western geography. Tristen Naylor, a specialist in international relations of Oxford University, disagrees with the former reality show presenter, and believes that the Hamburg summit will be remembered as the symbolic ending of the global leadership of the United States.  For Naylor, the erosion of international support began to show fissures in the battlefields of Afghanistan and Iraq, and was consolidated in those of Libya, Syria and Ukraine. “Trump’s decision to pull the US out of the Trans-Pacific Partnership and the Paris climate agreement were the next steps in this slow walk away from global leadership.”

Josef Janning, an outstanding German political analyst, from the European Council of Foreign Relations, considers that the relevant face-off is the one which arises between two perspectives, that of multilateralism versus that of multipolarity. The European defenders of multilateralism, such as Angela Merkel, support planetary governance that through forums such as the G-20 provides global public goods that legitimate them. This form of governance operates through state and non-state actors. People such as Donald Trump, on the contrary, only believe in power as a source of legitimation. For the upper levels of power, forums such as the G-20 serve to negotiate and organize the ambitions of the national entities that they represent. Janning, whose background includes being an invited professor at the Renmin University of Beijing, maintains that Xi Jinping works as well to affirm the interests of the State-civilization that he governs, and approaches Europe to take advantage of the confusion that creates problems for its countries, generated in good measure by the occupant of the White House. For the German analyst, his country and Brussels have been distracted with a secondary scenario from the true “big game” that is always the traditional struggle for power and prevalence, only now in a world “profoundly interconnected”.

It is impossible to predict which political and economic scenario will take precedence, but nevertheless we should note that the European Union of Angela Merkel is moving its cards and advancing with trade agreements with Canada and Japan, whose difficulties, in the second case in particular, could give way before the need to respond to and foresee the actions of Washington and Beijing.  Berlin, Paris and Tokyo, among others, offer a software of trade pacts and global public goods to counter and compensate the infrastructural hardware proposed by China to connect diverse geographies and that of military technology of the US (not to mention the cultural centrality of the fatherland of Muddy Waters and Steven Spielberg, which gives it an unparalleled added value).

The governments of Mercosur, in the best of cases, discuss according to the terms preferred by the dominant economies, without daring to formulate an original agenda or any kind of firm insubordination. The terms that the central and re-emerging powers propagandize and impose in the economic terrain seek to facilitate transactions and flows that in no way aspire to benefit the citizens of our region. It is as well to recall that even among the cultivators of peripheral regionalism, it was evident that the foreign policies that adhere to it are condemned to failure when they lubricate a bad economic policy, such as materialized in the 1990s, in favour of foreign firms and native prebendary bourgeoisies, which resulted in unemployment, poverty and a national vacuum.

July 10, 2017

(Translated for ALAI by Jordan Bishop)

Original: http://fredescastro7.wixsite.com/shushwap/single-post/2017/07/10/El-G-20...