Indonesia's Russia dilemma raises doubts about G-20's future
Group's divisions are a symptom of dysfunctional multilateralism
James Crabtree is executive director of IISS-Asia in Singapore. He is author of "The Billionaire Raj."
Indonesia is in a tricky spot over the Group of 20.
If Russian President Vladimir Putin attends when the group's leaders meet in Bali in November, his counterparts from the United States and Europe are threatening to boycott. Even if they do turn up, the summit of major global economies will almost certainly be overshadowed by animus between Russia and those nations critical of its recent invasion of Ukraine.
On the surface, it looks as if the war in Ukraine has derailed the G-20. But in truth, the aftermath of Russia's invasion has merely deepened preexisting fissures. The G-20 now reflects the reality of a dysfunctional global order in which the West is set against China and Russia, with other major global emerging markets stuck awkwardly in the middle.
In its role as chair, Indonesia has spent recent weeks scrambling behind the scenes to stop the G-20 meeting from falling apart. So far, its strategy mostly appears to be to deny there is a problem, saying it still plans to invite Russia. For its part, Moscow says it has not decided whether Putin will attend, although it is hard to imagine the Russian leader passing up an opportunity to throw his Western adversaries off-balance.
Those Western nations then face a tricky choice too. U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen last week said that the United States would boycott G-20 meetings at which Russia was present, beginning with a finance ministers meeting in Washington later this month. Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison has also said Russia should not attend in November.
Yet if Putin does decide to turn up, any boycott would simply cede the meeting to China and Russia, which is hardly an ideal outcome for U.S. President Joe Biden and his allies.
As host, Indonesia has few options. Much as Western nations might call for it, disinviting Russia looks like a non-starter. G-20 decisions are taken by consensus. Roughly half the body will likely back Russia's attendance, including India and Turkey, who are nominally aligned with the West. Similar calls to disinvite Russia from the G-20 after its invasion of Crimea in 2014 went nowhere.
President Joko "Jokowi" Widodo could try to defuse matters by inviting Ukraine's leader Volodymyr Zelenskyy. There is talk of a possible side-meeting on Ukraine too, the hope being that disagreements over Ukraine could then be quarantined from the rest of the agenda. Western leaders could also decide to turn up virtually, or simply to refuse to meet with Putin if they did attend.
Whatever happens, the G-20's difficulties illustrate one fact about the coming era of multipolarity, namely that Western powers are much less able to get their way. The U.S. might call for Putin to be disinvited. But even working with European allies, it cannot make it happen.
Many view this as a positive development; the passing of an era when the West ran multilateral bodies in its own interest and the arrival of one in which emerging nations, including China and Russia, have more of a voice.
Yet the G-20's predicament reveals a deeper problem, namely that divided multipolar governance often makes it near-impossible to get anything done. The G-20 has plenty it ought to be doing, from reforming world health architecture post-pandemic to coordinating action on climate change. Post-Ukraine, it is ever-harder to imagine much of this happening.
Even before the war in Ukraine, the body was proving ineffective. Established in 1999, the G-20 came of age by coordinating remedies during the 2008 financial crisis. It then came apart a little over a decade later as internal divisions saw it largely fail to develop an appropriately bold response to the COVID crisis against a backdrop of rising competition between the U.S. and China.
Optimists thought the G-20 might adapt. Some still hope the world's emerging market middle powers could grow into new roles, for instance, with major nations like Mexico, Turkey or Saudi Arabia beginning to play a bridging function that might bring together the opposing Western and Sino-Russian blocks. So far, there has been little sign of this.
The G-20's troubles have wider implications too, in particular for other multilateral bodies that count China, Russia and the U.S. among their members. Both the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation grouping and the East Asia Summit, due to meet later this year in Thailand and Indonesia respectively, may now face similar wrangling over Russian participation.
On the G-20 itself, Jokowi will keep pushing to find a path forward. He has often taken a narrow view of the body, seeing his chairmanship more as a chance to attract foreign investment rather than an opportunity to reform or re-energize the architecture of global governance. Given there is still quite a way to go until November, his approach will probably be to wait and see if events in Ukraine develop in a way that makes a successful summit possible.
It is a faint hope. At present, it is hard to imagine this year's G-20 producing even the blandest of joint statements. Yet if the meeting in Bali does run into the ground, it will not entirely be Indonesia's fault. The group's divisions are a symptom of a deeper dysfunctional multilateralism that any chair would struggle to remedy.
Whether the G-20 itself has a viable future must now be an open question.