Sarkozy’s financial summit proposal

by | Sep 24, 2008


Over at the UN in New York, where it’s the annual jamboree that is the General Assembly, Nicolas Sarkozy has been calling on world leaders to hold a summit later this year on building a “regulated capitalism”.  Four thoughts:

1) if this summit were to go ahead, it would mark the continuation of a trend towards head of state / government level summits on specific issues (as opposed to gatherings that cover a whole range of foreign policy issues, like the G8 or the Security Council). Earlier this year heads of government turned out in force for the FAO food summit; last year, Ban Ki-moon got a good turn out for his high level event on climate change at the UN.

But there’s only value in getting heads engaged if a) their involvement is needed in order to join up the dots between different areas of ministerial or department responsibility within their goverments (e.g. cross-sectoral bargaining that involves energy, climate and trade all at once), or b) their political clout is needed to forge a deal.  I’m not sure that either of those conditions applies here – in which case, wouldn’t it make more sense to leave such a summit to finance ministers?

2) Sarkozy also said at a press conference yesterday that “we cannot wait any longer to turn the G8 into the G13 or G14, and to bring in China, India, South Africa, Mexico and Brazil”.  Interesting to see this idea reviving; the scale of the current crisis (‘perfect storm’ etc.) might appear to militate in favour.  But as ever, the big questions are less over who would be around the table and more about what it would do, how it would work and – above all – whether it would be any more effective than the G8 (which hasn’t achieved very much lately).  More on this in a paper I wrote on new global leaders’ forums a while back.

3) While Sarkozy knows he wants a summit, it’s also clear that – so far – he doesn’t have any specific proposals for multilateral action.  You can bet this will cause a frisson or two at Number 10, given that Gordon Brown does have a set of proposals for international financial reform, but so far lacks a coalition to push them.  There might be potential for France and the UK to team up quite effectively here, not least given that Sarkozy will have recognised that without at least one major financial centre involved front and centre, his idea’s dead in the water (n.b in that regard that Sarkozy mooted London as a possible venue for the summit, along with NYC, Paris and Brussels).

4) Whether Brown’s proposals are the right ones to deal with the current crisis is, of course, a separate question.  Looking at them again, the main impression is of the lack of specificity: calling for a “common approach to handling major global market disruptions”, a “clearer, more authoritative watchdog” or “common principles, shared analyses and information and collaborative management of crises” is all very well, but if there was ever a case of the devil being in the detail, this is it.  (As for his calls for a global early warning system for financial crisis – by all means, but is now really the time to be thinking about that?)

It’s good to see that someone’s asking the big questions about long term prevention and looking to facilitate a serious high level conversation about where we go from here, and the UK should certainly get involved and think seriously about offering to host.  But it’s way too soon to be thinking about shared operating systems or even shared platforms at this point: the key tasks now are a) to put out the immediate fire and then b) to build up shared awareness of what’s happened, why, and what we want to achieve as we consider a new financial architecture.

(For explanation of shared operating systems, platforms and awareness, see here.)

Author

  • Alex Evans is founder of Larger Us, which explores how we can use psychology to reduce political tribalism and polarisation, a senior fellow at New York University, and author of The Myth Gap: What Happens When Evidence and Arguments Aren’t Enough? (Penguin, 2017). He is a former Campaign Director of the 50 million member global citizen’s movement Avaaz, special adviser to two UK Cabinet Ministers, climate expert in the UN Secretary-General’s office, and was Research Director for the Business Commission on Sustainable Development. Alex lives with his wife and two children in Yorkshire.


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