Pointless G-20 Summit Unfolds In Toronto

The first task for anybody these days who wants to follow world news in an intelligent way is to figure out what to ignore.  All over the world, commissions are meeting, legislatures debating, leaders are making speeches, demonstrators are marching, sabers are rattling and so on.  Nobody can follow it all or make sense of it all.  So, from the standpoint of the generalist or the engaged citizen the question is how to achieve ‘intelligent ignorance’: how to figure out what you don’t need to follow so that you can focus like a laser on what really counts.

The approaching G-20 summit in Toronto is an excellent subject to ignore — a classic pseudo-event that will be breathlessly and minutely covered by the ‘serious’ press at which much will be said and little done.  Over the last two weeks I myself have saved great swathes of time by skimming lightly across rather than delving deeply into such subjects as whether the United States and Germany will engage in a catfight over fiscal stimulus and whether China’s decision to loosen its control over its currency will reduce the pressure on China at the G-20.  It is as close to certain as anything can be that nothing will take place at the G-20 that changes German or American fiscal plans or in any way shape or form affect China’s currency policy in any substantive way.  There is no point whatever in covering these subjects, and just because journalists are stupid and lazy enough to write these pieces and editors are misguided enough to run them is no reason why you, dear reader, should waste your precious time reading them.  Indeed, to the extent that you allow yourself to be deceived into the belief that what is happening in Toronto is an event rather than a pageant you will actually be degrading your ability to follow world affairs.

Obama and Medvedev on the road (White House).

While the approaching G-20 summit, like previous G-20 and G-8 summits, is a pseudo-event as pointless as an American political convention, there is one useful purpose it can serve: it can help students of world affairs learn the difference between real events and fake ones, between (as Mark Twain said) a bolt of lightning and a lightning bug.

The first thing to observe is that the G-20 isn’t new.  It is an expanded version of the old G-8 (which itself was the old G-7 plus Russia).  These summit meetings of world leaders date back for a generation; they have always gotten lots of coverage in the serious press, and they have almost never meant anything or gotten anything done.  World leaders like them because they provide a platform that lets presidents and prime ministers look like statesmen instead of politicians.  Bureaucrats adore them because position papers must be written and revised and many obscure officials must rack up air miles preparing compromises and talking points for communiques and declarations.  It doesn’t matter to the bureaucrats that the declarations have no binding force and that countries who sign onto them will generally go on and do exactly what they would have done had no declaration ever been made.  Process!  Paper!  Junkets!

Now the one sure thing about vacuous talking shops is that increasing the number of participants decreases the importance of the meeting.  If 7 or 8 leaders representing the world’s richest countries almost never agreed on anything important, how many important decisions will a group of 20 leaders from countries with even greater disparities in interest and outlook reach?  If 7 or 8 leaders consistently produced empty communiques with few real world results, how much more vacuous and much less effective will the communiques produced by 20 world leaders be?  There will be more empty posturing and vain grandstanding than before — and there will be less substance and less frank talk than ever.

Yet, in a striking demonstration of the idiocy and futility with which our world is governed, as the G-8 morphs into the G-20 and becomes ever less likely to produce any meaningful result, it is getting more coverage and not less.

There are several reasons for this.  First, the word ‘news’ is derived from the word ‘new’, not from the word ‘significant’.  Even the sclerotic world of serious journalism and diplomatic convention was beginning to weary of the G-7/G-8 story.  With every passing summit, the vapidity of these events became harder to ignore; we were reaching the shark-jumping moment when not even bureaucrats could pretend to care.  But now we have new characters and new plot lines.  There is almost no chance that the G-20 meetings will accomplish more than the G-7 meetings, but what does that have to do with anything?  Evidently, not much.

Second, pandering is one of the activities that bring politicians, journalists and diplomats together, and the G-20 summit is a panderfest of historic proportions.  Politicians pander to the prejudices and aspirations of their constituents.  Right now that means ‘looking busy’ about the world economy, so the politicians welcome a summit that can showcase their tireless efforts to make voters rich or at least get them jobs.  Diplomats also pander: the powerful countries always need to stroke the less powerful but not insignificant.  This was one of the most successful features of the G-7: Canada and Italy stood on (apparently) equal footing with the US, Japan, Germany, Britain and France.  Then we pandered to Russia, desperate for signs of great power status, by turning the G-7 into the G-8.  And now, drumroll, with the expansion of the G-8 to the G-20 we can pander to the vanity (sorry, we can recognize the importance) of a whole new bunch of countries.  Also, we can do something that matters some — bringing China and India into the club — without dropping Canada and Italy.  Expanding the club avoids giving offense even if it makes the summits even less focused and useful than before for real policy purposes, but expanding the membership is the better choice if the chief function of the group is to flatter rather than to do.

Amazingly, this obvious and quite relevant fact has not been a major feature in the coverage of what much of the ‘serious’ press continues to treat like a major development.  Rather than hounding politicians for boondoggling, useless junkets, vanity grandstanding and general time wasting, the serious press has generally supported the summit process and enthusiastically for the most part hailed the ‘rise’ of the G-20.

This is partly because summits work well for the press.  The serious press likes these summits for the same reasons that the Weather Channel likes hurricanes — the summits are recurring events that are easy to cover. What will Canada’s position be on bank reform at the G-20?  What is the French view on Chinese currency reform?  Sources don’t mind talking to journalists about subjects like this so the stories are easy to research and write; as long as editors are willing to publish this swill journalists will gladly go on writing it.   From this perspective the increasing difficulty of pretending that G-7 summits still mattered after decades of irrelevance was a problem for journalists; the shift to the G-8 and now G-20 format keeps hope alive.

But the press is also in the pandering business.  Many readers are less interested in understanding the world than in receiving confirmation that their existing understanding of the world is correct.  For many of the people who read the serious press, the belief that the world is moving smoothly into a new era of North South cooperation along a path of institutional development and reform is an important part of their world view.  They also want and perhaps need to believe that the world’s political and economic authorities know what to do about the economic issues we face and are laboring earnestly together to solve common problems.  The G-20 story reinforces these important if delusional narratives in ways that both the producers and the consumers of serious journalism find deeply appealing.

Ultimately I suspect that the air will lead out of the G-20 bubble.  The world press once covered the meetings and the votes of the UN General Assembly with great attention.  I am old enough to remember when General Assembly votes got headline treatment in major US papers.  In due course the pretense that those votes mattered in the real world became unsustainable and the headlines died away.

Pending that day, the best way to handle the flood of coverage about events like G-20 summits is to employ the vital news technique of strategic defocusing.  Don’t turn a blind eye completely: scan the headlines and even read the occasional op-ed if the columnist is using an approaching summit as a news hook for an interesting essay (rather than bloviating at length about, say, whether Chancellor Merkel will have a public fight with President Obama over the fiscal policies of their two countries).  Every now and then a man will actually bite a dog at one of these summits; you can’t ignore them completely but with very little investment of time you can monitor the news flow to see whether by some bizarre twist of fate a real fact somehow manifests itself amid the empty pomp.

For the upcoming weekend, this is good news.  We can all spend more time outdoors and less time with the newspapers, TV talking heads and news magazines until this whole pointless roadshow leaves town.